Get ready for airplanes that hover like helicopters -- no airport required.
They're called tilt-rotor aircraft. They hover like helicopters -- but they fly faster and farther -- like airplanes. The military has flown them for years.
The world's first civilian production tilt-rotor aircraft is being built in the United States by Italian aerospace giant Leonardo. "The 609 represents, from a technological point of view, a breakthrough," Gian Piero Cutillo, managing director of Leonardo Helicopters, told CNN at last month's Helicopter Association International trade show in Atlanta.
"Regulators are going to look very closely at this aircraft in light of the developmental difficulties, both for the 609 and its V-22 cousin," says Richard Aboulafia, aviation industry analyst at Teal Group."But they're certainly not going to certify a product that isn't safe." "We are getting positive response numbers from the flight tests that we are doing," Cutillo says."So we are making important and significant progress."The AW609's price tag is expected to be somewhere around $25 million, Cutillo says, more than twice the cost of a comparable traditional helicopter.
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