FALCON: Flapping Air-Land CONnector

Level, powered flight under a parafoil canopy requires significant thrust.Ā Meanwhile, mission requirements preclude the use of traditional paramotor configurations.Ā To achieve the required thrust over the required mission durations, silently, with minimum SWaP, highly efficient thrust generation methods are required.Ā To solve this problem, Lynntech proposes the innovative Flapping Air-Land CONnector (FALCON) system.Ā Using the principles of flapping wing ornithopter flight, the canopy itself is used as the thrust producing hardware with a minimum of added system mass.Ā Because the large airfoil gently accelerates extremely large volumes of air, superlative efficiencies are obtained ¢ far exceeding any reasonably-sized propeller or fan-based system.Ā The result is an extremely lightweight, easy to integrate, failsafe, and high performance vehicle configuration which easily meets all desired performance metrics.