Supersonic Helicopter a reality?

[Clipper]

There needs to be much more research and development before they start using Osprey like aircraft for civilian airliners. The Osprey has a questionable safety record, and has been grounded more than once while it's safety has been investigated.

I guess I am just skeptical about supersonic speed for a chopper, but none of the commercial aircraft in the air today have any glide capability to speak of. The Hudson River crash recently is actually the only major airliner crash that I can remember in recent history where there were very many survivors. That was truly a miraculous piece of flying by the pilot, and a miraculous outcome for the passengers. Anywhere but NYC with the ferry traffic and other boats in the area, and that could have had a very different outcome also.

I have on occasion, wondered why a system cannot be developed that allows the wings of an airplane to be jettisoned along with the baggage in a cargo compartment, while a large system of parachutes deploys in progressive sequence that brings just the passenger compartment to the ground safely.

It seems that such a system would be even easier to develop for a helicopter. Bring it to a hover, jettison the rotors and pop a chute. My imagination obviously is way ahead of engineering capability. We have airdropped jeeps and tanks for years, why not a passenger compartment or rescue pod like fuselage, such as is ejected from an F-111 aircraft, or the protective pod used in drag racers and high powered racing boats?

[Swimmy]

With respect to the last part of your post, I imagine the economic practicality along with physics dictates that no such system is feasible. Those civilian passenger planes are designed to maximize passenger throughput. You'd have to trade off several passenger seats, or redesign many of the current models to pack enough parachutes to deploy. Next, you would have to add some kind of triggering mechanism to jettison the wings. All that added weight would require reducing the number of passengers allowed to fly at any given time. There would be no way for an airline to pay for the r&d to make it a reality and recover those costs from the passengers without entirely killing the entire aviation industry for civilians.

With a helicopter, if the engine dies, under battery power, the rotors will still spin. You can, under "auto rotation" safely glide the helicopter back down.

I think supersonic flight for a helicopter is possible. I always imagined using computer controls, at a certain speed, a system could ignite the jet propulsion and stop the rotors blades in a predetermined spot to make the blades double as lift generating wings. The speed requirement would help provide some glide time in the transition from helicopter mode to jet mode.