Inspiration for developing an autonomous vertical takeoff and landing helicopter struck Hector Xu during an evening helicopter flight hundreds of feet above Bristol Airport after suddenly being cast into darkness with mountains looming.
Xu, now founder and CEO of Rotor Technologies, a developer of autonomous vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft, first came to New England in 2016 from the United Kingdom to work on his PhD at MIT in engineering. He decided he wanted to learn how to fly helicopters and enrolled in flight training. (All while also taking over a Chinese restaurant in Bristol and being the father of a young child).
As Xu and his instructor, now Rotor’s chief pilot, left Bristol to fly back to Nashua, darkness overtook them, and they were flying blind. To exit Bristol’s airport safely, helicopters need to fly through a gap in the mountains and for a couple of tense minutes, the pair weren’t sure where they were in relation to those mountains. “One moment you see the horizon and then it’s pitch black. We didn’t really speak the rest of the flight,” Xu says.
After that flight, the idea of creating an autonomous helicopter that could sense hazards and access remote areas began to take off. Rotor Technologies completed its first autonomous helicopter flight campaign of a full-scale civilian helicopter last fall.
Rotor’s R220Y helicopter logged over 20 hours of flight time and demonstrated its long-distance flight capability through in-flight testing of radio equipment and cellular LTE communication links. Rotor hosted Gov. Chris Sununu on Jan. 31 for the first live flight test of its autonomous helicopters.
Rotor is commercializing its autonomy technology by developing the R550X, a utility helicopter that will have a payload capacity of 1,212 pounds and is designed for hazardous operations such as firefighting, crop dusting and remote cargo delivery. The journey to passenger flights will be long, says Rotor’s Chief Commercial Officer Ben Frank.
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