The Hexplane: A Scalable Air Vehicle Concept for Breakthrough Performance in Speed and VTOL

Aviation history is full of many attempts at achieving vertical flight combined with a useful speed, range and payload similar to fixed wing airplanes. The problem has settled on the understanding that two characteristics must be satisfied simultaneously: low disk loading for vertical flight and high propulsive efficiency for cruise flight. The helicopter meets the first need, but not the second. The twin-tiltrotor compromises the first and second, achieving significantly faster flight than the helicopter, but still does not approach the performance of a fixed wing airplane. The Hexplane is a three surface aircraft with six tilt propellers. The Hexplane achieves both low disk loading during vertical flight and high speed propulsive efficiency during cruise flight by using a distributed actuator disk solution. The configuration is based on a distributed propulsion system, without interconnected cross shafting system. This paper discusses the configuration design and performance characteristics of the Hexplane.