A Large 4/5/7 Seat SUV                                          Above, the Horizon 4/5 Seat Personal Transport / Small Air Taxi

 

 

                                  Below, the Horizon Larger 6/8 Seat Air Taxi or Luxury Personal Transport

Capabilities

The essence of an Autocopter is that it should be as easy to fly as drive a car, as safe

to fly in as travel by car, able to fly over cities and at night, cruise at high speed for a

helicopter, provide a smooth and relaxed flight at low altitude and, finally, for non-

professional pilots, involve no more training than required for a fixed-wing a/c.

Safety

For the Autocopter this means a high degree of engine, drive system, rotor and flight

control system redundancy, plus flight control and planning software that protects the

pilot and passengers from collisions with terrain and obstacles as well as entering into

unsafe flight regimes or exceeding the safe flight envelope.

Carbon Neutral and Carbon Zero

The Autocopter has been designed to use a combination of power sources and fuels.

With gas turbine engines it can fly of normal jet fuel, diesel, biofuel or, preferably,

synthetic jet fuel. Biofuel, e.g. E85, would make the aircraft carbon neutral but limit its

speed and range. Synthetic jet fuel, made most easily using CO2 taken from the

atmosphere, would make it carbon zero and with no limitations on speed and range.

Fly-by-Wire

The  aircraft’s flight controls are all fly-by-wire in an architecture that goes under the

name of ‘Distributed IMA’.  Three channels are used with ‘deep’ diagnostics in all of the

distributed modules. The flight control system shares hardware and software with the

aircraft’s powerful Health and Usage system.

Easy to Fly

‘Easy to Fly’ implies that much of the routine flying done by the aircraft will be ‘hands

off’ in that with known take-off and landing sites, the primary duty of the pilot will be

to ‘see and avoid’.  Otherwise, flying will be semi-autonomous (i.e. between levels 3 and

4 in automobile terms), as will flight planning, even in crowded airspace like the UK’s.

The Family

The modular nature of the technology will enable Horizon to build a large variety of

aircraft that are essentially optimised to suite a variety of missions. The 3 to 4 seat

aircraft will make most of their sales in the Personal Transport and Air Taxi segments.

The 2-seaters are essentially high-speed sport machines. Utility and Military machines

will be much more highly configured to a specific mission.