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3D Design and animation
You can see a small animation of the Libelula helicopter in a 360º display and flying, the flying animation was done with a real rocket helicopter sound of the flight of the rocket engines I built for a military helicopter.
Important: You must have installed the appropriate codec's in your computer in order to see the videos.
Animation 360º AVI 2.94 MB
Animation of flight MOV 13.5 MB
Back Pack Helicopter
For decades people have dreamed to fly in a backpack helicopter.
The idea is not new, it was in the 40's that the idea was proposed by the Austrian Paul Baumgartl and later by others that tried to fly with internal combustion engines but the lack of a powerful engine put this project in the dreams file, even nowadays the most powerful engines are the most unreliable, the two stroke engines, ask me with three in-flight engine failures flying gyrocopters.
This is the Baumgartl Heliofly
In the 60's came Eugene Gluhareff with his idea of the strap-on helicopter and he designed and built the MEG-1X that was powered by one of his valve less pulse jets with a single blade and a counter weight on the other side and later with the MEG-2X and he was able to fly but the problem that he found was that the jet engine when hot become plastic and deformed because it is made of a thin sheet of stainless steel and the huge loads of the centrifugal force deformed and in one case the tail of one of his engines flew away.
 
Gluhareff with his MEG-1X
I was a dealer of the Gluhareff jet engines when I was 19 years old and I saw this prototype backpack helicopters at Gardena California when I meet Mr. Gluhareff there.
You can visit the site Gluhareff Pressure Jet Engines operated by Irina Gluhareff daughter of the inventor.
This is me holding the G8-2-40 jet engine I built when I was 19 years old.
I still have this jet in my shop.
Mr. Eugene Gluhareff flying with his MEG-2X
His idea was perfect, but the engine was heavy for this application and the engine turned red hot and became "plastic" or "soft" at this temperatures and with the huge centrifugal force loads it was a danger of loosing the tail of the jet engine.
Later it was done with ram jets by Hiller with the same kind of problem, very heavy engines that stressed the rotor blades at the root.
Rocket Helicopter
The idea of Eugene Gluhareff to mount a jet engine to the tip of the rotor blades became successful when an American inventor named Gilbert Magill sketched out his plans for a portable "minicopter." his helicopter was powered by a pair of twin hydrogen peroxide rockets inside the rotor blades and it flew very well but he wanted to sell it to the military and they where more interested in Cobras or fully armored helicopters and Magill ran out of money in the mid-1980s, and a bank seized his assets, including the helicopter design.
This is the Magill helicopter
Liteco a Swiss company bought the assets from the bank and I was contacted by them to design a new transversal rocket engine with a single catalyst cartridge and I designed and built the new rocket engine to be used in the Firebird and in the Atlas, the new two place version helicopter developed by Liteco and Advanced Technologies Incorporated in the US, these helicopters flew flawless with incredible agility.
Nobody at Liteco understood the operation of the helicopter and after Liteco folded, Intora a British company bought the patents and the assets to Liteco and planed to make the helicopter for sale to the military.
In a videotaped demonstration, the helicopter took off from a trailer behind a pickup truck, flew under a low bridge, then landed back on the trailer with a precision that no conventional helicopter could match.
The government of Dubai was impressed by a 1999 test flight and expressed interest in ordering a fleet of the helicopters as soon as the design is perfected.
It was a fight between the partners and not a technical problem that ended with the Intora company.
2008 NEWS!!
Now in late 2008 I was contacted by Swiss Copter the company that bought all the assest from Intora and we signed a contract to develop a new kind of rocket engine one of a kind in the world using 70% and 50% hydrogen peroxide mixed with a special fuel to be used in the line of new helicopters that will be produced by Swiss Copter and Avimech Swiss Copter USA.
 
This is the Intora Firebird helicopter and the tip rocket engine
In this videos you will see how the vapor trail is visible because the very low temperature that condenses the exhaust from the rocket engines, in the Atlas helicopter video you can see in a warmer day that the exhaust from the rocket engines is totally invisible.
After this I was contacted by Sentry Technology Group to develop and build six rocket engines to be used in the Vertical UAV a military helicopter.
I designed and built this tip rotor rockets for "Vertical UAV"
This rockets are installed in a military UAV helicopter, they are only 1-1/2" in diameter and less than 10" long and with this engines a rotor blade produced more than 2200 lbs of lift.
This small rocket engines produce 10 times more thrust than the jet engines used by Eugene Gluhareff and five times more than the Intora rockets.
This are the most powerful rocket engines even installed in a helicopter.
Again you can see the trail of the rocket engines because the very low temperature of the air condensing the exhasut gases from the rocket engines.
A NEW BACKPACK ROCKET HELICOPTER
The Libelula micro helicopter is based on the experience gained along the years making the rocket engines for this kind of helicopters, this is a proved and tested technology, this is not just an idea.
The best of this technology is that this kind of helicopters don't need a tail rotor because they don't have any torque, so with a simple vane they can turn being the simplest form of an helicopter and the easiest and safer to fly.
Because 80% of the helicopter accidents are blamed to tail rotor failure that is most of the times fatal.
The only way to avoid the tail rotor is with a pair of counter rotating rotor blades or with a direct jet impulse at the tips of the rotor blades and this is the exact idea to make my micro helicopter, this will be the lightest helicopter in the world, so light that you strap it to your body and fly.
I think that in 2009 we will have a flying prototype of the Libelula backpack helicopter.
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