NASA has unveiled a new concept for a personal aircraft vehicle.
The technology is part of initiative to bridge gap between cars and planes
The aircraft, called a Puffin, is quiet enough for neighborhood flights.
What takes off like a helicopter, flies like an airplane and makes about as much noise as an electric car?
Why that would be a Puffin, a prototype one-person aircraft that is part of a broader NASA initiative to develop technologies for personal air travel.
No one has ridden inside a Puffin as yet. Right now, it's a subscale model without a body or tails. But the electric-powered vehicle already has aced one of its most difficult goals: quiet flight.
"It's a 10 times reduction in noise from the quietest helicopters today," said Mark Moore, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.
That's important if personal air vehicles are ever going to bridge the gap between commercial air transport and the family car.
"It's inevitable that someday more and more people will take to the air in on-demand vehicles," Moore told Discovery News. "It will happen. There's just no other way to achieve fast, on-demand, high-speed travel."
The idea is to develop an air-based transport system that doesn't require people to drive long distances to airports to board planes for relatively short flights
For more Information ...Courtesy ==> http://news.discovery.com/tech/nasa-aircraft-puffin-transportation.html
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