HS-Drone:  A Disruptive Breakthrough
It is well known (in the profession) that a breakthrough that reduces complexity of vehicles capable of hovering (i.e. vertical takeoff/landing), transition, and cruising (horizontal thrust with lift from fuselage/wings) would disrupt the entire industry.

The problems with helicopters and vertical-takeoff drones are low energy efficiency (less than 25% that of jets) and low velocity.  If these vehicles were faster and more-efficient, they could provide point-to-point service (as the bird flies) at greater than 250 mph without any significant infrastructure beyond the (relatively) trivial infrastructure similar to bus stops.

Terreplane Technologies, LLC has a patent pending status on a breakthrough that makes this possible, and the debut of the third type of vehicle will be posted by August 1 of 2019.

The starting point for the breakthrough is the breakthrough was the development of a more-useful and fundamentally-correct flight theory.  The resulting heuristics resulted in the Terretrane vehicle design.  The same technology was applied to Terratrans and now HS-Drone.

​Terretrane - Both high lift-drag ratios and a narrow vehicle (narrow-to-no wingspan) are necessary for overhead tethered-gliders to be cost effective.  The prototype to the right identifies an optimal configuration.  The allowed US Patent on this vehicle is on engaging a conductive cable as the reactive component of a linear motor to pull Terretrane.

Terretrans - The need for Terretrane to advance the technology led to the realization that most aircraft do not effectively use Lift-Body fuselage technology.  Among the advantages brought with lifting body technology are higher L:D, better fuel economy, and shorter takeoff distances.  The Terretrans vehicle is designed for very-short takeoff distances as a new market.

HS-Drone - Although shorter takeoff distances is an advantage, the real advantage lies in vertical takeoff.  A new web site is dedicated to this HS-Drone (hs-drone.com) technology.