ot: personal flying machine coming to a sky near you

[benb]

Quad/Hex-Rotor/Whatever drone style things are never going to go anywhere at the size required to fly humans around.

They are the worst thing going aerodynamically in terms of power requirements, safety, etc..

Even the Amazon delivery drone thing seems like it's never really going to go anywhere unless we invent little "Mr. Fusion" type devices or develop batteries that are 100x or 1000x more efficient than what we have now.

Makes sense this thing says over water only, I bet it's got an artificially low altitude restriction too so it basically won't go higher than it's safe for you to jump off of. The thing is if one of it's engines fail it's going to crash in the worst possible way.

They work for toys/little drones because all the parts are cheap and off the shelf and you can get the computer to do almost all the flying.

Watching the video it does look like a fun personal watercraft thing.. wonder how much it will cost ($100k?) and how long it will fly for, and what the maintenance requirements are. I thought Ultralights still required the recreational pilot license or something...

[Fivethumbs]

Now all we gotta do is find some uncongested fresh water.

[William]

Originally Posted by Fivethumbs

Now all we gotta do is find some uncongested fresh water.

Municipal drinking water reservoirs, irrigation canals, and nuclear reactor cooling ponds all are usually pretty quiet.






William

[Bob Ross]

Originally Posted by MattTuck

the Deadelus. I have no idea how many watts it takes to fly, but I have to imagine that with carbon fiber these days, they could get it light enough so anyone could fly one.

My dear friend, bandmate, and college roommate went to MIT at the same time as a team of grad students there who were building one of those early human-powered flying machines...not sure if it was the Deadelus, but a sibling to the Gossamer Albatross for sure. He showed me a room where the team trained, and they had a recumbent stationary bike hooked up to a very primitive power meter (this was late 70s/early 80s remember) with a hysterical hand-drawn sign "You must be able to sustain this many watts to fly"

For short-term flight it wasn't that ridiculous a number; my buddy -- who in contemporary parlance would have been described as "thik" -- was able to do a quarter mile test flight sometime later that year.

[pbarry]

Drone meets hovercraft.

[benb]

Originally Posted by Bob Ross

My dear friend, bandmate, and college roommate went to MIT at the same time as a team of grad students there who were building one of those early human-powered flying machines...not sure if it was the Deadelus, but a sibling to the Gossamer Albatross for sure. He showed me a room where the team trained, and they had a recumbent stationary bike hooked up to a very primitive power meter (this was late 70s/early 80s remember) with a hysterical hand-drawn sign "You must be able to sustain this many watts to fly"

For short-term flight it wasn't that ridiculous a number; my buddy -- who in contemporary parlance would have been described as "thik" -- was able to do a quarter mile test flight sometime later that year.

Crazy thing about this is it takes a lot of mental effort to fly a plane, at least if you're inexperienced, and no one had experience with those pedal powered planes cause they were research projects.. to do so while putting out some decent wattage would make it all that much harder.

Carbon fiber might have been available for projects like that back then.. it isn't THAT new, and you can make a lot of airplane bits out of simple tubes and such that don't require all the fancy molding technology going into bike frames these days. There was an MIT team for the red bull flugtag recently and there is a good video of their work and their flugtag plane had heavy amounts of carbon fiber construction out of tubes and other simple parts.

[shovelhd]

Originally Posted by William

Municipal drinking water reservoirs

You fly one of these over our local reservoir, you'll have the National Guard aiming a 50cal at your ass.

[gdw]

Interesting project but the prototype looks like it requires two hands to operate which makes it thoroughly impractical for those of us who like to text and drink beer while operating our private vehicles.

[William]

Originally Posted by shovelhd

You fly one of these over our local reservoir, you'll have the National Guard aiming a 50cal at your ass.

William