http://www.gizmag.com/d-dalus-uav-design/18972/

Ok, so it is basically a UAV right now. But the company hopes to turn it into a passenger vehicle at some point.

Currently marketing balderdash from the read of it, but I could be wrong.

If I am, it looks like it'd be a nice addition to a lot of civilian and military applications. Search and Rescue is the first one that comes to my mind, with the ability to drop emergency supplies to trapped people when found.

Near silent?
With FOUR Turbines? O.o

Hense my thought that it's marketing balderdash.

Then again, everything is relative. "Near silent... Compared to a Helicopter at full military power."

OK, I see where you would want to call that a T-Bird, but it's just an exotic VTOL. The T-Birds are high speed craft CAPABLE of vertical flight but primarily designed to operate as WIGE (Wing In Ground Effect) very-low-altitude aircraft. I had a REALLY lengthy post on that at one point a couple years back, if you're interested enough to look for it (I don't have time right now to go digging).

Now, as a drone, kick hoop. Even as an aircraft with the Improved Takeoff 2 quality (or whatever the right name is for the thing, I'm at work) it's essentially a rotor-less helicopter from a game-mechanics standpoint. IF - BIG IF - they can scale the thing up it would make a GREAT air-rescue vehicle (Think Doc Wagon HTR Platinum) because it doesn't have to contend with rotor sweep when looking for a suitable landing spot. That said, I can't see how in that capacity it would be any less vulnerable to ground fire and FOD (Foreign Object Damage) than a ducted-fan VTOL (for a real world example, see the US Marine Corps F/A-35B version of the Joint Strike Fighter which appeared in Die Hard 4: Live Free Or Die Hard, orsomthing akin to the transport choppers in Avatar, assuming they could scale them up well enough).

Anyhow, that's my two centi-Nuyen.

-Kerenshara