Sunday, February 28, 2010

I'm all for quieter...

Helicopters could become less obnoxious for bystanders.

For all the government conspiracy militia nuts out there, I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there is no such thing as silent, stealth black helicopters. The bad news is that, thanks to Eurocopter's noise-canceling Blue Edge rotor blades, there soon will be.
The extremely loud noise made by helicopter blades results primarily from the blades chopping through eddies in their own wakes, a phenomenon known as blade-vortex interaction. By changing the shape of the rotor blades, Eurocopter manages to pair down the blade-vortex interaction so thoroughly that the sound only reaches the whisper volume of 3 or 4 decibels. [More]




Now if they could just tweak the emergency glide path, I might actually get in one.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

PopSci seems to have misinterperted what they read/were told. They are claiming the sound of the blades is only 3-4 decibels. Wired.com states that the sound is reduced by 3-4 decibels. Most of us don't have the capability to hear a 4 db sound.