I swear I saw something like this in some kids magazine 30 years ago. It was supposedly powered by a vacuum motor. I now understand that can’t possibly work, but for many years I thought it could. I’d love it if someone else knew what I’m talking about and could send me a link to the magazine article. I assume it wasn’t trying to be a joke, this was a relatively serious kids magazine, but maybe I’ve been wrong.
That doesn't "fly" in the sense of climbing above a thin layer of air created by blowing air into a chamber under you. The picture in the ad hints that 3 1-foot diameter pads would provide sufficient "lift"; seems unlikely. Depends on how much pressure the source can provide but you need to lift not just the rider but the vehicle on just a few psi pressure. That class of vehicle is known as a hovercraft:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovercraft
I built one of these with my dad (the version with only a single skirt) in the sixth grade - it was awesome! Unfortunately, the skirt we created wasn't quite even around and couldn't hold enough pressure for me to ride it, but that didn't stop my younger sister from riding.
Building this started a several years long obsession with hovercrafts. Multiple science fair projects, digging on the internet, etc. My family ended up taking a trip to Europe and I was able to ride across the channel from Calais to Dover on a giant hovercraft. Literally a dream come true at the time. Too bad I was also 14 and super embarrassed by my parents' attempts to take pictures, etc. ;-)
At least small planes in europe (CS-23) aren't allowed to have humans within an (iirc ~15 degree) cone of them.
This approach here seems to be done with no regards to such regulatory (and well-meant) requirements.
1) This is a powered lift craft, not a plane, so it doesn't even fall under CS-23.
2) There are classes where you're allowed less in exchange for easier certification. If the craft isn't operated commercially and doesn't need to leave national airspace, certification is typically far easier (at least for anything not heavier than a medium SUV).
From Unwind's Teknikens Värld link it seems to be mostly a technicality.
>Peter Ternström betonar att det egentligen är lagligt i Sverige också, eller snarare att det inte är olagligt, eftersom farkosten inte ingår i en klassificering.
Peter Ternström points out that it's actually legal in Sweden as well, or rather that it's not illegal, because the craft isn't part of any class rating.
Where the preceeding talks why they chose to sell to the US market first.
It’s a lot of weight for little reward. A duct/shroud may not even improve the safety in a significant way (if it were thick enough it could, but it’d need to very light)
This is still better than some of the similar designs. Some of them look really easy for the pilot to fall off and get ground up by the propellers. At least this one the pilot kind of looks sort of enclosed so they would not likely be able to fall out into the blades.
You see this in so many ridable multicopters and it always makes me cringe... the plane of rotation of a heavily loaded, high speed rotating part is not a healthy place to hang out. The shared plane of rotation of 8 of them is 8x as bad.
Almost looks like a ground-effect vehicle. Doesn’t go too high; which may not really be an issue. Just high enough, so tarmac isn’t necessary.
I seem to recall a discussion on HN, where it was explained that quadcopters don’t scale up too well. I don’t remember the reasoning.
The one thing that concerns me about commodity-level flying vehicles, is the way people drive the ones that are stuck on the ground. I would want autonomous vehicles to be devloped and refined, before flying ones.
Because smaller prop means you need to spin faster to hit the same airflow. And efficiency usually drops by x^2 as a function of rotation velocity. Also, at high speed you have vacuum issues near the tip of the blade. Therefore, having four small rotors can easily be up to a magnitude less efficient than a helicopter.
They are explaining how quadcopters don't scale very well. You may be misunderstanding the explanation. The surface area covered by the rotor is much less for quadcopters and it is difficult to make up for that. Plus small rotors are less efficient. One upside for quadcopters is simplicity but that advantage diminishes with scale.
For completeness I should add; Quadrotor configurations rely on varying prop speeds to control pitch, yaw, and roll. The larger the props the more difficult it is to vary the prop speed in a timely manner. Electric motors are more weight efficient at high speeds but larger props need to be slower. You could add a gearbox but either way you are gaining weight and complexity. Plus parts start to get really expensive as you scale up and get out of hobbyists range.
And to put an even finer point on it, it isn’t just control authority but keeping the damn thing even stable. The only reason those things stay aloft is the controller senses minute changes to the orientation (called attitude) of the craft and adjusts the motor speeds in tiny amounts to fight those changes. Without that quick feedback loop the craft would flop all around and crash.
It’s one of the reasons you don’t see gas powered quads. Gas engines just cannot react fast enough and precise enough to correct subtle changes in attitude.
Efficiency drops by "propeller" speed and then falls off a cliff when the prop tips go super sonic. So you really can't just make them bigger and spin faster.
I’m not sure what reasons there would be for quadcopters not scaling up well. Bigger rotors should be more efficient like with any other aircraft. Perhaps there are scaling issues with quickly changing the speed of larger rotors to maintain flight control? That could be resolved by using variable-pitch rotors, although at that point you’ve lost the key advantage of multirotors (which is their mechanical simplicity) and you’re probably better off with just one even bigger rotor with cyclic pitch control (i.e. a helicopter).
helicopters also have one major advantage for manned applications: autorotation. there's at least a chance to survive loss of power in a helicopter. a quad with no power just falls.
Autorotation is a great thing to have when your motor fails, but presumably multirotors would at least make up some reliability by having several motors and presumably being able to safety land when one motor fails.
I'm kind of surprised they use only 4. There are drones with 6 and 8 rotors, which can still fly if 1 fails, which they use in the film industry to fly heavier, more expensive cameras. There are also ways to get quads to fly on less than 4 rotors if one becomes damaged, although as a human I'm not sure I'd want to be in one doing it. Here's a Ted Talk with a live demo from 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2itwFJCgFQ
Quadcopters scale up fine, in fact as other commenters have mentioned they get more efficient as they get larger.
However, quadcopters are mainly useful because they are simple and cheap. Once you add the amount of redundancy necessary to safely carry a human (I am not convinced they have hit that bar here) it's no longer cheap, and it makes sense to spend a bit more on a helicopter, which is much more efficient.
Quadrotors use rpm-based control, which is simple and effective, but doesn't scale as the rotor gets bigger and the moment of inertia increases. You could switch to pitch-based control, but then you lose the simplicity, which is a big part of the appeal. The other issue is that the efficiency of any propulsion system is proportional to the disk area. Four smaller propellers have the advantage of zero net torque on the airframe, but carry a substantial penalty in terms of efficiency, which cuts into performance.
Fixing these issues inevitably leads you to a helicopter.
I was about to leave a snarky "glide ratio = 0" comment until I saw the note about the ballistic parachute. Wish they included the effective altitude though. I assume it would be effective from a lower altitude than the Cirrus, as this thing weighs only ~400 lbs with a human in it.
The official number is 400ft but I've heard anecdotes that there have been successful deployments lower. That said, I see this being operated in the "dead mans curve", ie well below any effective height, for a significant portion of it's flight
There are also enough false deployments that caused harm with these parachutes (edit: instances where pilots didn’t deploy when they should have) that the jury is out on how much of an improvement these are to safety, overall. Operator skill and training is a big factor and this product isn’t targeted at highly trained pilots.
I don’t have great sources, so take my claim with a grain of salt. But overall this analysis of Cirrus incidents over 25 years [0] was interesting to read.
In response to fatalities and pilots choosing not to use the parachute when that could have saved lives, Cirrus improved training and saw significant safety record improvements.
> By then, Cirrus had already upgraded its training twice, eventually pulling it entirely in-house. All new-aircraft buyers take it.
They also have training for the used market, and saw owners that didn’t do it often had worse safety records.
Since a Cirrus has a wing, the parachute is primarily a super last resort.. the passenger safety training I took even said it’s mainly to be used if the pilot passes out and a passenger engages it.
The jetson doesn’t have a wing, so I’m happy they have this parachute. I hope they can offer great training too.
Surely there are flight patterns that can minimize this risk: ie diagnostic hover at 10ft for X seconds to rule out start up failures, followed by an ascend to 500ft, flight path maintains that height, similar pause prior to descent on landing...
This is usually done in helicopters, but it's not straight up and hover but instead a departure over the runway with forward speed. You can use that speed/energy in an emergency like losing an engine.
Parachute opening needs to balance between speed of deployment (because the ground is coming up) and G-force shock (because humans are squishy, and even the aircraft structure they're attached to has a limit).
Cirrus flies fast, so its parachute has a slider / limiter on it to reduce the speed of opening to keep the G shock manageable. On the other hand, since the top speed of this Jetson device is pretty low at 63mph, their parachute must have no slider and can probably be deployed from as little as 200 ft in ideal conditions. Depends on the exact model, your decision/reaction time, aircraft speed, attitude, and stability at time of deploy, etc.
The parachute should cost less than $5K, and its weight is not included in the 255lb weight limit (it's an FAA part 103 aircraft), so it's pretty much a no-brainer to add it to this aircraft, even if it's not very useful in very low level flights.
I never understood why startups are so infatuated with quadcopter designs. Just design a small electric gyro-copter and you'll get 10X range and half the complexity.
Some gyros can jump-start, as in pre-spin their rotor fast enough for vertical take off. It would add a bit of complexity but it'll still be relatively simple.
No, because the pre-spinning (torque applied to rotor) part happens on the ground with the rotor blades set to low/no pitch. The rotor then starts freewheeling (no torque applied or transferred from the rotor) and the blades' pitch angle is increased, which slows the rotor down, but momentarily creates enough lift to lift the autogyro into the air, where it immediately transitions to forward flight.
They also have some extremely dangerous flight characteristics.[0] To be fair, helicopters are even worse, but they require extensive training and are known to be dangerous.
It’s still simpler and cheaper. The swashplate is much simpler. Much less power is fed to the main rotor as inertia is built up slowly and only for take off. The lower standard of reliability as worst that happens is you don’t take off. Engines are pushing a more forgiving higher speed prop, so engines and fuel are cheaper.
I don’t know how marginal jumpstarts are, possibly very, which would limit the utility. Especially where there is a runway nearby.
Because it allows you to skip the entire aerospace engineering portion of the design process. Airframe design is complex and requires a lot of domain knowledge in fluid dynamics. Quads just muscle their way along and only require simple control theory to maintain flight so anyone can design and build them effortlessly.
Isn’t it crazy that Moller spent decades trying to get the basics of their flying car, only to give up inches from the finish line?
Tech has evolved so fast in the past few years that a brand new vehicle like this can go from design to production in a few years, and anyone can build a rough working prototype in their backyard.
yes, kudos to them for bringing it to market ($90k seems almost reasonable for this sort of contraption), but it's a much less ambitious vehicle. the aircar was supposed to cruise at 300 mph with an 800 mi range. this thing maxes out at 63 mph and has twenty minutes of flight time, so only about a 20 mile range. even if I were somehow allowed to do it, the jetson would barely make it from my house to my office.
Considering the Skycar never flew above 10 meters high or ever achieved free flight, getting this less capable aircraft to commercial production is a significant achievement. The target specs on paper are meaningless.
The liquid fuels Moller used had much better energy densities than batteries, but it never flew without a tether. The Jetson One claims to have 20 minutes endurance, which is very impressive, but still impractical.
I'm not so sure the finish line is within sight yet. This is closer to an ATV than it is to a scooter. It even looks a bit like a Honda Pilot ATV with propellors.
It could attract more folks than a traditional ultralight would. The price tag is much higher, though.
Top speed of 60MPH; let's halve that for a safety margin, which gives a range of ten miles. There's around thirty towns and cities that close to my home. Reaching any of thirty towns in ten minutes would be far from useless.
If you were a rich person living in (say) a village in the UK 20 minutes is easily enough to fly to the pub, charge it a bit, and fly back.
As a non-rich person it'd be useless to me even if I could afford it (I live near other humans) but I can absolute imagine some people I have met buying one.
Doesn't matter until there's a breakthrough with battery energy density. Any electric VTOL aircraft capable of carrying humans is limited to less than 50 miles range.
Or as the cool gimmick in the next James Bond movie, complete with sponsorship, so that it could attract interest and fuel the development of better aircraft in the future.
We have gained so much in terms of technological progress, consistently reducing the energy required to go from point A to point B, it surprises me how we are again increasing it for getting from point A to point B.
The concept is great, but the push for mass market adoption bugs me.
These things are not efficient modes of transport. It takes a lot of energy to move one person from A to B.
I agree. No one ever said waverunners were a practical form of transportation, but they still sell millions of them. This does look like a really fun personal toy, though. I can easy imagine some rich dudes taking them for Endor-style races through the forest up here.
I've flown FPV drones through forests, it's insane. The reaction speeds needed are crazy. It is almost impossible to last a day without crashing. I'm sure there are lots of fun things to do with it, but Endor style races is not one of them. The people willing to do things that crazy don't last very long.
I am aware crazy people do exist. It's a matter of degree and I would suggest that flying this thought a forest Endor style would be far more dangerous than free solo climbing.
It's more or less like wingsuit flying, just faster and with obstacles much closer. So yeah, I would say orders of magnitude more dangerous than free solo climbing...
Wingsuit flying is pretty well known as a hobby that eventually kills almost everyone who does it. It seems once you start flying as close to rocks as you can for fun there's some sort of skill-risk feedback loop that eventually kills you.
Most wing suit flying is generally far away from obstacles. When they do get close its not many obstacles and it’s carefully planned. Flying FPV through forests is a lot of fun because of how random it is, and how dangerous it feels, but you quickly become aware that the human brain is not set up to do that kind of high speed navigation. There is no traction and flight lines have to be planned a few moves ahead. There is very little margin in the best of times, and sometimes no margin at all. It’s like that ball tracking / hidden monkey experiment. While you are watching one tree another jumps out at you from nowhere. It would be like playing Russian roulette non stop. You’re looking for the intersection of people who are actively suicidal and with a spare $100K.
I live in a forest between a river and a winding road... I see people do craaazy shit all the time, from death races in expensive sports cars on the road to wave running way too close to the dock to loading paintball guns with ball bearings and shooting them in the woods; and I'm telling you it's not if someone does an Endor race with this thing, it's when.
> The concept is great, but the push for mass market adoption bugs me.
> These things are not efficient modes of transport. It takes a lot of energy to move one person from A to B.
Will you not entertain the possibility that a form of travel using geodesic distance may be more efficient? Going from Brooklyn to Manhattan and bypassing traffic, for example (a small body of water where flying across would be more efficient for those not familiar)? Or iterative improvements to it, if it gains adoption, would improve whatever numbers you're using for your energy requirements? Or that it may reduce our need to make new infrastructure, and that may also reduce energy costs?
Mass use of flying cars is fundamentally infeasible on any realistic timescale for a huge list of reasons beyond energy inefficiency. Accidents are catastrophic. The noise would be insane. Minor body damage that wouldn't matter for a car could cause the whole thing to crash. You'd need a complex traffic control system that would never be allowed to miss a beat without risk a Kessler syndrome like event.
And in your water example, building a bridge would be drastically better for a high traffic use case.
In cases where you can't justify infrastructure build out, it will still be more efficient to use all terrain ground vehicles.
And no, hovering in the air and fighting gravity ever moment of active travel will never be anywhere close to the efficiency of a rolling vehicle.
> Will you not entertain the possibility that a form of travel using geodesic distance may be more efficient?
I completely agree. But for mass market personal aerial vehicles, regulation would eventually force vehicles to fly close to ground (for safety of self and others, better fall 30 feet than 300 feet)
In this scenario, geodesic distance hardly makes any difference.
Personal aerial vehicles are never going to be safe. Not for the lack of innovation or technology, but for human nature. Ever see how many people drive their cars with the "check engine" lights on? Or how many fail to get theirs serviced in time, or change the oil in time? The mass market is not fit to drive their own personal aerial vehicles.
There are niche uses, such as medical emergencies, policing, etc. Putting these into the hands of everyone is a disaster waiting to happen.
> Personal aerial vehicles are never going to be safe. Not for the lack of innovation or technology, but for human nature. Ever see how many people drive their cars with the "check engine" lights on? Or how many fail to get theirs serviced in time, or change the oil in time? The mass market is not fit to drive their own personal aerial vehicles.
> There are niche uses, such as medical emergencies, policing, etc. Putting these into the hands of everyone is a disaster waiting to happen.
Listing all of the things that could go wrong with a technology hasn't worked well for us. Imagine doing this exercise for the automobile. New infrastructure, a slip of the hand killing pedestrians, etc..
I acknowledge that there are many issues.
What I see:
The price point is reasonable enough that if there isn't regulatory enforcement, some employees at big tech will start flying these things along the water from downtown San Francisco to work / in-person meetings, saving them 2 hours a day. Convenience and time at this price point is very appealing to a certain demographic outside of any general nerding out over futuristic tech. The same conditions exist in New York City. If this is allowed to happen, this space is interesting, but of course, we're talking about ~20 vehicles over 2-4 years here.
> Listing all of the things that could go wrong with a technology hasn't worked well for us
I am did not list anything wrong with the technology.
My point is that human nature itself is at fault. Would you trust a flying machine in the hands of a drunk driver? But, no amount of regulation / laws / punishment will deter such incidences.
> My point is that human nature itself is at fault. Would you trust a flying machine in the hands of a drunk driver? But, no amount of regulation / laws / punishment will deter such incidences.
You're talking about degrees of damage. The issues presented here are present in cars. We've worked around them in cars (relatively well I'd argue) because of the trade-offs in convenience and time savings. There's nothing that says this mode of transaction, if viable, wouldn't have the same pressures applied to make it safer.
The wider point is convenience / time savings is a significant motivator, and betting against a technology that seems to include both has never turned out well.
You obviously haven’t been to flight school. Altitude is safety. Once you were high enough up to kill you and or whatever you land on, further height doesn’t make you any more dead, but it does give you more time to work the problem.
This thing in particular has a parachute. I bet from 300 feet it doesnt have time to save you or let you glide to a spot without people under you, but from 3,000 feet it would.
The way to make flying cars (and let's drop the sophisticated terminology, we're discussing something called Jetson One) safe for the mass market is to make them available as fleet vehicles for taxi companies such that you can ensure all the drivers are trained and sober and all the vehicles are maintained and inspected. Even if the hivemind insists they'll be self-flying, it's still unsafe beyond normal bounds of unsafe to have ill-maintained flying cars trying to navigate three-dimensional traffic.
> We have gained so much in terms of technological progress, consistently reducing the energy required to go from point A to point B, it surprises me how we are again increasing it for getting from point A to point B.
It takes exactly the same amount of energy to go from point A to point B as it did 10,000 years ago.
What we've done is gotten better at packing more energy generation in a smaller volume/envelope.
Elite cyclists can only hit 2.5kW for a few seconds. Sustained output for about 20 minutes will only be in the 0.4kW range, and regular people can't even do half of that.
Haven't these been around in China for 5+ years? I'm also a bit skeptical about the 1 item per month build rate... that seems a bit slow to me. Then again, I'm just the armchair critic here...
There's a whole crop of aerospace startups now wasting their time on electric airframes that are 10-20 years ahead of their time in terms of battery capability. It's a classic case of solving the easy problem first.
Airframes are trivial. Getting battery energy density to a place that it becomes useful for personal aircraft is not. Yet that is the singular enabling technology to make this stuff a reality.
In the US, you can fly most places and land most places (with permission of the owner) with helicopters, with only general (e.g., must pose no hazard to people and property) rules instead of specific restrictions (outside of controls to keep them out of, e.g., airplane traffic patterns around airports.)
But I can see something like this being available in numbers being the catalyst for that changing fast...
This is an amazing outcome! Three cheers to the founders and the team working on this project/company.
As with most tech, it does seem like a Pandora's Box in terms of outcomes. Especially regulatory/safety issues.
I come from India, where median folks have a complete and utter disregard for traffic rules and safety regulations. I can't begin to think how we would adopt a technology like this. I mean, how would we start, how would traffic merge? Can we restrict/regulate the flow of vehicles in thin air?
The fact that this is a tech+social problem interests me even more.
From the video, it looks like this craft is limited to about 10 feet in altitude (certainly as high as I’d want to go, but I imagine their primary market at first is going to be thrill-seekers). And yet that’s really all you need for a lot of point-to-point transport, especially in rural areas (which I also imagine will be the only legal places to fly these for the foreseeable future).
A thing with what amounts to buzzsaws conveniently mounted at its extremities, flying at 10 ft. (3 m) max altitude? Can't imagine anything going wrong with that...
You want to be higher. Altitude gives you more time in an emergency (like waiting for that chute to deploy). Once you’re above the altitude that will kill you on impact, more altitude won’t make you more dead. Also, wires are at low altitude, and are responsible for many rotorcraft accidents.
The real limitations come from Part 103, which limits ultralights to uncontrolled airspace (Class G). These aircraft will be limited to 1200 ft. AGL in most of the country, and 700 ft. AGL near many airports and their associated approaches.
It does not appear to be limited by the Wing-in-ground effect. This effect apparently tops out at approximately half the vehicle's wingspan; and they are above that.
Well at 210 lbs you're either tall enough that you probably won't fit in this thing lengthwise or you are in fact overweight and losing a few lbs wouldn't hurt.
I had to do the conversion to kg which is 95.25kg.
My naked weight is 93kg but with clothes/wallet/keys goes up to about 95kg.
I guess I will have to wait for the family version to come out.
They’re limited to 254 pounds empty, and I imagine batteries behind the pilot constitute an appreciable fraction of that weight budget. More pilot weight would probably push your center of gravity too far forward which would put undue strain on the front motors, causing them to fail.
Reminds me a lot of the Martin Jetpack, which received tonnes of media hype when it was first unveiled at Oshkosh 2008, and despite being "almost ready" for the next decade, nothing was ever built and the company went bust.
Incidentally, the remaining assets (including intellectual property) were just put up for auction a few days ago [1].
The market for what's essentially an aerial jetski has always been small, and now due to the drone renaissance it's basically non-existent.
> A complete vehicle is 92 000 USD and is delivered to you as a partially (50%) assembled kit for home completion. It contains everything you need, from the aluminium space frame to motor controllers, propellers and motors. You will also receive detailed build instructions.
Seems odd to not deliver a fully assembled aircraft. Is there any regulatory reason? If cost is an issue, they could probably charge extra (such as $110K total) and deliver it fully assembled.
Can confirm [1], am building an aircraft in my garage. It's the only segment of general aviation that's growing as it does away with a lot of the arduous approval process for inconsequential modifications/maintenance. I don't mean this is some sort of libertarian crypto-utopia, the FAA has just lumped general aviation in with commercial operations where the passengers expect to have an absolute guarantee of an uneventful trip whereas GA is similar to driving your car. Realistically safety ranges from slightly better than car to slightly better than a motorcycle depending on how you work the numbers but it's important to note that mechanical issues are extremely rare in GA accidents, much like the auto world, it's almost entirely operator error. The FAA is, as a result, regulating GA aircraft into extinction as certifying new airframes is an absolute financial impossibility due to overhead costs. Even if the new craft are safer than the existing fleet they're prevented from entering service and it's causing a lot of issues.
Thats not exactly right. It’s simply that you cannot sell something built >51% by the factory under experimental rules, you’d need to have it FAA certified which this isn’t ( for thousands of reasons ).
The 51% rule is extremely common in experimental aviation.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadPicture of the ad:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/7jrpbu/this_hove...
Building this started a several years long obsession with hovercrafts. Multiple science fair projects, digging on the internet, etc. My family ended up taking a trip to Europe and I was able to ride across the channel from Calais to Dover on a giant hovercraft. Literally a dream come true at the time. Too bad I was also 14 and super embarrassed by my parents' attempts to take pictures, etc. ;-)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEtZn3YrEEQ
OTOH putting the propellers above would change the shape and thus the aesthetics seriously.
2) There are classes where you're allowed less in exchange for easier certification. If the craft isn't operated commercially and doesn't need to leave national airspace, certification is typically far easier (at least for anything not heavier than a medium SUV).
>Peter Ternström betonar att det egentligen är lagligt i Sverige också, eller snarare att det inte är olagligt, eftersom farkosten inte ingår i en klassificering.
Peter Ternström points out that it's actually legal in Sweden as well, or rather that it's not illegal, because the craft isn't part of any class rating.
Where the preceeding talks why they chose to sell to the US market first.
I seem to recall a discussion on HN, where it was explained that quadcopters don’t scale up too well. I don’t remember the reasoning.
The one thing that concerns me about commodity-level flying vehicles, is the way people drive the ones that are stuck on the ground. I would want autonomous vehicles to be devloped and refined, before flying ones.
It’s one of the reasons you don’t see gas powered quads. Gas engines just cannot react fast enough and precise enough to correct subtle changes in attitude.
However, quadcopters are mainly useful because they are simple and cheap. Once you add the amount of redundancy necessary to safely carry a human (I am not convinced they have hit that bar here) it's no longer cheap, and it makes sense to spend a bit more on a helicopter, which is much more efficient.
Fixing these issues inevitably leads you to a helicopter.
That said, this looks like another Icon A5 situation...
In response to fatalities and pilots choosing not to use the parachute when that could have saved lives, Cirrus improved training and saw significant safety record improvements.
> By then, Cirrus had already upgraded its training twice, eventually pulling it entirely in-house. All new-aircraft buyers take it.
They also have training for the used market, and saw owners that didn’t do it often had worse safety records.
Since a Cirrus has a wing, the parachute is primarily a super last resort.. the passenger safety training I took even said it’s mainly to be used if the pilot passes out and a passenger engages it.
The jetson doesn’t have a wing, so I’m happy they have this parachute. I hope they can offer great training too.
[0] https://www.aviationconsumer.com/safety/cirrus-at-25-a-safer...
https://discover.garmin.com/en-US/autonomi/
Cirrus flies fast, so its parachute has a slider / limiter on it to reduce the speed of opening to keep the G shock manageable. On the other hand, since the top speed of this Jetson device is pretty low at 63mph, their parachute must have no slider and can probably be deployed from as little as 200 ft in ideal conditions. Depends on the exact model, your decision/reaction time, aircraft speed, attitude, and stability at time of deploy, etc.
The parachute should cost less than $5K, and its weight is not included in the 255lb weight limit (it's an FAA part 103 aircraft), so it's pretty much a no-brainer to add it to this aircraft, even if it's not very useful in very low level flights.
[0] https://youtu.be/CfjBzrSDrV0
I guess if you could attach the vehicle to the ground and spin up the propellor and then release you could get the same effect.
Or another option is if the rear propeller could turn its rudder against the spin direction.
I don’t know how marginal jumpstarts are, possibly very, which would limit the utility. Especially where there is a runway nearby.
[1] https://ehang.com/
Tech has evolved so fast in the past few years that a brand new vehicle like this can go from design to production in a few years, and anyone can build a rough working prototype in their backyard.
The Jetson One produced a minimalistic 1 seat vehicle.
not to forget Opener BlackFly
I'm not so sure the finish line is within sight yet. This is closer to an ATV than it is to a scooter. It even looks a bit like a Honda Pilot ATV with propellors.
It could attract more folks than a traditional ultralight would. The price tag is much higher, though.
As a non-rich person it'd be useless to me even if I could afford it (I live near other humans) but I can absolute imagine some people I have met buying one.
The concept is great, but the push for mass market adoption bugs me.
These things are not efficient modes of transport. It takes a lot of energy to move one person from A to B.
There will always be some subset of people willing to do crazy dangerous things when similar safe alternates exist.
And I for one am excited to see the race footage.
Yet people still do it (and regularly die) and keep pushing the limits of what we thought was possible.
In fact, the sport is growing.
> These things are not efficient modes of transport. It takes a lot of energy to move one person from A to B.
Will you not entertain the possibility that a form of travel using geodesic distance may be more efficient? Going from Brooklyn to Manhattan and bypassing traffic, for example (a small body of water where flying across would be more efficient for those not familiar)? Or iterative improvements to it, if it gains adoption, would improve whatever numbers you're using for your energy requirements? Or that it may reduce our need to make new infrastructure, and that may also reduce energy costs?
There are a lot of things here to be so certain.
And in your water example, building a bridge would be drastically better for a high traffic use case.
In cases where you can't justify infrastructure build out, it will still be more efficient to use all terrain ground vehicles.
And no, hovering in the air and fighting gravity ever moment of active travel will never be anywhere close to the efficiency of a rolling vehicle.
I completely agree. But for mass market personal aerial vehicles, regulation would eventually force vehicles to fly close to ground (for safety of self and others, better fall 30 feet than 300 feet)
In this scenario, geodesic distance hardly makes any difference.
Personal aerial vehicles are never going to be safe. Not for the lack of innovation or technology, but for human nature. Ever see how many people drive their cars with the "check engine" lights on? Or how many fail to get theirs serviced in time, or change the oil in time? The mass market is not fit to drive their own personal aerial vehicles.
There are niche uses, such as medical emergencies, policing, etc. Putting these into the hands of everyone is a disaster waiting to happen.
> There are niche uses, such as medical emergencies, policing, etc. Putting these into the hands of everyone is a disaster waiting to happen.
Listing all of the things that could go wrong with a technology hasn't worked well for us. Imagine doing this exercise for the automobile. New infrastructure, a slip of the hand killing pedestrians, etc..
I acknowledge that there are many issues.
What I see:
The price point is reasonable enough that if there isn't regulatory enforcement, some employees at big tech will start flying these things along the water from downtown San Francisco to work / in-person meetings, saving them 2 hours a day. Convenience and time at this price point is very appealing to a certain demographic outside of any general nerding out over futuristic tech. The same conditions exist in New York City. If this is allowed to happen, this space is interesting, but of course, we're talking about ~20 vehicles over 2-4 years here.
I am did not list anything wrong with the technology.
My point is that human nature itself is at fault. Would you trust a flying machine in the hands of a drunk driver? But, no amount of regulation / laws / punishment will deter such incidences.
If it became a real problem, it would be easy enough to do something like a mandate built in breathalyzers
You're talking about degrees of damage. The issues presented here are present in cars. We've worked around them in cars (relatively well I'd argue) because of the trade-offs in convenience and time savings. There's nothing that says this mode of transaction, if viable, wouldn't have the same pressures applied to make it safer.
The wider point is convenience / time savings is a significant motivator, and betting against a technology that seems to include both has never turned out well.
This thing in particular has a parachute. I bet from 300 feet it doesnt have time to save you or let you glide to a spot without people under you, but from 3,000 feet it would.
I can see a PAV that can’t be flown manually outside designated areas or a city where full automation is mandatory for all cars within its limits.
It takes exactly the same amount of energy to go from point A to point B as it did 10,000 years ago.
What we've done is gotten better at packing more energy generation in a smaller volume/envelope.
Only against conservative fields like gravity, not against friction! When I bike 10 blocks, I use less energy than when I walk 10 blocks.
I'm not complaining about the vehicle to transported ratio though, it's about the same as my lead-acid e-bike: http://elhjul.se
Airframes are trivial. Getting battery energy density to a place that it becomes useful for personal aircraft is not. Yet that is the singular enabling technology to make this stuff a reality.
I assume this is wildly illegal in most jurisdictions?
No different than a helicopter.
Hell, plenty of farmers that have a Piper Cub or similar and operate off their acreage.
But I can see something like this being available in numbers being the catalyst for that changing fast...
I come from India, where median folks have a complete and utter disregard for traffic rules and safety regulations. I can't begin to think how we would adopt a technology like this. I mean, how would we start, how would traffic merge? Can we restrict/regulate the flow of vehicles in thin air?
The fact that this is a tech+social problem interests me even more.
The real limitations come from Part 103, which limits ultralights to uncontrolled airspace (Class G). These aircraft will be limited to 1200 ft. AGL in most of the country, and 700 ft. AGL near many airports and their associated approaches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_(aerodynamics)
You do not need to be a professional sports person - keen hobbyists exist and there is definitely a group here that are into power lifting.
That's the whole point of a Lotus.
EDIT: CG = center of gravity, for clarity
Incidentally, the remaining assets (including intellectual property) were just put up for auction a few days ago [1].
The market for what's essentially an aerial jetski has always been small, and now due to the drone renaissance it's basically non-existent.
[1] https://www.skylarc.co.nz/tenders/martin-jetpack/
Seems odd to not deliver a fully assembled aircraft. Is there any regulatory reason? If cost is an issue, they could probably charge extra (such as $110K total) and deliver it fully assembled.
[1] https://www.eaa.org/eaa/aircraft-building/builderresources/g...
The 51% rule is extremely common in experimental aviation.