"it can disengage it's rotor systems and ignite these 2 additional turbines. 3.2 seconds after liftoff, Airwolf and exceed mach 1 from sea level to 65000 ft"
It seems they are targeting emergency responders, but it looks too big for such a role. You normally would would want small, compact helicopters, that can easily find a landing place close to a road accident or land in a semi-urban environment.
Both also Airbus, the first one is used as trainer by the USAF and also ambulance by Switzerland, the second one is mainly used as ambulance and also police heli.
This new one is useful over sea and wilderness. Probably perfect for Canada, Scandinavia and France, not to mention African, Middle Eastern and South American operators.
It's mainly a luxury transport aircraft for high level officials, SAR is mainly framing it as useful aircraft for the general public.
> It seems they are targeting emergency responders
I think they're choosing to focus on emergency response use cases for public consumption. I suspect Airbus knows the primary market for this mix of capabilities will be as a
a) better, faster, longer-range "sky limo" for politicians and wealthy people already using helis for private transport
b) faster air taxi for business travelers to commute to/from congested metro areas
c) faster, longer-range heli for sight-seeing tours like Hawaii or the Grand Canyon.
It's natural engineering evolution to expand possibilities with new trade-offs between speed, range, performance and price. Faster, longer-range helis have been possible for a while and there's clearly a market for them. Personally, I don't see a problem with this. The weird thing is that marketers feel they need to present products in some "social good" context if they can - even when it's obviously a poor fit, as is the case here. In any market of products there will always be luxury offerings. Yachts, super cars, private jets and mansions create perfectly good jobs for large upstream ecosystems of non-billionaire engineers, craftspeople, machinists, mechanics, etc.
For air ambulances within metropolitan regions, this sort of solution would be an expensive and inefficient use of current technology capabilities. A patient pod with 8-10 gimbaled, ducted fans roughly 80 cm across could be faster to respond, faster to load, and faster to transport from scene to hospital.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 17.4 ms ] threadSomething like this: https://youtu.be/tqkwtTgJkZ8
Or even balance on a road guardrail: https://youtu.be/bP4oscYF_5g
This new one is useful over sea and wilderness. Probably perfect for Canada, Scandinavia and France, not to mention African, Middle Eastern and South American operators.
It's mainly a luxury transport aircraft for high level officials, SAR is mainly framing it as useful aircraft for the general public.
I think they're choosing to focus on emergency response use cases for public consumption. I suspect Airbus knows the primary market for this mix of capabilities will be as a
a) better, faster, longer-range "sky limo" for politicians and wealthy people already using helis for private transport
b) faster air taxi for business travelers to commute to/from congested metro areas
c) faster, longer-range heli for sight-seeing tours like Hawaii or the Grand Canyon.
It's natural engineering evolution to expand possibilities with new trade-offs between speed, range, performance and price. Faster, longer-range helis have been possible for a while and there's clearly a market for them. Personally, I don't see a problem with this. The weird thing is that marketers feel they need to present products in some "social good" context if they can - even when it's obviously a poor fit, as is the case here. In any market of products there will always be luxury offerings. Yachts, super cars, private jets and mansions create perfectly good jobs for large upstream ecosystems of non-billionaire engineers, craftspeople, machinists, mechanics, etc.
... I mean, given that it's touting high speed and range, it probably isn't aimed at that use case.
How much are air ambulances used _within_ cities, anyway? I would've thought barely at all.
https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/stories/2024-05-the-racer...
Much more technical detail than the theverge article too.
= "Here’s what this PR newsletter said"