It's so rare and just sooo utterly cool to see fundamental innovations in $100B industries still being performed by the backyard inventor.   It strokes just about every Romantic bone in my body.

MSNBC/Newsweek has this article about a guy in the UK who's invented a totally new hybrid concept for combining the qualities of an airplane with a helicopter.   He calls his invention the FanWing.

...Whatever its appearance, the FanWing is something of a rare event in the aeronautics world: a wholly new technology of flight. The ungainly creature that Peebles, 57, has worked on for much of the past decade combines many of the best features of helicopters and traditional fixed-wing airplanes. It uses far less fuel than a helicopter or a conventional airplane and needs little or no space for takeoff and landing. It is quieter than a helicopter and would cost far less to build and operate. Given a little more time and development money, the FanWing might claim a new niche in aviation: that of a low-cost, slow-moving workhorse of the skies.

Unbelievably, MSNBC does NOT include a picture of the device but luckily Mr. Peebles has a website -- http://www.fanwing.com/ -- with pictures, mpgs, funky graphics, and relatively detailed explanations about the "how"

The basic idea in a nutshell is a horizontally oriented fan across the leading edge of the wing.   Picture the rotor from a farm combine fitted instead with a series of airfoils designed to suck air in from a very tall leading edge surface.   Once the air is "inside" the rotor, it's squirted out at a higher speed through a smaller section across the top of a somewhat traditional airplane airfoil.    Once you have a speed differential and an airfoil, voila, you've got lift.

Applying my armchair aeronautical engineering to the concept, it passes the "smell test" in it's claim for high lift efficiency.   The efficiency of a given propulsion + lift system for aircraft boils down to, for a given speed, 1) how much air are you moving and 2) what's the temperature of the air.   

A jet, for example, moves a relatively small volume of high temperature air at a high speed.  It's comparatively inefficient because energy is expended to directly heat up a small volume air.

By contrast, a turboprop moves a much higher volume of ambient-temperature air (the average prop "wingspan" is larger than the wingspan of a jet's intake blades for most medium/small sized aircraft) at a relatively lower speed.   Many of the commercial jet innovations in recent decades such as high bypass ratio engines are designed to capture some of the efficiency of the turboprop while holding on to the speed of a jet.

In contrast to all of this, the Fanwing moves a VERY large volume of cold air across the entire surface of the airfoil at a pretty low speed.   The STOL capabilities probably stem from the fact that the moving air is directly applied to the airfoil rather than used to "pull" the plane forward which in turn indirectly applies air to the foil.   The result should be extremely high lift efficiency at a very low level of expended energy.

---