But if it practically worked as a day to day driver it would absolutely revolutionise traffic in some cities, such as Jakarta with 18 million motorcycles all stuck in traffic.
Cant imagine all the issues you'd have to work through to make that work though. It would be a good time to invest in roof-repair and insurance businesses.
I'd want it if it didn't work so well to be honest. People in the Bay Area complain about how terrible public transport is. Try living in the midwest or southeast. I frequently dreamed of having my own personal Rocketman style jetpack or something to avoid that terrible commute. If I had the funds I'd buy one of these things without a second thought.
10-22 minutes of flight time doesn’t seem like it has commuter applications. I’d guess that for regulatory and safety purposes you wouldn’t be allowed to overfly a city, and you’d probably need to take off and land somewhere safe as well. This is for amusement, not flying over traffic.
If we assume that your second sentence is solvable (and I think it will be over time), the 10-22 minute number at the speeds they are talking about is huge.
For example, for someone who works at the Googleplex in Mountain View, 10 minutes gets you to Fremont (less oppressive housing market), 15-17 minutes gets you to Santa Cruz or SF/Oakland, and 22 minutes could get you to places as far away as Gilroy or Concord. All of these are spitball estimates, but they are directionally correct.
“As the crow flies” distances are deceptively short, and the impact this could have on housing markets, commuter towns, and “suburbs” could be huge. One could imagine a scenario in which the savings on housing would easily make one of these bikes look downright cheap (e.g., house in Mountain View versus similar house in Fremont). While there are issues of whether one would want to live in Mountain View or Fremont, the fact is that the option will exist in a way that sucks less than spending ridiculous amounts of time on the Bay Area highways and interstates.
If there were only few of those around and you could afford one and it had good range imagine how it would cut your commute. Fly to your cabin in the woods in no time (rather than sit in traffic for hours) to chill for a bit? Worth the money.
If it worked well and was free from regulation significantly limiting its use then a guess is there would be a substantial market for something like this.
Most importantly, we’ll never get to a future like what was imagined in the video if people are not taking honest shots at it. The fact that this is being given a chance is very exciting.
Yeah, I'm not sure about that but the tech can be used with different approaches.
Owning the jetpack outright seems like a sort of "high octane for rich people entertainment" play, which you could compare to the Tesla roadster approach.
You could even have some bungee jumping/jet ski equivalent of it where you rent it for a couple hours.
Longer term, maybe you could have a jetpack/drone Uber-type merge, where you can have your jetpack delivered on demand, go where you want in a quick and entertaining way, and dispose of it until you need one for the ride back.
"The Speeder is “at least” two years of development time away from ending up in customer hands."
vs.
"Joby Aviation has spent the last decade developing their own electric motors and their current VTOL design from the ground up." [0]
I'd guess that it's at least two years after development has completed in order to get through final certifications for whichever regulatory agencies have a say in this.
I love so many things about this, yet at the same time I don't get the positioning of this product.
1 - Is this is a product for consumers who buy $300-500K super sports cars?
2 - Is this targeted to the consumers who buy private planes?
3 - Is this for search and rescue market?
Group 1 - I don't know. Why not buy a drone-based technology that runs on batteries that might be cheaper and perhaps more reliable. Yes, it may not have the same energy density of batteries, but you can get your 20 min of thrill, super charge it and fly again for another 20 min.
Group 2 - I don't see this being comfortable, they'll buy a single engine plane with seats for 4 that is more comfortable and you don't freeze, or for more adventures people a trike at a fraction of a cost would do fine.
Group 3 - For search and rescue, you probably go as a team of 2-3 people and if you're rescuing people you need to bring them back. So you'll need a fleet of these. I understand helicopters are expensive, but once you add a few of these, then you're compete with a true and tested helicopter model.
Maybe at the end of the day, they'll make this autonomous, put a few missiles on it and then sell it to the pentagon. It's agile and fast and probably can make an argument for its tactical advantages.
I love this idea. I've always wanted a way to play Quidditch, and short of someone building a Quidditch court into an orbiting space station, couldn't think of how you would do it. This is the answer!
While most people are focused on how it will work for commute and day to day activities, even if it doesn't work for those use cases, it is great for theme parks, adventure rides type of use cases. People spend millions of $$ every year on those "weird" roller coaster rides and theme parks.
Drones are pretty good at landing themselves these days if there's a need. I can't imagine one of these couldn't enforce a height limit when it's low on fuel and then land itself when it's nearly empty.
Assuming it would be operating under 14 CFR Part 91 like the rest of general aviation, I think the law is quite clear:
91.119: "Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes: (a)Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface."
91.151: "(a) No person may begin a flight in an airplane under VFR conditions unless (considering wind and forecast weather conditions) there is enough fuel to fly to the first point of intended landing and, assuming normal cruising speed - (1) During the day, to fly after that for at least 30 minutes; or (2) At night, to fly after that for at least 45 minutes. (b) No person may begin a flight in a rotorcraft under VFR conditions unless (considering wind and forecast weather conditions) there is enough fuel to fly to the first point of intended landing and, assuming normal cruising speed, to fly after that for at least 20 minutes."
And it's not like it hasn't happened before. Small aircraft land on houses with enough regularity that I would expect the law to be well settled. See [1] and [2] for recent examples.
True. To build on OPs point though, these aren't exactly comparable. Specifically, light aircraft:
* are piloted by people who have to be certified pilots, which takes considerable training
* are flown at higher altitudes than what this product's marketing is suggesting
* are much more expensive to own/operate
* are only allowed to take off from specific places (regional airports) that tend to be away from high population density areas
* can use the lift from wings to potentially glide to safety if engine failures occur
This concept looks like it works best for short hops between high population density areas, and is at a price point and training level (read: none) that would mean many more potential vehicles would be in the air. So it's not only the above issues but also a matter of degree.
Oh, I totally agree. I was attempting to make the point that purpose-built aircraft with more highly trained pilots still succumb to this. A random on a flying motorcycle doesn’t stand a chance.
Ya it seems like risk profile isn't very clear, nor do major risks have sufficient mitigations.
I feel like the easier place to start is a low-speed automated cargo delivery system that runs on pre-defined flight paths and only in certain weather conditions. Even then you're dealing with pretty decent risk profile given the failure mode of anything flying is rather dangerous.
I'm not against flying things in cities per se, just want to see the discussion go more like 1) flying things are good for X Y Z reasons, 2) major issues to address before we get there include A B C, 3) here's how we're solving those to unlock this new opportunity. Maybe that discussion is happening in other places, but I'd love to see these safety factors better addressed by anyone building these types of things, else it doesn't build much confidence in the viability of the company.
The safety system has to be integral with initial design and it is. Before these are used in urban environments the machine must be able to set itself down safely regardless of the failure. That is possible.
We probably have the highest wing loading of any aircraft, therefore the impact of turbulence is much less than fixed wing or helicopter. The pilot has belly strap and lock holding them to vehicle unless they need to release in an emergency in which case it has pyro cutter.
In rain you’d get wet just like riding a motorcycle on the road. The engines keep running fine.
Flying into birds is not recommended for any aircraft. They wouldn’t go into the engines but could hit the pilot then our safety systems would need to deploy.
Lightning usually won’t take an aircraft of any type out of the sky but may affect instruments.
Thankyou for sticking around and answering so many questions!
My first thought was "why is the pilot hunched over the intakes?" immediately followed by "holy hell that wing/disc loading must play hell on power requirements and fuel consumption, how does that work?".
You mention a scale model elsewhere, is there any video of it available online?
I wish there was a "moonshot" for something like The Kidney Project (https://pharm.ucsf.edu/kidney) A project to produce an artificial kidney. It was kept alive by small donations by kidney patients over the years. Now maybe on better footing and closer to human testing. But still nothing funded like these pie in the sky moonshot project that people will care nothing about in a few years.
Absolutely. I work for YC. An artificial kidney would transform the lives of millions of people on dialysis. It's worth trying to build one even if the chance of success is only 1%.
Thank you for this. I think the prominence of YC will bring much attention to this space.
The approach that the kidney project is taking is very promising. It expands on the current dialysis method. Improved filtration but self contained in the body. No need to lug around a heavy machine. No regular clinic visits. 24x7 cleaning of blood. Reduced chance of infection. No rejection issues unlike transplants. The cost savings vs current dialysis is mind-blowing. Back in the 80s, our current dialysis method was in their infancy until new materials (plastics) made them feasible.
Then get people behind: https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat4782 on the phone. I feel like SJ Park is going to be one of the big brains behind artificial organ revolution.
I don't mean to imply I'm involved in the Kidney Project. With the time I spend in dialysis, I'm in no position to even take on such a venture. I just wanted to point out there are very meaningful projects other there with a little more visibility and funding can reach success sooner. There are millions of those on dialysis which would be able to get our lives back on track (work, live, travel) if this project becomes successful. The cost savings vs dialysis are enormous. The project is close to human testing. All I'm asking is for VCs to make a good faith effort to learn about it.
Such a parachute would be prohibitive in term of weight, so no. I suppose the pilot could wear a personal parachute, and hope to ditch far from people or property, but I think the odds are...
"In the very unlikely event that all four engines fail, we’ll go straight into the ground like a fucking dart." -Billy Connolly
Ballistic parachutes above approx 150ft. Working on two alternative solutions for the “red zone” ie zero - 150 ft. All the eVTOLs makers need to solve same issue and we plan to offer it to them.
It looks like the the rider/pilot is expected to ride hunched over the ducted fan (?) intakes. I suppose it offers a lower center of gravity and is safer than the open rotors of the "flying motorbikes" the Dubai police were testing to much marketing fanfare, but... it still looks wrong from a human factors standpoint.
How do the jetpacks comply with 14 CFR 103.1(e)(4) which requires powered ultralights to have "a power-off stall speed which does not exceed 24 knots calibrated airspeed"?
These don't look safe, even assuming perfect mechanical reliability, because humans will be piloting them over major population centers.
Humans are generally dumb and inattentive, and this particular vehicle looks like it would attract especially dumb humans who'd use them to try dumb things. Since they won't need any piloting certification, this is basically offloading risk onto everyone on the streets below.
I'd feel more comfortable if this were automated only. Then I'd at least be assured there'd be an organization held accountable, rather than a risk-seeking human who'd be dead anyway if it crashed.
If it were automated and had perfect mechanical reliability, then the only real issue is the noise pollution. Which still is going to be an issue, because these jets put out significant noise, and I haven't seen anything in the last 10-20 years since Moller's flying car prototypes to suggest that progress is being made there.
I love scifi as much as the next person here, but there's a lot of problems to solve before we put loud flying missiles in the hands of untrained adrenaline junkies flying over population centers.
Systems do not preclude controlled flight into terrain. They simply purport to. These are different things. And before you say "in that case it's not controlled" well yes it is.
That's why I don't think we would ever have flying cars either. We can barely handle driving on flat surfaces and I suspect most people on the road only get by idly emulating simple line following machines rather than actually engaging the whole situation.
It takes a third party to orchestrate busy sections of our current flying vehicles, planes, so I can't see any alternative to full automation of a mass of flying cars.
Agree on the flying part, not so much on the line following machine. If you think about it: think about the vast amount of cars and miles driven every day. Think of the sheer number of decisions every driver has to make all the time. I think it’s a wonder that the traffic accident rate is rather low.
About 40,000 people died last year in the US. That's over 100 people dead every single day. Millions are injured on a scale from minor bruising to permanent disability every year. It's the number one cause of accidental death if you ignore overdoses. This is not a low rate.
I mean cars wouldn't be accepted today if they were just invented. The only reason why we think 30k deaths a year is fine is because "that's the way it's always been", and cars come from an age when one out of three children would die before they turned 5.
In a sane world we would have only segregated rail transport in urban areas and cars in rural areas where the population density is less than 10 people a square mile.
I'm of the same mind. There's a reason pilots have to have hundreds of hours of training before they are allowed to fly solo. Adding a third dimension to piloting a small personal vehicle takes every bit of concentration and awareness a human can handle. I definitely don't want to see the average driver next to me every morning and afternoon -- the one making all kinds of bad decisions like running red lights and not looking before merging -- behind the wheel/stick of a flying craft.
Conversely, there are a bunch of countries where you can get your PPL before your driving license. I first flew a plane when I was 14. It's not that hard.
Not while the sky is still big enough perhaps. I can take off, poke about and land at a rural airport without seeing anyone but without coordination a busy airport would be a writhing pile of twisted metal. Also it does take a particular type of person to choose to fly, so you are already in a minority of people. The majority of people drive, that is a lot of room for bad judgement.
I live on Moffett Field next to the 101 -- the vehicles from the 101 are far more annoying than the airplanes. Just listen to traffic noise pretty much in any urban or suburban environment. The Caltrain sounds like -- well, a freight train. My point is that if we cared about noise pollution, we'd be paying more attention to the everyday noise all around us and developing technology such as a hypothetical road surface that absorbs sound or finding ways to make the loud train horns unnecessary. The noise from trains and roads is far more obnoxious than any airplane sounds.
True cars and trains are loud. However, we're on the verge of both Caltrain and car electrification, which will significantly reduce ambient noise.
I can't believe we haven't cut & covered the Caltrain line yet. I imagine that's a project even the plentiful peninsula NIMBYs could get behind.
As sibling points out, airplanes at moffett are rather far away, whereas these flying bikes are meant to be point-to-point in dense environments. Also note that there's lots of regs & techs that help reduce noise for larger planes, and I'm not sure the same is going to be true for these smaller vehicles, similar to how all those two-stroke lawnmower and leaf blower engines are horrible both environmentally and noise-wise because they're optimized for size.
The Caltrain horns are so loud I have decided I believe in a conspiracy theory - the volume was mandated in the name of "safety" by a lobbying group secretly working for the auto industry.
Nowhere else I've been are trains so obnoxiously loud.
So back in the day (fault of bad meds) I was sometimes a crazy driver. Poor impulse control. Drive it like you stole it. Whatever. But hey. I'm still alive, and I never got anyone else seriously injured or killed.
But anyway, one afternoon I was doing slalom at ~90 mph through ~70 mph traffic. And then, out of nowhere, this dude on a racing bike blew through at 140 mph or more. And we were all damn lucky that I saw him just before using the same gap that he was heading through. It would have been a serious mess.
Indeed. If your car's power cuts, or breaks fail - the odds of you surviving are incrementally getting higher every year we're on the road. Cars are getting safer and safer, but surely part of that is due to the fact they're on the ground.
If I'm even 10 metres under the ground, flying at 50km/h, if this device fails, of the battery runs out, you're not gonna live to the tell the tale. There is no parachuting, no way of gliding safely to the ground (like planes and helicopters). What is the safety net?
I can't ever see a world where even a minority of the population adopt flying cars. The chance of catastrophic failure (death) is too high.
This. For all the, "Where's my jetpack?" angst in the world of science fiction fanboys (I am one) and start-up builders, there seems to be a disconnect with the rest of humanity on this issue. If the chance of failure is > 0% and odds of death on failure is > 95%, I don't see how a product like this will ever become more than a pipe dream, or at best a prototype flown by a thrill seeker over open water for a publicity stunt.
Edit: After reflecting on this I realize that airplanes probably fall into these statistics, at least for catastrophic failure anyway. I'd be curious to examine statistics in more detail to figure out what a comfortable level of risk would be, but for now, I guess I fall into the ranks of your typical armchair critic on this one.
Commercial airplanes are much safer than cars (because they're rigorously maintained, observed, and operated by professionals). Little ultralight planes might be the best analogy for this project - but they're used by thrill-seekers, just like you predicted.
Commercial airplanes are usually able to safely glide under engine failures. A jetpack is going to drop out the sky. Just from glancing at this flying bike, if the power cuts above 10m, you're probably going to die.
Fixed wing can glide, helicopters can autorotate, open rotor e-vtols don’t autorotate because they don’t have variable pitch blades and their inertia is way too low anyway. jet-vtols have no rotor blades at all so... you’re right if an e-vtol or jet-vtol experiences a catastrophic failure then it’s going straight down! Many of the e-vtol companies say they solve this by having x levels of redundancy..we don’t buy that at JPA. We want to build a saftey system that can rescue the pilot from 5 feet or 50 feet or 5000 feet. Now that’s a challenge! But we believe doable.
I'm having trouble finding good references to cite [1], because the internet doesn't have a long-term memory, but early reactions to the automobile were identical to this. People had never tried to maneuver machines faster than a horse could pull one.
The driving skills that we take for granted now, that seem to come naturally for so many people, were totally nonexistent a little over a hundred years ago. Our brains can now process lots of things moving at different rates of what would have been bewildering speeds to any human not that long ago. We negotiate traffic and anticipate tricky situations and have developed rules that help coordinate the chaos.
Yeah, there are a lot of collisions and deaths all the time, and there are a lot of people who aren't great at it. But even the not-great ones are capable of something that nobody was when the automobile was introduced.
Lots of things turn out better than we expect just because most people don't really want to die. If it were possible for people to fly around overhead in some kind of personal vehicles, my guess is most folks would learn how to handle it.
Given how many days of the year the roads are frozen and/or snow covered where I live, the safety trade-off might be worth it. Just so long as the max height is only about half a meter off the ground (hovering, not flying).
I suspect that what they're offering is not only feasible but achievable with modern technology. The glut of cheap sensors and research into dynamic, multi-axis control thanks to drones makes it easier for something like this to come into being. However, I am skeptical about their ability to build something that can fly for a long distance due to the low energy density of current technology. Even with a gas powered turbine system, their efficiency is capped at around 30%? Theoretically, heat recovery can boost that to 85%, but that equipment is heavy and it's complicated to mount https://www.wbdg.org/resources/microturbines . I don't know the answer to this question but I do hope that they find out!
Good luck guys! You're solving some really Hard problems here.
Thank you, yes we really are but it’s cool to do. We should achieve up to 30mins endurance with exiting engines and if we move to a turbofan than 2-3 x that is possible
With our environment going to hell, we don't need this.
So much for the argument that capitalism entrusts wealth in the hands of a few for the benefit of all, or that wealth correlates to merit in any meaningful sense.
Seconded absolutely. The superbikes of today are thrilling and gorgeous and have brought me huge enjoyment. Pending A successful launch; the The flying-superbikes-of-tomorrow's will inspire and bring joy to my children. Wishing you all the good fortune.
Glenn Martin and Martin Jetpack [0] (Glenn left the company in 2015 though) has been trying to build and bring to market something similar for the past decade (development has been going on decades before that). There's apparent commercial, private, and government interest in the device, but somehow that hasn't actually manifested into a finished and delivered product.
When Glenn spoke to a group of potential investors (which I was somehow a part of) back in 2011 you'd think that they were on the cusp of having a finished product and a stack of orders from the US DOD, a variety of commercial organisations, and dozens of rich people who want a personal aircraft. Technically Martin Jetpack still exists, but it has failed to bring anything to market, despite having millions of dollars poured into the company [1]
I struggle to see how Jetpack Aviation is going to achieve what Glenn and his company failed to do. They don't even have a flying prototype or a physical mockup, only some cool CAD models that look like they were made by some high school kid who's watched Star Wars a few too many times.
Jetpacks and flying motorbikes look cool, but on a practical basis they just aren't useful. They don't fly high enough or fast enough, and they can't operate in high wind or poor weather. For military/government use they aren't suitable and there just aren't enough rich people who want an expensive flying toy to sustain the market.
This company is different. Their jetpack is way more portable than martin’s and Ive seen several videos of successful flights. I think making a motorbike won’t be that hard for them.
Our tech could not be more different to the MJP. Theirs was a gasoline engine powering a pair of ducted fans. Too many single points of failure and never able to keep the engine cool, not possible to fly much faster than 60mph. Ours is 1/3rd the size, will fly at 4x the speed. We’ve flown our jetpacks all over the world. We already have a development agreement with the US Navy. They are perfect for overt (perhaps not covert) military ops - insertion and extraction and getting medics into position. Why risk a Blackhawk and crew??!!
Why not for governments and EMS. If we can get EMS medics to heart attack and stroke victims just 1 min quicker the number of lives saved is 100,000 - 200,000/yr just in USA. Isn’t that worth taking a shot at?
I don’t understand the point about flying high enough. We can fly at over 15,000ft
Hey first things first I respect what you're doing. A 1% chance of success is worth it here. That being said... You are literally exactly this with your comment...
> When Glenn spoke to a group of potential investors (which I was somehow a part of) back in 2011 you'd think that they were on the cusp of having a finished product and a stack of orders from the US DOD, a variety of commercial organisations, and dozens of rich people who want a personal aircraft.
I think small flying vehicles are cool and this is a good use for them, but if this is true, are there other ways to get more people equipped with some of these lifesaving skills at possibly lower marginal cost? CPR training? More AEDs? Some more kinds of injectors that can be used by people with minimal training? Maybe there are other devices on the model of the AED that could administer other kinds of potentially-dangerous treatments?
There's also the ability to stick AEDs on drones, which relies on the member of the public reporting the heart attack to use it, but can make them available to that person much more quickly than instructions about where to find the nearest publicly-accessible AED.
You can obviously also have a lot more defibrillator drones available across a city than jetpack-equipped paramedics. I've seen it as a concept, not sure how many are in use and what their success rates have been.
Would you be willing to tell us how you plan to handle power loss failures? Some other powered lift aircraft have had a "death zone" altitude range: too high for the pilot to survive a crash but too low to deploy a parachute.
Look that's all fine but you must surely realise where you are posting this, and that in the future your comment can only be either irrelevant or held up as an example of people making predictions that turn out to be wrong.
Did your motorcycle have all kinds of advanced gyros, inertial sensors, radar/lidar sensors, and control loops?
Seems like your comment is a bit like someone in the 1900s pointing at an early car and saying, "I fell off a horse once and nearly broke my neck. You won't survive an accident in that contraption." He wouldn't have been entirely wrong, but he wouldn't have been right, either. His comment would have added nothing useful to the discourse.
Um, yes, actually. Humans are capable of all of those things. The problem usually arises when they decide to do something stupid, or somebody else decides to do something stupid and it involves them.
If you've tested it and works, I retract the last paragraph, still looks Sci fi though.
Have you tested for a coin strike? For a plane you're going to have an upper bound for what your going to get in the engine, because it has to be picked up by the engine. This design, anything could fall in, potentially quite dense.
312 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadBut if it practically worked as a day to day driver it would absolutely revolutionise traffic in some cities, such as Jakarta with 18 million motorcycles all stuck in traffic.
Cant imagine all the issues you'd have to work through to make that work though. It would be a good time to invest in roof-repair and insurance businesses.
For example, for someone who works at the Googleplex in Mountain View, 10 minutes gets you to Fremont (less oppressive housing market), 15-17 minutes gets you to Santa Cruz or SF/Oakland, and 22 minutes could get you to places as far away as Gilroy or Concord. All of these are spitball estimates, but they are directionally correct.
“As the crow flies” distances are deceptively short, and the impact this could have on housing markets, commuter towns, and “suburbs” could be huge. One could imagine a scenario in which the savings on housing would easily make one of these bikes look downright cheap (e.g., house in Mountain View versus similar house in Fremont). While there are issues of whether one would want to live in Mountain View or Fremont, the fact is that the option will exist in a way that sucks less than spending ridiculous amounts of time on the Bay Area highways and interstates.
Wouldn’t you need a pilot’s license for this? If it only flies so low that you don’t, isn’t it then suuuuper dangerous?
I say the dangerous part as a former Boosted Board afficionado and current motorcycle rider
They said the exact same thing about cars when they first came out.
Most importantly, we’ll never get to a future like what was imagined in the video if people are not taking honest shots at it. The fact that this is being given a chance is very exciting.
Owning the jetpack outright seems like a sort of "high octane for rich people entertainment" play, which you could compare to the Tesla roadster approach.
You could even have some bungee jumping/jet ski equivalent of it where you rent it for a couple hours.
Longer term, maybe you could have a jetpack/drone Uber-type merge, where you can have your jetpack delivered on demand, go where you want in a quick and entertaining way, and dispose of it until you need one for the ride back.
vs.
"Joby Aviation has spent the last decade developing their own electric motors and their current VTOL design from the ground up." [0]
I'd guess that it's at least two years after development has completed in order to get through final certifications for whichever regulatory agencies have a say in this.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/08/the-electric-aircraft-is-t...
I remember this lesson from watching _Flight of the Phoenix_. :-) Congratulations!
1 - Is this is a product for consumers who buy $300-500K super sports cars?
2 - Is this targeted to the consumers who buy private planes?
3 - Is this for search and rescue market?
Group 1 - I don't know. Why not buy a drone-based technology that runs on batteries that might be cheaper and perhaps more reliable. Yes, it may not have the same energy density of batteries, but you can get your 20 min of thrill, super charge it and fly again for another 20 min.
Group 2 - I don't see this being comfortable, they'll buy a single engine plane with seats for 4 that is more comfortable and you don't freeze, or for more adventures people a trike at a fraction of a cost would do fine.
Group 3 - For search and rescue, you probably go as a team of 2-3 people and if you're rescuing people you need to bring them back. So you'll need a fleet of these. I understand helicopters are expensive, but once you add a few of these, then you're compete with a true and tested helicopter model.
Maybe at the end of the day, they'll make this autonomous, put a few missiles on it and then sell it to the pentagon. It's agile and fast and probably can make an argument for its tactical advantages.
edit: typo
Experience Day fees start from only $10,000 per person per day with possible discounts for groups and full training costs approximately $60,000.
[0] https://jetpackaviation.com/fly-a-jetpack/
91.119: "Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes: (a)Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface."
91.151: "(a) No person may begin a flight in an airplane under VFR conditions unless (considering wind and forecast weather conditions) there is enough fuel to fly to the first point of intended landing and, assuming normal cruising speed - (1) During the day, to fly after that for at least 30 minutes; or (2) At night, to fly after that for at least 45 minutes. (b) No person may begin a flight in a rotorcraft under VFR conditions unless (considering wind and forecast weather conditions) there is enough fuel to fly to the first point of intended landing and, assuming normal cruising speed, to fly after that for at least 20 minutes."
And it's not like it hasn't happened before. Small aircraft land on houses with enough regularity that I would expect the law to be well settled. See [1] and [2] for recent examples.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/family-4-people-killed-... [2]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/911-call-captures-race-free-woman-...
I don't mean to be negative but here's a few questions:
What happens when you hit turbulence?
What happens if you get caught in a rainstorm?
What happens if you fly into a flock of birds?
What happens when you fly into lightning on a clear day?
None of those have to be fatal in an airplane, but potentially could be on this machine.
* are piloted by people who have to be certified pilots, which takes considerable training
* are flown at higher altitudes than what this product's marketing is suggesting
* are much more expensive to own/operate
* are only allowed to take off from specific places (regional airports) that tend to be away from high population density areas
* can use the lift from wings to potentially glide to safety if engine failures occur
This concept looks like it works best for short hops between high population density areas, and is at a price point and training level (read: none) that would mean many more potential vehicles would be in the air. So it's not only the above issues but also a matter of degree.
I feel like the easier place to start is a low-speed automated cargo delivery system that runs on pre-defined flight paths and only in certain weather conditions. Even then you're dealing with pretty decent risk profile given the failure mode of anything flying is rather dangerous.
I'm not against flying things in cities per se, just want to see the discussion go more like 1) flying things are good for X Y Z reasons, 2) major issues to address before we get there include A B C, 3) here's how we're solving those to unlock this new opportunity. Maybe that discussion is happening in other places, but I'd love to see these safety factors better addressed by anyone building these types of things, else it doesn't build much confidence in the viability of the company.
In rain you’d get wet just like riding a motorcycle on the road. The engines keep running fine.
Flying into birds is not recommended for any aircraft. They wouldn’t go into the engines but could hit the pilot then our safety systems would need to deploy.
Lightning usually won’t take an aircraft of any type out of the sky but may affect instruments.
My first thought was "why is the pilot hunched over the intakes?" immediately followed by "holy hell that wing/disc loading must play hell on power requirements and fuel consumption, how does that work?".
You mention a scale model elsewhere, is there any video of it available online?
The approach that the kidney project is taking is very promising. It expands on the current dialysis method. Improved filtration but self contained in the body. No need to lug around a heavy machine. No regular clinic visits. 24x7 cleaning of blood. Reduced chance of infection. No rejection issues unlike transplants. The cost savings vs current dialysis is mind-blowing. Back in the 80s, our current dialysis method was in their infancy until new materials (plastics) made them feasible.
Planes can glide after a loss of power, helos autorotate, do these just fall out of the sky on a nice ballistic arc?
Maybe one of those whole plane parachutes?
"In the very unlikely event that all four engines fail, we’ll go straight into the ground like a fucking dart." -Billy Connolly
Edit: turbine intakes, FTA.
They are already talking about cargo is more likely than passengers. Ever the same story in transportation.
Humans are generally dumb and inattentive, and this particular vehicle looks like it would attract especially dumb humans who'd use them to try dumb things. Since they won't need any piloting certification, this is basically offloading risk onto everyone on the streets below.
I'd feel more comfortable if this were automated only. Then I'd at least be assured there'd be an organization held accountable, rather than a risk-seeking human who'd be dead anyway if it crashed.
If it were automated and had perfect mechanical reliability, then the only real issue is the noise pollution. Which still is going to be an issue, because these jets put out significant noise, and I haven't seen anything in the last 10-20 years since Moller's flying car prototypes to suggest that progress is being made there.
I love scifi as much as the next person here, but there's a lot of problems to solve before we put loud flying missiles in the hands of untrained adrenaline junkies flying over population centers.
It takes a third party to orchestrate busy sections of our current flying vehicles, planes, so I can't see any alternative to full automation of a mass of flying cars.
In a sane world we would have only segregated rail transport in urban areas and cars in rural areas where the population density is less than 10 people a square mile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Though there are better places than the US, quite a few countries are willing to put up with absurdly higher risks.
I live on Moffett Field next to the 101 -- the vehicles from the 101 are far more annoying than the airplanes. Just listen to traffic noise pretty much in any urban or suburban environment. The Caltrain sounds like -- well, a freight train. My point is that if we cared about noise pollution, we'd be paying more attention to the everyday noise all around us and developing technology such as a hypothetical road surface that absorbs sound or finding ways to make the loud train horns unnecessary. The noise from trains and roads is far more obnoxious than any airplane sounds.
I can't believe we haven't cut & covered the Caltrain line yet. I imagine that's a project even the plentiful peninsula NIMBYs could get behind.
As sibling points out, airplanes at moffett are rather far away, whereas these flying bikes are meant to be point-to-point in dense environments. Also note that there's lots of regs & techs that help reduce noise for larger planes, and I'm not sure the same is going to be true for these smaller vehicles, similar to how all those two-stroke lawnmower and leaf blower engines are horrible both environmentally and noise-wise because they're optimized for size.
Nowhere else I've been are trains so obnoxiously loud.
Can't imagine the stupid s%%t some are going to do in 3D.
So back in the day (fault of bad meds) I was sometimes a crazy driver. Poor impulse control. Drive it like you stole it. Whatever. But hey. I'm still alive, and I never got anyone else seriously injured or killed.
But anyway, one afternoon I was doing slalom at ~90 mph through ~70 mph traffic. And then, out of nowhere, this dude on a racing bike blew through at 140 mph or more. And we were all damn lucky that I saw him just before using the same gap that he was heading through. It would have been a serious mess.
I do other things.
If I'm even 10 metres under the ground, flying at 50km/h, if this device fails, of the battery runs out, you're not gonna live to the tell the tale. There is no parachuting, no way of gliding safely to the ground (like planes and helicopters). What is the safety net?
I can't ever see a world where even a minority of the population adopt flying cars. The chance of catastrophic failure (death) is too high.
Edit: After reflecting on this I realize that airplanes probably fall into these statistics, at least for catastrophic failure anyway. I'd be curious to examine statistics in more detail to figure out what a comfortable level of risk would be, but for now, I guess I fall into the ranks of your typical armchair critic on this one.
The driving skills that we take for granted now, that seem to come naturally for so many people, were totally nonexistent a little over a hundred years ago. Our brains can now process lots of things moving at different rates of what would have been bewildering speeds to any human not that long ago. We negotiate traffic and anticipate tricky situations and have developed rules that help coordinate the chaos.
Yeah, there are a lot of collisions and deaths all the time, and there are a lot of people who aren't great at it. But even the not-great ones are capable of something that nobody was when the automobile was introduced.
Lots of things turn out better than we expect just because most people don't really want to die. If it were possible for people to fly around overhead in some kind of personal vehicles, my guess is most folks would learn how to handle it.
[1]: Best I could do for now: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan-histor...
Good luck guys! You're solving some really Hard problems here.
So much for the argument that capitalism entrusts wealth in the hands of a few for the benefit of all, or that wealth correlates to merit in any meaningful sense.
When Glenn spoke to a group of potential investors (which I was somehow a part of) back in 2011 you'd think that they were on the cusp of having a finished product and a stack of orders from the US DOD, a variety of commercial organisations, and dozens of rich people who want a personal aircraft. Technically Martin Jetpack still exists, but it has failed to bring anything to market, despite having millions of dollars poured into the company [1]
I struggle to see how Jetpack Aviation is going to achieve what Glenn and his company failed to do. They don't even have a flying prototype or a physical mockup, only some cool CAD models that look like they were made by some high school kid who's watched Star Wars a few too many times.
Jetpacks and flying motorbikes look cool, but on a practical basis they just aren't useful. They don't fly high enough or fast enough, and they can't operate in high wind or poor weather. For military/government use they aren't suitable and there just aren't enough rich people who want an expensive flying toy to sustain the market.
[0] http://www.martinjetpack.com/
[1] https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&...
Why not for governments and EMS. If we can get EMS medics to heart attack and stroke victims just 1 min quicker the number of lives saved is 100,000 - 200,000/yr just in USA. Isn’t that worth taking a shot at?
I don’t understand the point about flying high enough. We can fly at over 15,000ft
I'm curious, how high have you actually flown it? Up to 15,000 ft? That sounds absolutely terrifying.
> When Glenn spoke to a group of potential investors (which I was somehow a part of) back in 2011 you'd think that they were on the cusp of having a finished product and a stack of orders from the US DOD, a variety of commercial organisations, and dozens of rich people who want a personal aircraft.
You can obviously also have a lot more defibrillator drones available across a city than jetpack-equipped paramedics. I've seen it as a concept, not sure how many are in use and what their success rates have been.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
You won't survive an accident in this thing.
Seems like your comment is a bit like someone in the 1900s pointing at an early car and saying, "I fell off a horse once and nearly broke my neck. You won't survive an accident in that contraption." He wouldn't have been entirely wrong, but he wouldn't have been right, either. His comment would have added nothing useful to the discourse.
Also what happens if you have a loose thing on your person that gets sucked into the fan.
The image looks nice and Sci fi, but that design isn't practical.
If you've tested it and works, I retract the last paragraph, still looks Sci fi though.
Have you tested for a coin strike? For a plane you're going to have an upper bound for what your going to get in the engine, because it has to be picked up by the engine. This design, anything could fall in, potentially quite dense.