Modern combat autogyro?

http://youtu.be/p8IB-5PbL9U

Modern autogyros (or gyroplanes if you prefer) like the Magni M24 Orion, AutoGyro Calidus and Cavalon and the Xenon/Zen1 show that this type of aircraft has come a long way since the old Bensen Gyrocopters. With maximum level speeds around 100 knots and cruising speeds around 100 mph, these aircraft have effectively no minimum forward speed (i.e. no stall) and can maintain altitude at very low forward speed, essentially hovering if there is any significant wind. They do all this without the weight and complexity a transmission, variable pitch rotor, etc. and with excellent maneuverability when flying low and slow.

It seems to me that there ought to be a role for a dedicated military autogyro as an affordable light tactical reconnaissance aircraft and even, with today’s lightweight missiles, light attack and anti-tank aircraft. An autogyro about double the weight and power of the sport models above could carry two crew and their survival gear, basic day/night sensors, minimal armor protection for critical components and crew, a pod for guided rockets or anti-tank missiles and perhaps a small turret with a rifle-caliber machine gun to provide suppressive fire against ground targets. Purchase and operating costs would be a fraction that of a light helicopter.

What do you think? Will we see armed autogyros return to the skies for the first time since WWII (not counting 007’s Little Nellie)?

Can't see it happening. Autogyros could only really compete with the small piston helos at the low end of the market, and no one regards those as suitable for combat use either.

Not sure what's happening with this company (it's been a couple of years since I heard from them) but they were looking at using autogyros for surveillance type missions.


http://www.gyro-jet.co.uk/

I don't see this happen either. An autogyro is slow by essence and would be easy bait for any kind of armed UAV.

Autogyros should have a lower fuel consumption, than helicopters, I think and with rotor spin-up
a very short take-off run. And a true hover capability may often not be needed. So an autogyro
should achieve a longer loiter time, than a helicopter with the same weight.
Maybe an autogyro-UAV could find interest for some users. Illuminating a target with a true
airspeed of, say 20 mph probably isn't much more difficult, than from a hover.
And perhaps this could be true for a manned attack type, too. We just have to forget, what
today comes to our mind, if we hear "autogyro".

Jemiba said:

Autogyros should have a lower fuel consumption, than helicopters, I think and with rotor spin-up
a very short take-off run. And a true hover capability may often not be needed. So an autogyro
should achieve a longer loiter time, than a helicopter with the same weight.
Maybe an autogyro-UAV could find interest for some users. Illuminating a target with a true
airspeed of, say 20 mph probably isn't much more difficult, than from a hover.
And perhaps this could be true for a manned attack type, too. We just have to forget, what
today comes to our mind, if we hear "autogyro".

Click to expand...

Autogyros also have very limited payloads and high single crew workload, unless you pay the weight and cost penalties of bigger size plus some type of stability augmentation. By the time you do that you are practically at a helicopter in terms of cost and complexity.

As TomS said, they would be competitive with light piston helicopters, and we don't see many of those in military roles. Even in police service (which we used to call paramilitary) you don't see many light piston helicopters anymore because they are too weight limited after you add any mission equipment like searchlights and coms.

Consider the JetRanger/Kiowa family: 5 seats in the civil role, soon became a 2 seater without armament in the military role based on weight limits. To get back to 2 crew plus limited armament needed a 4 bladed rotor, new transmission, and upgraded engine.

While I agree with the issues surrounding very light aircraft and payload creep in a combat application, I don't quite understand this comment from Bill Walker:

Autogyros also have very limited payloads and high single crew workload, unless you pay the weight and cost penalties of bigger size plus some type of stability augmentation. By the time you do that you are practically at a helicopter in terms of cost and complexity.

Click to expand...

From my admittedly limited experience, I don't see that a modern autogyro demands any more pilot workload than a fixed wing aircraft, and quite a bit less than any helicopter. Some handling aspects are different, but not more demanding, than a fixed wing. I am talking about conventional autogyros, with pre-rotation of the rotor on the ground and fixed rotor pitch. I do agree that the jump take-off autogyro is almost as complex as a helicopter so there's not much point.

On payload, as far as I can tell, an autogyro will, by it's nature, always have a greater payload than a helicopter of equivalent power since it is not limited by hover requirements in or out of ground effect. Extrapolating from something like a Magni M24 Orion (115 hp, 285 kg empty, 550 kg gross) then it's not hard to imagine a small turboprop like the current generation 450 hp Rolls Royce (ex-Allison) 250 powering a seven- or eight passenger utility autogyro or a fully-equipped two-seat combat model using the same powerplant, rotor and tail that is able to carry a few hundred kilos of disposable ordnance.

I'm not sure what you mean by fixed pitch rotor on an autogyro. Juan de la Cierva showed us that a lot of variable pitch is needed for forward flight, and for flight control. Once that rotor starts moving forward, there is little difference between the physics of stability and control of a helicopter and that of an autogyro. In terms of stability, there just isn't much in either machine. This is overcome by pilot attention to flying, leaving little left over mental capacity for other tasks. One of the reasons the Cessna L-19 / O-1 lingered on in NATO and US Marine service into the 1970s, even after the first light turbine helicopters entered military service, was its ability to allow a single crew man to fly and direct artillery. Single crew meant lower cost of ownership. You still can't do that in a helicopter, although both the Americans and the Russians have tried.

You are right Fred, the gyro begins makes sense if you scale it up to 600+ horsepower, big enough for 6+ seats without military equipment (just like light turbine helicopters had to be scaled up to finally replace the L-19). But you are now very close to helicopter cost of manufacture and cost of ownership, so why not go all the way for just a little more money?

Finally, don't be too quick to discount the advantages of hovering. Take a look at ADS33E, the US military specification for helicopter handling qualities. In order to be accepted for use in the scout and/or attack roles, a lot of hover capabilities are required - things like horizontal and vertical demask/remask tasks. Viet Nam and on showed that these abilities greatly increased survivability, even against light ground fire.

Bill, I don't think your comments apply to a modern gyroplane. I have flown a Robinson R22 for one lesson and it felt like riding a unicycle with two feet and both hands. I have also flown both Magni and AutoGyro two-seat gyroplanes--nothing at all like the Robinson, just like flying a fixed-wing aircraft in most regimes. On the rotor question, take a look at these two pics:







These are the Magni and AutoGyro rotor heads, respectively, and Bell 47 rotor head for comparison. As you can see, both gyros use a Bell teeter-totter two-bladed arrangement. But unlike a helicopter there is no swash plate, cyclic or collective pitch and the rotor blade is not free to change pitch, it is fixed. For control, the entire rotor is simply tilted forward and back, left and right on a non-rotating universal joint (or, if you prefer, the aircraft is weight-shifting below the rotor, hard to tell which is the tail and which is the dog).

For the record, my understanding is that Cierva's great discovery was not variable pitch, which others had tried, it was the use of flapping and lead/lag hinges to deal with the assymetric nature of rotary wing flight. The Bell teetering arrangement takes care of that more elegantly than the separate hinges of the old Cierva designs if you can get by with just two blades. Since the Bell arrangement worked fine up the size of a UH-1 Huey, there is definitely room to grow.

Actually, I was thinking of something roughly in the class of the Groen Brothers Hawk 4. The
worth of the capability to hover remains, of course, but from what I read, experiences in Iraq
and Afghanistan led to tactics emphasizing constant movement, not standstill. IIRC, the US
Army Apaches suffered heavier losses due to their tactic to hover, than the USMC Cobras,
which used some kind of "race track" tatctic.
And honestly, reading again about the above mentioned Groen Hawk 4, I'm not sure anymore,
that such an aircraft would be much cheaper, than a helicoper.

Jemiba said:

And honestly, reading again about the above mentioned Groen Hawk 4, I'm not sure anymore,
that such an aircraft would be much cheaper, than a helicoper.

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I believe that's one of the reasons they tested the Hawk 6G, based on a Cessna 337, as a means to see if the Groen brothers' technology could be adapted to existing airframes in order to minimize manufacturing costs.

Chinese fighter autogyros which, apart from reconnaissance, can also fight tanks with the help of guided missiles

View: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Qq-qovwXIW0

From 16: 34 minute
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57IDwTmqGUs

autogyros can be used for example for transport of logistics or to wounded soldiers I base this of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina when all the armed parties did not have the possibility of air coverage of some pockets with logistics