DARPA has a VTOL program. Some fellers at Boeing-Philadelphia had an idea for a VTOL aircraft. So… they spent three days designing a subscale prototype, and two weeks building it.
[youtube 8N3RlaVYDdM]
It flies, if rather wobbly. Further tinkerage with the computer control system should clear that right up..
Three days. Think of it… not months and months of committee meetings and never ending analysis paralysis. Just design something that, while not being perfect, is good enough.
Interestingly, the same technologies (computers) that helped them design and fly the “Phantom Swift” this quickly are responsible in no small part for the aerospace industry grinding to a halt in recent decades. In the 1950’s and before, if you wanted to test an idea, you built it. Then stuck it in a wind tunnel, or launched it with a sounding rocket, or dropped it from a plane, or stuck an engine and an adrenaline junkie in it and actually flew it. But once computer aided design and analysis came on the scene, rather than spend lots of money building, flying and crashing, engineers spent lots of money designing and redesigning and reredesigning and rereredesigning until eventually the whole program got cancelled.
