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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
Rocket 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.
I still have in my shop the G8-2-40 jet engine I built when I was 19 years old.
Mr. Eugene Gluhareff flying with his MEG-2X
His idea was perfect, but the engine was heavy for this application.
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, but his idea 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 they did some modifications to the original Magill helicopter that developed in the Firebird and later Liteco asked Advanced Technologies Incorporated to develop the new two place Atlas rocket tip helicopter but nobody at Liteco understood the operation of the helicopter and after Liteco folded, Intora a British company bought the patents and the assets and planed to make the helicopter for sale to the military.
I was contacted by Intora to design a new rocket engine and I designed and built the new rocket engine to be used in the Firebird and in the Atlas a new two place version, these helicopters flew flawless with incredible agility.
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, maybe in some hangar are stored this wonderful helicopters but the most important is that it was a proven and tested concept that flew incredible well.
 
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 safer and easier helicopter to fly
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 with a carbon fiber corset and the best part is that I have everything to make it because I will use most of the parts and molds I did for the rocket belt project and I have the technology and the know how so it is only time to be able to test fly this helicopter.
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