One of the first flights of the CarterCopter. The aircraft is over 30 feet off the ground.

A rear view of the aircraft in flight.

The wing contacting the runway during the hard landing. The aircraft landed banked because of the slow response of the rotor due to the high stick forces, in turn caused by the dogleg rotor design.

The nosewheel side plates broke during the hard landing because of the side load caused by the aircraft landing banked and the wing hitting the ground first. The retraction mechanism was undamaged and the nose gear extension installed for high speed taxi testing was also undamaged.

When the nose gear failed, the nose went down and raised the tail booms up, and the right fin was sliced by the rotor. The impact did very little damage to the rotor because of its high inertia.

Photo by Jason Bynum
The CarterCopter has since been repaired and modified several times, flown to a mu of 0.87, a top speed of 173 mph, an altitude of 10,000 ft, and the rotor speed reduced to 115 rpm. We will continue flight testing to expand this envelope.

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