UAVs
Monocopters in which the entire aircraft rotates about its center of mass as it flies present advantages and challenges as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to the designer. As highly centripetal machines, they cannot be manned.
The first of these monocopters were constructed by Dr. Charles W. McCutchen and powered by reciprocating model airplane engines in 1952. He flew them at Lake Placid, and named them "Charybdis machines". Other early experimenters were William Foshag and Joe Carter.
These types of monocopters caught on in the model airplane world, particularly in Eastern Europe, where free flight record-setting models were constructed by George Horvath of Hungary, Sergei Vorabyev and V. Naidovsky of Russia, and Steffan Purice of Romania . An exception to the lack of US enthusiasm was Francis Boreham's "Buzzcopter" of 1964, and Ken Willard's "Rotoriser" of 1984. In 2002, Ron Jesme made the first successful electric propeller monocopter. Daedalus Research of Logan Utah also manufactured a monocopter kit, "Maple Seed," using a 0.049 model-airplane engine.
Gordon Mandell of the M.I.T. Model Rocket Society designed a model-rocket engine powered monocopter, which he named "turbocopter," and published the design concept in his column "Wayward Wind" in Model Rocketry Magazine in 1969. A later version of this was researched at MIT in 1980. This design prompted Korey Kline, an early member of the Tripoli Rocketry Association, to design his own rocket-powered monocopters which fly on long-burn model rocket engines. They were demonstrated at various rocket launch events in the 1980s to crowds that raved at their performance. A few were manufactured as kits by Ace Rocketry at that time.
Korey Kline published very little about monocopters, rocket or otherwise, and so by the 1990s the monocopter had faded from view. Edward Miller of Pennsylvania began experimenting with them again in the late 1990s, as well as Francis Graham, a Kent State University, Ohio, physics professor. By 1999 both were flying rocket monocopters. Francis Graham wrote a book, Monocopters, with some theory of their flight characteristics, in 1999, sold by Apogee Components of Colorado Springs. Ed Miller went on to build the largest high power rocket monocopters ever flown, with 8 foot large fiberglass-covered wooden wings, and also sells them. Chuck Rudy flew a large monocopter with a hybrid rocket engine, using solid and liquid fuel. Francis Graham continued to promote monocopters, and organized a small conference held in Washington, Pennsylvania, in 2001. He also presented a paper on the subject at the 2003 Century-of-Flight conference sponsored by the AIAA in Dayton.
Joseph Peklicz of Martin's Ferry scaled down the monocopter into a kit form using small model rocket engines, and sold many to individuals and schools. His kits are still available and are widely sold and are a good introduction to monocopters. In 2008, Art Applewhite of Kerrville, Texas began selling a popular line of rocket-powered monocopter kits as well.
Monocopters that rotate entirely had no practical purpose prior to 2003, but, in part due to Graham's book, that would change. Patent 7,104,862 was awarded in 2006 to Michael A. Dammar of Vera-Tech Aero RPV Corp. of Edina, Minnesota for a monocopter military reconnaissance device that was remotely controlled and took short exposures. Another remote-controlled monocopter, which could fly indoors on an electric motor, and which uses the Earth's magnetic field as a reference, was developed by Woody Hoburg and James Houghton at MIT in 2007–2008.
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