TriFan600 Concept Art
The ideal airplane doesn’t need a runway. Since Kitty Hawk, the standard design of a fixed-wing airplane assumes the plane will build momentum and lift by accelerating along an open stretch of land (or sometimes sea), and will need to land by decelerating along a similar smooth path. To free airplanes from runways, they need a different way to get airborne, and in this concept vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) plane from XTI aircraft, promises just that: a business-sized five passenger plane, with tilt-rotor engines that let it fly like a plane but takeoff and land like a helicopter
The video below, from XTI’s crowdfunding campaign, puts their concept squarely at the end of a long chain of airplane evolution
http://www.popsci.com
