BACKGROUND Search and rescue (SAR) operations constitute a significant proportion of Norwegian ambulance helicopter missions, and they may limit the service's capacity for medical operations. We compared the relative contribution of the different helicopter resources using a common definition of SAR-operation in order to investigate how the SAR workload had changed over the last years. METHOD...

The goal of the European project muFly is to build a fully autonomous micro helicopter, which is comparable to a small bird in size and mass. The rigorous size and mass constraints infer various problems related to energy efficiency, flight stability and overall system design. In this research, aerodynamics and flight dynamics are investigated experimentally to gather information for the design...

OBJECTIVES To study the profile of airlifted patients and their outcomes after arrival at the hospital, and to evaluate the appropriateness of their prehospital care and the decision to use aeromedical evacuation. DESIGN Prospective case series. SETTING Accident and emergency department of a public hospital, Hong Kong. PATIENTS All patients transported to the department by a helicopter of...

OBJECTIVE To determine the relationship between whole body vibration (WBV) induced helicopter flights and degenerative changes of the cervical and lumbar spine. METHODS We examined 186 helicopter pilots who were exposed to WBV and 94 military clerical workers at a military hospital. Questionnaires and interviews were completed for 164 of the 186 pilots (response rate, 88.2%) and 88 of the 94 ...

This project proposes and describes the implementation of a wide-area surveillance system comprised of a sensor/interceptor placement planning and an interceptor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) helicopter. Given the 2-D layout of an area, the planning system optimally places perimeter cameras based on maximum coverage and minimal cost. Part of this planning system includes the MATLAB implementati...

in this paper, a robust tracking control method for automatic take-off and trajectory tracking of a quadrotor helicopter is presented. the designed controller includes two parts: a position controller and an attitude controller. the attitude controller is designed by using the sliding mode control (smc) method to track the desired pitch and roll angles, which are the output of position controll...

An implicit unsteady upwind solver including a mesh motion approach was applied to simulate a helicopter including body, main rotor and tail rotor in hover flight. The discretization was based on a second order finite volume approach with fluxes given by the Roeand#39;s scheme. Discretization of Geometric Conservation Laws (GCL) was devised in such a way that the three-dimensional flows on arbi...