What you are looking at here may not exist, but it’s likely to be the stealth heavy transport helicopter that carried backup SEAL commandos in the final hunt for Osama bin Laden. It looks appropriately powered by ninja stars.
The blades design is striking, but not new. We have seen those before – a similar contraption is being used by Eurocopter engineers to attenuate the noise caused by blade-vortex interaction, the noisy whoop-whoop-whoop swooshing sound made by the helicopter’s rotor.
In the stealth Eurocopter prototype there’s also another technology called Blue Pulse, which adds piezo-electric flaps that move up and down at 15 to 40 times per second to the blades’ edge to help cancelling the blade-vortex interaction.
It’s not hard to believe that the Chinook used in the attack – as recently confirmed by off-the-record sources at the Pentagon – would have this technology too, along with others taken from the stealth RAH-66 Comanche, like heat-absorbing paint. After all, the traditional twin-engine CH-47 Chinook is made by Boeing, which participated in the development of the RAH-66. [David Cenciotti via Danger Room]