Aircraft propulsion is inherently low jerk which makes it difficult for a conventional single mass helicopter to evade anti-aircraft fire.
The solution is to design a helicopter in two sections connected by an hydraulically operated actuator, preferably with the center of the thermal image out in the middle of nowhere. When there is any danger of receiving fire the pilot activates the system and jerks each section off the mass of the other, if necessary in any or all 3 dimensions.
The airframe or rotors may need to be beefed up a little and the personnel secured because it'll be a rough ride for the pilot & crew until they can find a safe altitude or location.
But it's better than being a low jerk low acceleration target.
The best way to not be harmed by antiaircraft fire is to not be shot at in the first place. That's currently handled by so called stealth tech which makes it harder for enemy fire control to see you at all, or once seen, to exactly locate you.
The second best way is to not get hit.
That's usually handled by convincing "smart" incoming fire that you're somewhere else say with flares and decoys.
Trying to physically jink an aircraft (or part of it) out of incoming fire's way is impractical for humans at today's closing speeds because of our pitifully slow reflexes. Machines have much faster reflexes but airframes and humans wouldn't likely be able to survive the extreme forces applied to them.
Ignoring that, the biggest problem with automatic active evasion is it jerking the controls out of the pilot's hands.
The OP was referring to a helicopter. A stealth helicopter makes sense only in a reconnaissance or special operations role. For an attack role, stealth wouldn't make a lot of difference.
The heat of the Helo exhaust could be masked and thus prevent IR lock on by missiles, but this is not the same as reducing radar cross section via stealth.
The trend is to eliminate the pilot and use drones.
However, considering the attack helicopter, drones wouldn't make much sense because of the need to instantly analyze a panorama of battlefield data and respond accordingly. This would be difficult for a remote pilot, sitting thousands of miles away at a 2D console, to accomplish.
There is also the minor problem of suddenly changing the orientation of a flexible rotating system, like rotor blades, which is one of the reasons there are not very many aerobatic helicopters, including military ones.
Falling out of the sky because you lost some or all of your rotors, or because you tore the airfame in half, is not much different than falling out of the sky because someone blew a hole in you first. The fireball just comes sooner.
If we beefed the craft up enough to survive your "cartoon, frightened" deception, there would be no lift capacity left for anything else.
Let's just run everything by Cloud 9's. That way the muition would penetrate without explosion, in and out, with almost no chance of encountering anything critical.
They certainly have an idea what conventional airframes and rotors can take under a variety of loadings so they can design around that on the preliminary test rig.
After proof of concept they can, if higher jerk and accelerations are desired for the production run, redesign the airframe as suggested in the OP.
The reason so many choppers get shot down is because acceleration from propulsion, especially at speed, never comes anywhere near what is necessary to evade fire or what the helicopter experiences during hard landings, micro bursts, etc.
An erratic movement would make it a hard target for bullets and combined with radar and a controller, an impossible target for RPGs and Stingers.
Aside from the fact that I don't want to be shot at in any circumstances, I specifically don't like amusement park rides, and wouldn't care to ride one of your contraptions even if they were only shooting water balloons at it.
ign. =A0I was on the Test and Evaluation Team for the 1st Air Cavalry Divis= ion, and it was well-known that helicopter design had limits that would not= allow much armor-plating,
Armor is too heavy for aircraft. The high strength to weight ratio of aircraft means evasion action [high acceleration/high jerk] is the preferred survival strategy.
ys have to be protected by air cover, or the enemy had no viable air force = or air defense. =A0That was the early Vietnam war. =A0I was the operations = officer for Kien Phong Province, and it was a standard rule that flying was= above 1500 feet, to avoid small arms fire. =A0Landing (and takeoff) was pr= esumed within a safe perimeter. =A0Later they came up with air defense weap= ons, and it got more hazardous, although, they only got one shot before bei= ng taken out. =A0Very similar to the recent downing of a Chinook. =A0The fi= rst guy, with the first weapon can be a surprise. =A0You can bet they won't= be flying Chinooks on that profile again, but every war has it's "Pearl Ha= rbor" moments. =A0I am also one of few "ground-pounders" to have an Air Med= al for over 200 hours, in combat, as commander of ground troops, in a C&C h= elicopter. =A0And survived two auto-rotation crashes - one in the Mekong - = that was at least cooling.
hame to waste a potential patent by disclosing it in a public forum.
A tech incendiary can always post a follow up claiming that he "isn't exactly sure how to do it" thereby leaving the door open for others.
This idea originated last week when an army medic emailed that grim video of all those downed helicopters. When an RPG took down a helicopter I felt like I was dying.
put it down on paper, and they will be helicoptering a path to his rooftop= to drop megabucks.
In that case I know exactly how to do it, complete with a cost - benefit risk analysis and anything else they want.
No, you have figured no way to keep the "join" taught, no method of keeping the pilot in control of even one of the bodies, no method of keeping the rotors intact / attached. So in a sense, we can do better than your idea by flying two separate helicopters with 50% of our assets in each.
PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.