I found this [1] article when I started googling the people in the company, I thought this quite from their CTO Tomasz Patan was fun:
Vi vill inte att folk ska köpa vår produkt och krascha den direkt, så vi har sålt till välkända personer främst i USA som skulle få för mycket skit om de gjorde dumheter med den
which translates to (note: native Swedish speaker, but not a certified translator):
We don't want people to buy our product and crash it straight away, so we have been selling to famous people mostly in the US, who would get too much crap if they fooled around with it"
I enjoyed the directness of that statement. :)
Also learned from the same article:
- The maximum cargo weight including pilot is 100 kg, if you actually reach that then flying time is reduced to 12 minutes.
- The battery pack is charged externally, i.e. not in the vehicle, so you can have spares and swap.
- No mention of the battery pack's weight, but I guess you would have to be quite a bit below those 100 kg in order to have room for another battery.
- New owners get a 2-day course (not a "crash course", I guess :) at Jetson before being allowed to take their new vehicle home.
I saw that video some days ago and thought "that would be a nifty way to get to work and back" ... 12 minutes flight time would actually allow that for me ... but not for a lot of others.
12 minutes endurance is absolute madness to any pilot. No way to fly this thing within the current regulations.
A fuel powered aircraft needs to land with a legal minimum fuel reserve of 30 minutes when flying visually (good weather only), in worse weather it's 45 minutes + the time it takes to get to an alternate airport in case of problems at the destination. So usually 1 to 1.5 hour of reserve/alternate fuel on top of the time needed for the flight itself.
I have some experience with visual inspection of aerial optical fiber. You can rent a very large and expensive helicopter to fly uncomfortably close to swaying fiber and power lines, or fly this thing up and down the line.
There's also a lot of money in visual inspection of power lines. Not in California, LOL, where they just let it burn, but in better areas, when trees or vines get too close to the power lines, even during droughts, they trim them rather than letting them catch fire and burn off. But I live in a civilized area far from the coasts LOL.
I imagine this will get militarized and police-militarized very quickly. Thirty seconds before kicking the door in over unpaid library fines or writing the wrong politics on twitter, fly the plane over the building and look in all the windows and make some decisions about letting the team kick the door in, or land the plane on the roof or try to find the best vantage point to observe or illuminate the situation. In 12 minutes everyone in the house or everyone in the swat team will be dead, one way or the other. Might be good for last minute verification its the correct house, not that there's ever any punishment for shooting the wrong people, in either military or civilian or militarized police situations.
I suspect there are entire classes of non-tactical military-type use. Aircraft crashes next to the aircraft carrier, a few minutes/seconds of nearly instantly arriving and hovering over the pilot will help the "real" helicopters and rescue crews find the pilot. A human piloted electric drone could hover over a pilot before a turbine helicopter finishes spinning up the rotor... Its not powerful enough to lift people in a rescue situation but is strong enough to drop lightweight supplies.
There are some limited situations where a human being on site making judgement calls is safer and more efficient than a pre-programmed drone or a human very far away and uncoordinated with the folks on site.
I suspect battlefield communications is in a stage much like anti-aircraft defense in Vietnam in the early days, before surface to air missiles existed. I think the USA, and probably the world, has seen the last battlefield of total emcom superiority. In 2030 trying to fly a FPV observation drone will just get automatic counterbattery fire on both the drone and operator, on both sides, etc. The days of you just freely transmit are over. The land battlefield is going to look a lot more like naval sonar situation where if you active sonar ping you get blown up by someone you never even hear. So everyone's got a radio and blue force tracker and all that is kinda over now.
A US Navy carrier strike group already always has a search-and-rescue helicopter airborne during flight operations. That has been standard procedure for years. They can respond to a crash in a matter of seconds.
I imagine this would be way too loud to use in any police situation.
Besides, none of your examples require that a human actually be inside the vehicle. They could all be done by unmanned drone. The only reason to put a human in the vehicle is to travel.
Now if they replaced the human with its weight in batteries, or better yet a hydrogen tank with a fuel cell, this would give it a huge flight time which would make it much more useful.
That depends under which class the aircraft will be certified, depsite it being electric I could image that it falls under the ultra-light class (I'd have to look up the exact Name under EASA so).
EASA doesn't have rules for ultra- and microlight aircraft, they're only in national regulations. So then it depends on what the country you're in decides.
But even if you're allowed to fly with only minutes of fuel reserve. The big question is whether you should want to. When you're in a more basic aircraft, that didn't go through all the certification requirements that other aircraft go through, it would not be a great idea to skip all kinds of safety practices like fuel and alternate planning just because you're not legally forced to do it. You're then just increasing risks more and more, while this thing is marketed to non-pilot buyers that may not even fully understand the risks.
In good weather a helicopter is allowed to reduce it to 20 minutes.
In bad weather the alternate must be an airport with the facilities to conduct an instrument landing, so definitely not just a parking lot. And the forecasted weather at that airport needs to be good enough from 1 hour before until 1 hour after the expected arrival. "Good enough" is defined stricter for helicopters than for airplanes.
They may have updated the article since you wrote your comment, but as of when I’m reading it, it’s attributing that quote to Peter Ternström, the other founder and CEO.
It's a nice toy, but the problems of personal aerial vehicles were not about electric motors vs ICE:
- Massive amount of sound pollution, current crop won't be allowed near cities in significant numbers; that's why the presentation videos are always silent.
- Exceptionally energy inefficient and limited speed, due to the way lift is achieved; it makes zero sense to spend 10 times the energy to travel at speeds comparable with what can achieved on the ground with the right infrastructure.
- Very limited safety guarantees, can't be safely used by an untrained pilot, typically can't be flow at all over populated areas etc.
Maybe they could reach for a market that can tolerate these drawbacks, ex. air ambulances, and build on that.
Airbulances are definitely a killer app. The loud noise is a feature, it makes people look up and make room for landing. A 0.005% chance of crashing on its built in airbags, and possibly damaging property or squishing somebody, while completely unacceptable for a personal recreation vehicle, would be ok for a device that can save a life every few flights. You can also find suitable infrastructure - helipads - on many urban hospitals.
Forget electric, it needs the highest density fuel system to allow at least an hour of flight, maybe a LPG fuel cell, or a piston engine geared with electromagnetic power couplers to the propellers for very rapid dynamic response.
A two person craft, lifting maybe 250Kg overall to allow for medical gear, the medic operates during liftoff/landing then autopilot takes you to predefined hospitals on predefined flight paths that are known to be safe.
That's just silly and completely unrealistic. We already have helicopter ambulances. They work, but have a relatively high accident rate due to being called to fly frequently in bad weather and near obstructions (trees, power lines). The FAA and crew members won't tolerate something that's even more dangerous for domestic civilian use.
There are no such thing as predefined flight paths that are known to be safe, at least not in the areas where air ambulances have to operate. There is always a risk of collision with other aircraft operating under VFR. And a human pilot is always needed to cope with in-flight emergencies that autopilots can't handle.
There could be a limited use case for military casualty evacuation drones. The military is researching those for use in combat zones where sending a manned helicopter would be too risky.
Lacks the safety features of airplanes (gliding) or helicopters (autorotation), has terrible rotor placement and small air time. I would advertise it as "your personal death machine". :)
No amount of money would make me use that thing.
EDIT: Ok, sorry, it says it has a parachute, but I still would not use it.
Yes. This is why paragliding from hills is more dangerous than regular parachuting from a plane. Your paraglider canopy can collapse due to bad wind or unexpected updrafts at say 40 feet from the ground and you slam into the ground before it recovers. In contrast, when a parachute malfunctions on a freefall deployment, you are often higher than 2000ft, and there is plenty of time to deploy a reserve, fix twisted lines, etc.
What are you comparing, deaths per flight, per flight hour, per participant per year? Do you distinguish tourists, hobbyists, and competitors? What about injuries?
Credible and reliable data for such comparisons does not exist, unfortunately.
Paragliders who aren't idiots don't spend much time at 40ft AGL in weather conditions that can cause a collapse. And not every low altitude collapse is fatal. Spine compression injury is more likely, and they wear padding on their butt to minimize that (some even have airbags).
For better or worse, the main predictive risk factor in paragliding is personal attitude, and I suspect it's the same in parachuting.
Anecdata I know, but I parachuted for two years and paraglided for a year (before airbags were a thing). I saw more injuries in paragliding and people I know broke hips, twisted ankles and bashed into dry-stone walls (head saved by a helmet, which was itself destroyed). The broken hip was a club instructor who was caught out landing.
In my parachuting experience I saw only one really bad accident: in an accuracy contest, a guy who was going to miss the target by a few feet, reached out with his feet and landed on the base of his spine. Stretchered away.
My own skydiving parachute malfunction occurred on opening at approx 2500 ft. The bastard main failed to emerge and I deployed my front-mounted reserve. The act of flipping onto my back unjammed the main and for a moment I had two canopies opening. The main won and I spent half a minute pulling in the reserve canopy so I could see where the fuck where I was going.
I didn't get the shakes until about ten minutes after landing. The jumpmaster confirmed the sequence of events and I got back on the horse and jumped again 40 minutes later.
Beyond the risk level of ground take-off paragliding (and related activities), you have (in my subjective order of least to most risk) wingsuit fliers, base jumpers and then you of course have base jumping wingsuit fliers..
If you have the money, zero/zero ballistic parachutes have been a reliable thing for more than half a century.
For ultralight sized aircraft, they cost about 1/5 the cost of a new airframe.
Generally they don't provide much survivability IMHO. Most ultralight deaths seem to boil down to CFIT and similar "happened too fast too close to ground" incidents with a side dish of refusal to do maintenance, and you know they're not going to maintain their airframe parachute or how its attached or how to engage it if they refuse to maintain their engine... But they are available and in special cases they might be useful.
The Jetson One video seemed to show them flying pretty close to the ground - I was wondering if that was to reduce fall height in the event of loss of power.
Your comment seems to indicate that one is sort of trading problems, not really significantly reducing risk (at least at the speeds one would want to go) - do I understand that correctly? Mind slightly expanding? Is the problem that you basically hit the ground with your full speed rather than having some wind resistance reduce your speed before impact?
>If you have the money, zero/zero ballistic parachutes have been a reliable thing for more than half a century.
That's called an ejection seat, right? As in a rocket-propelled vehicle to launch you sufficiently high out of your aircraft to allow your parachute safely to deploy (i.e. about a hundred meters, as described in the prior post)
I'm unaware of any of those which are zero-zero. The Cirrus CAPS system has a minimum altitude of 400 ft or 920 ft after a one-turn spin, for example. BRS doesn't make specific claims for their system as far as I know but I'd be amazed if it were that much improved over the Cirrus one.
You can't descend quite as slow as a normal engine because the motor has somewhat more friction at low RPM, even though it's similar to free-spinning at higher RPM. That makes for a rougher final approach but just as much glide distance and control.
Small rotors will make it more of a hassle but should still be quite safe. Even if you do end up touching down hard, there's way less angular momentum stored up and you wouldn't have the chaos of giant blades exploding. Of course there's still the batteries, since li-ion cells have only slightly less energy than kerosene when burned.
A parachute is... not the kind of safety feature that should be relied on. Parachutes take >100 feet to open properly. 20 foot falls can easily be lethal.
>Even if you do end up touching down hard, there's way less angular momentum stored up and you wouldn't have the chaos of giant blades exploding.
That angular momentum is what allows autorotation to be possible. Theres zero chance a quadcopter blade could maintain enough energy to autorotate while carrying the weight of a person. The blades are also fixed pitch, which would make a landing flare impossible.
That is dangerously incorrect. Successful autorotation requires high inertia rotor systems with controllable blade pitch. Small rotors like on this Jetson don't have anywhere near enough inertia, and it looks like they're running fixed pitch props. The type of motor is irrelevant as long as the motors can be de-clutched from the rotors.
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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of things start off as only for rich people, and get cheaper as the technology matures and scales up. Making something only rich people can afford can be part of the process of making something available for everyone.
(In this case it costs $92k, so under 0.1% in rich countries)
Knee-jerk ascription of new product classes to elitism isn't constructive.
The iPhone, when first released in 2007, cost $500, or about $800 today after adjusting for inflation, but launched a smartphone industry that today produces devices that are affordable enough that 3 billion own one, including some that go for as little as $50 and have better performance than the original iPhone.
Imagine a constant, loud drone of propellers. High pitched whines that rise and fall, mixing into a shrieking chorus when you get close to a major destination.
Imagine cities built without any thought given to how people who don’t have their own aircar will get around. Roads can be used by foot or cycle traffic. Some places might be completely cut off from the outside world except for air traffic.
Imagine buildings towering high into the sky, tiny aircraft vying for ways in and out of the landing bays that pepper the building’s sides like holes in a tree full of birds.
Imagine a significant portion of these aircraft shrieking their way over your head are piloted by people who are badly trained, drunk, arrogant assholes, or otherwise uncaring of the rules of the road. Imagine some of these people have disabled the sophisticated collision-avoidance methods the law would surely require - maybe because it broke in their old aircar and they can’t afford to get it fixed/replaced, but can afford an illegal workaround; maybe because a business can get just enough profit to feel like it’s worth the risk and fines, maybe because they are bored teenagers playing chicken. Imagine two air cars crashing near their flight ceiling, right above a busy convergence of routes. Or above the tower you live in.
Imagine aircars maintained to the standards of personal vehicles, rather than expensive airplanes. Imagine the equivalent of a rust-bucket with several dents, a fender held on by wire, and one wheel running on a spare. Imagine the shittiest thing you’ve seen on the freeway, translated to the air.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
With a 20 minute flight time (and is that with any safety margin remaining? Doesn’t say.) at ~60mph I can only make a 10 mile round trip. 20 miles of each landing spot has a charger (and I doubt there’s weight budget to carry a decent charger with me).
It’s a very cool kit for hobbyists but there are very few missions this can fly with utility.
I don't know - 10 miles across impassable terrain sounds pretty good if the alternative is a 60 miles detour driving around a fjord or Forrest or something.
Still I don't think this is designed for "utility" - seems to me it is more for the fun of it.
Totally agree it’d be great in those situations, but I just don’t think there are a lot of people who need that. It’s probably a lot of fun to fly.
It’s just stressful to think if something isn’t going right in flight and I want time to think and react.. every minute is 5% of my battery. I also saw in another post that fully loaded the battery life is 12 minutes total.. nearly 10% a minute brand new (which every charge cycle reducing my total energy).
They also said the batteries are swappable, so if I had 3 in a rotation they could all be charging/flying with up to an hour of flight. Sounds like a fun day!
If something goes wrong, you're done for. If you're close to the ground, you have no time to do anything. Even if the flight controller discovers the failure early enough and cuts the motors, you'll still probably flip over/smash into the ground. If you're high enough, you'll just fall to your death.
I personally wouldn't want to fly over impassable terrain with vehicle this short range. Anything happens - and I have to call for helicopter rescue team, opposed to just land anywhere more or less flat and call for tow truck.
If you live in Vanvikan that would be just the right range to cross the Trondheimsfjord to Trondheim, slashing the usual commute by ferry by a factor of 5 or so.
Actually, the power density of a charger shouldn't be an issue for this.
You can get very dense systems if you're willing to cool them appropriately (the frequencies you can use thanks to modern GaN and SiC transistors allow for very compact inductors and make switched capacitor converters feasible for mains voltages).
10 kW/kg is not even exotic anymore, and I doubt you'd want to charge at more than 100 kW with an on-board charger, anyways.
If you're interested in the components, looks like both motors and propellers are from https://www.mad-motor.com
It's quite hard to find high quality electric drive components in this size – too big for drones, too small for full scale airplanes. https://store.tmotor.com/ is another alternative.
It could handle the required rpm to create lift/takeoff (up to 18k according to their marketing material, it would probably overheat if you had that kind of rpm for an extended period of time though), but you'd probably need a cable to an energy source.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
If you're rich enough for this vehicle, it might be better to rent or buy a single engine plane instead. Yes, you gotta get a license but honestly after you get past the basics you'll probably fly better than Harrison Ford with little issue. I assume the real costs are going to be the hanger rental, insurance, and maintenance.
I think you'd have a far better chance of walking away from a failed engine in that plane too. Assuming it's something like a Cessna you've at least got a reasonable chance of landing it.
There's a reason the racecar frames that "inspired" this thing are made of steel and not aluminum. While this looks sturdy to a layman, I'd imagine this thing would crumple to nothing on impact.
Love to see a crash test and be proven wrong though.
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.
Here's a direct link to the flight demo video. Looks like fun but it only reaches a maximum altitude of about 4 m. Basically it's operating more like a hovercraft than an aircraft.
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.
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.
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. ;-)
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
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 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.
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.
> 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.
Before I left California I actually looked into personal transport, only half ironically. The real estate costs are so nuts it would be cheaper to get a house inland across the mountains (Southern California) and buy a personal aircraft to commute.
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.
I am 6'3" tall and have the body of a programmer who also lifts weights. That means Ive got some body fat and some muscle mass and I weigh too much for this vehicle. Im not obese though. 210 lbs max weight is going to cut out a large percentage of the folks who could afford one- Athletes. I get this is Rev 1, but there isnt much flight time here and you have to be a small to medium sized person to fly it.
Feels like going back full circle to 1903 and using a propeller to fly :)
I am incredibly excited about the prospect of small flying machines. I also can not imagine that propellers will be where this ends although there are limitations with using electric energy.
There are quite a few concepts flying around these days:
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...
So, the drone footage used to capture this video makes me wonder:
- Is the camera drone VERY fast?
- Or is the Jetson slow?
- Is this realtime footage or accelerated somehow?
The answer for FPV footage is almost always that it is real time. FPV camera drones can go upwards of 100mph. In the hands of a skilled pilot they are incredibly agile.
They are also almost entirely built by the pilot. The entire FPV scene is a pretty cool hobby to get into.
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...
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.
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.
Vi vill inte att folk ska köpa vår produkt och krascha den direkt, så vi har sålt till välkända personer främst i USA som skulle få för mycket skit om de gjorde dumheter med den
which translates to (note: native Swedish speaker, but not a certified translator):
We don't want people to buy our product and crash it straight away, so we have been selling to famous people mostly in the US, who would get too much crap if they fooled around with it"
I enjoyed the directness of that statement. :)
Also learned from the same article:
- The maximum cargo weight including pilot is 100 kg, if you actually reach that then flying time is reduced to 12 minutes.
- The battery pack is charged externally, i.e. not in the vehicle, so you can have spares and swap.
- No mention of the battery pack's weight, but I guess you would have to be quite a bit below those 100 kg in order to have room for another battery.
- New owners get a 2-day course (not a "crash course", I guess :) at Jetson before being allowed to take their new vehicle home.
EDIT: Fixed italics for translated quote.
[1]: https://teknikensvarld.se/nyheter/miljo-och-teknik/jetson-on...