# How Could We Take Off Like a Helicopter but Fly Like an Airplane? | Metroair

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/feed/375472
- Entity ID: wefunder:feed_item:375472
- Published at: 2026-08-27 07:10:49 UTC
- Updated at: 2026-08-27 07:10:58 UTC

## Author
Jisu Kim

## Subject
Metroair

## Content
Hi everyone,This is the question that started Metroair — and it's older than you might think. Aerospace engineers have chased it for decades, because each aircraft type is brilliant at one thing and terrible at the other.The trade-off every aircraft facesA helicopter can lift off from a parking lot, hover, and land almost anywhere. But keeping an aircraft airborne with rotors alone burns enormous energy — every second of flight is a fight against gravity. That's why helicopters are loud, expensive to operate, and short on range.An airplane is the opposite. Once moving forward, its wings generate lift almost for free — air does the work. That's why a plane can cross an ocean on the same class of engine that would barely keep a helicopter aloft for a few hours. But it needs a runway, and runways don't exist where people actually live.Urban air mobility needs both: take off from a rooftop like a helicopter, then cruise efficiently like an airplane. The problem is that bolting the two together is much harder than it sounds.Why "just add wings" doesn't workWhen rotors and wings share one airframe, they interfere with each other. Rotor downwash disrupts airflow over the wing. In forward flight, exposed lifting rotors create massive drag — like driving a car with parachutes attached. And the transition moment — the handoff from rotor-borne lift to wing-borne lift — is the most delicate phase in all of aviation. Get the control logic wrong, and the aircraft falls out of the sky precisely when it's switching modes.This is where many eVTOL designs struggle, and where we've focused our engineering from day one.Our answer: the MulticruiserThe Multicruiser is designed as one fused aircraft, not a helicopter with wings glued on: Vertical lift, minimal drag penalty. Our patented Rimfoil ducted rotors provide helicopter-style lift on takeoff — then, in cruise, the duct design cuts the drag those rotors would normally create by roughly two-thirds. The biggest tax on hybrid designs, largely engineered away. One control brain, two flight modes. Rather than separate "hover mode" and "airplane mode" systems, we integrated multicopter and fixed-wing control logic into a single system that manages the transition continuously. We flying our FPV prototype through exactly this. Safety by geometry. The rotors are guarded by design — a requirement, in our view, for any aircraft meant to operate near buildings and people. Why this matters for the missionSolving hover-plus-cruise efficiently is the unlock for everything we've shared about our vision: aircraft that take off from urban hubs, cruise on wing lift, and make air transportation economically viable for everyone — not just those who can afford a helicopter charter.That's what this round funds: taking the Multicruiser FPV from flight-tested prototype to pilot production.Questions about the engineering? Ask us in the Ask a Question tab — our team loves this topic.