And as the article says, the company is lead by Sebastian Thrun who was the previous founder of Google X and their self-driving car team, as well as still the president of Udacity.
Doesn’t it terrify anybody else that you are right in the rotational plane for those propellers? If one of them were ever to break, it’s coming right at you.
Those blades are very light, probably carbon fiber. If the propeller breaks, the blades would be slowed down tremendously by aerodynamic forces in just a meter or so. Just like a piece of cardboard would be.
Not only that but my understanding is that when carbon fiber breaks it explodes into a mess of tiny strings. Which is very unlikely to kill you directly though it might get wound up in the other three props and bring the whole thing crashing to earth.
Is anyone able to find an actual flight footage with unaltered audio. I'm curious to see how loud this is. Considering all the flight footages are either muted or edited with music, I assume the answer is very loud.
I could see the advantage of these in swamplands or the 'bushes' if you will (places like remote parts of Africa, South East Asia, parts of the Southern United States, Alaska, come to mind).
But the practical use case I can't seem to envision yet. However, if the goal is to be able to fly these things like helicopters but get some sort of massive fuel advantage out of it, I could see them being used for certain types of deliveries if they can hold a substantial amount of cargo via an attachment or something.
Fuel efficiency, noise, flight time, max and min speed and load. Depending on these and some more I can imagine plenty of scenarios. Park rangers and other areas that have difficult to access portions come to mind.
"The aircraft features pontoons and is designed for use over water, and it can fly between three and 10 feet above the surface with vertical take-off and landing capabilities."
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I wonder what the scenario for this is. You couldn't fly these in urban centers unless it was similar to flying a helicopter, no?
Also, I wonder how fuel efficient they are.
But the practical use case I can't seem to envision yet. However, if the goal is to be able to fly these things like helicopters but get some sort of massive fuel advantage out of it, I could see them being used for certain types of deliveries if they can hold a substantial amount of cargo via an attachment or something.
But otherwise, yeah, that's a current use case of helicopters.
the development of human carrying N-copters has been picking up around the world like a forest fire, just search on Youtube. My favorite:
https://youtu.be/EQK9m_OBVgY?t=22
hearing how bad the commute on 237, i think many would prefer the flying bathtub over the car :)
This is not the flying car we were promised. /s
A design that lets you save energy after takeoff by using lift from wings and forward propulsion... maybe.