An Initial Flight Performance Assessment of New Urban Air Mobility Concept Vehicles for Medical Rendezvous Operations

A novel multirotor concept is proposed for airlifting the emergency medical personnel without the use of a rescue helicopter (designed for patient transport) during the first line emergency services. Based on this concept, two configurations are designed and introduced, comprising a common quadrotor system with single and dual pusher propellers, respectively. An initial flight performance assessment is conducted for the introduced configurations by means of trim calculations in two distinctive flight modes across the entire designated flight speed range, initially without rotor-rotor interactions, and subsequently, with their inclusion. For this purpose, an existing mid-fidelity rotor-rotor interaction method is extended to capture the interactions in all three directions between the rotors that are arbitrarily positioned and oriented to each other. The trim calculations including rotor-rotor interactions show a 10% increase in the vehicle power at the maximum flight speed. The interactions between the pusher propellers and the lifting rotor wakes result in sudden increases up to 100% in the induced inflow of the propellers at low-speed regimes. The paper presents the two conceptual configurations along with their model syntheses and the results of the trim calculations. The influences of the rotor-rotor interactions on the trim results are discussed both at the rotor and the vehicle level.