Slashdot Mirror
NASA Tests Flying Scooter For Commercial Take-Off
Ant writes: "
NASA will
discover tomorrow
whether a
prototype
airscooter - a
jetpack-like device
propelled by fans -
could really be a
viable mode of
transport.
If successful, the
airscooter trial at
Nasa's Ames research centre in California could form another
stepping stone in the development of personal, individual
aircraft that allow commuters to speed over traffic jams, doctors
to fly to emergencies and soldiers to leapfrog minefields.
The SoloTrek Exo-skeletor Flying Vehicle (XFV) is designed to
allow a pilot to stand upright, with fans 3ft in diameter above his
head that lift him into the sky, allowing flight at speeds of up to
80mph for up 1Å hours on a tank of petrol." Despite the cool graphic, note that what's being tested is an engine, not the whole rig pictured -- that's just a tease. Consultation with the UK branch office revealed no clue of how long "1Å hours" is. Any ideas?
A sqwwaaaaakin' good time! irc.rabidpenguin.org
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
It is probably too late to really talk to anybody here but...
I've seen a lot of comments regarding how unsafe these things are and comparing them to the lack of safety in automibiles.
One of the greatest troubles with automobiles is the lack of space in which to drive them. Everywhere you look there is something to run into and lots of those things also happen to be moving at relatively high rates of speed.
Well, once we open up the third dimension a lot of that crowding goes away. People will have time to blink out for a bit in most places. Speeds are much lower than traditional aircraft, so there is an excellent chance for even a fairly negligent driver to see an oncoming obstacle and move, especially as a lot of these obstacles are fairly large.
You won't see a lot of commercial use of these devices until their carrying capacity and fuel efficiency increases dramatically. Commercially it will be a niche product...EMT's whizzing to injury sites, police on patrol, etc.
A lot of ground vehicle accidents involve commercial vehicles, and not merely because they are on the road a lot. A lot of commercial drivers become inured to the responsibility of conducting a vehicle.
There are still the problems of takeoff and landing, which are the most dangerosu phases of flight operations. To some extent technology can help an operator manage the troubles there.
There is the problem of engine failure. This can be handled with parachutes, airbags and additional safety gear like helmets and ankle/knee braces.
Finally I imagine that, like motorcycle riders, personal air vehicle operators will exercise greater caution than your average automobile operator. Have you ever noticed how motorcycle drivers pull over very quickly during adverse weather ? I know I have seen many drivers pull over under bridges and call for a ride. Ever notice the conspicuous absence of motorcycles under many weather conditions.
People act as stupid as they think they can get away with, witness motorcycle drivers flying around at 90 or 100 mph. Of course they only seem to do this under dry road conditions with good visibility. People in cars act very stupid because they think they are safe. They are wrong of course. People in jet packs or the like will have to be very aware that they are in danger.
Finally a lot of people who are afraid to drive do so because "They have to." A lot of these people have poor eyesight, poor reflexes or a variety of anxieties about the entire driving process. A lot of these unsafe drivers will simpley choose to stick with ground transportation. We can use stricter licensing to eliminate others.
We can also tie having a personal aircraft license to having a safe ground transportation license. This may make for safer ground drivers, as people vie for their air licenses. Further the only people with air licenses will have at least a moderate record of transport safety.
There are solutions to the problems. They will be found because people want to do this. They will be found because governments want this. (They don't like having to maintain our roadways, anything that can make that problem go away will be helped along.)
The most influential arguments against this technology I've seen on Slashdot come from pilots. Flying is complicated and very technical. Humans and computers can combine to overcome these problems. The Airbus planes are a step in this direction...but not there yet. Imagine having a system like that on a simpler aircraft to assist the pilot. The upside is that the aircraft can be flown more simply by more novice pilots. The down is when the computer screws up and takes away necessary control from the pilot like the A320 at the Paris Airshow a few years back. The answer is not here yet, but it IS coming.
So maybe not next week or next year, but it will get here sooner rather than later. I look forward to it.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
Clearly hasn't been paying much attention to humankinds history.....we're continually doing things that would have seemed impossible/highly stupid in the past.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Gravity would clean up midair accidents quick!
(Nevermind about the people UNDERNEATH the accident!)
:)
--
There is no technology available now or forseeable in the future that will make it safe to fly a personal plane into a thunderstorm or into ice. There is no technology that will take away your ability to fly into them. The only technology that can do that is technology that keeps you on ground, always.
"If God had wanted man to fly, he would have given us wings."
"Flying is for the birds, not man."
etc.
What a dope you are. You can't see the sky for the clouds...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
This toy's been in development a while - the web site's Solotrek.com. Hope they can make it fly - and navigable by mere mortals, not just Special Forces folk.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The symbol is one for an angstrom -- which is 10^-10 meters. I think if that distance was significant, there wouldn't be much market for these things.
We've only got a few months left in the year 2000- I want my personal Jetpack we were all supposed to have by now!
I disagree. Anything that removes stupid people from the gene pool (preferably before they breed) is a good thing.
</humor>
Actually, stupid people are why this will never really take off (no pun intended) in the US. Just look at general aviation. An alternator for a '73 Ford costs $50, the alternator for a '83 Cessna costs $300. Same alternator, save the FAA approval tag on the Cessna. Why is the Cessna more expensive? Liability insurance: your '73 Ford seizes up, are you going to file a multimillion dollar suit? Your Cessna crashes, will your heirs?
www.eFax.com are spammers
The average person (and most above-average persons) are simply unable to be focused enough to drive safely in 2 dimensions, let alone 3.
I mean, even myself.. I make every attempt to be a good driver, and usually I'm quite successful, but there are always times when you look the wrong way...
What we need is better public transportation, better forms of mass transport, not even *MORE* forms of personal transport. THey are wasteful, resource wise, and inefficient.
No, I think the other guy was right, he was just trying to be witty. There is nothing actually relevant about saying "people objected to X which is now widespread, so your objections to Y must be equally wrong." The fact that naysayers aren't always right is pretty useless for evaluating an argument against something.
Its like if someone was talking about their hopes for a presidential candidate and I started making hopeful comments about our new chancellor adolf hitler who will bring us out of this recession. There has been no useful critique of the real subject at hand.
And of course the differences between fears about the mechanical workings of a new device and the unavoidable practical implications of thousands of people zipping through a 3D area with no markings of lanes are so great as to make the comment just a silly throwaway line.
Have you ever been on the boston esplanade for the fourth of july? There's lots of boats out having fun. Most of them are rafts and canoes, but there are a few power boats zipping around. There's big signs on the bridges warning people not to leave wake, but every few minutes some moron will zip through leaving a wake that rocks smaller boats on both shores.
Now imagine that everyone was in the fast boats, and instead of a fairly straightforward trip up on down the river, you had some people going across and some suddenly dropping in from above because the fast part of your trip is through where they stop, and someone just sort of stopping and circling because they were getting their bearings, and....
You can't make these problems go away with silly "quotes" about a completely different situation. It can be funny, but "aren't we feeling clever" is the only real response, because it is not useful or relevant.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
just what the world needs.. Fly-by shootings.
We will have gang wars up in the air! It'll be just like Cowboy Bebop.
Yeah, the thing may well fly. That isn't what the pilots are saying is impractal (in the next 10 years). If it works doctors may fly to patents, or paramedics. After a lot of training. Infentry may fly over minefileds, again after training (maybe somewhat less because someone might decide to risk it rather then letting them get shot cleaing a mine field under fire). But who will you not see flying? The guy who drives 45 in the fast lane. The guy who doesn't check his tires every few days. In fact almost anyone that wouln't pay a big chunk of cash and go through a longish training program with the risk of failing the test at the end and not being allowed to fly.
At least until we get some pretty damm bug free auto-flight/landing/takeoff code, and you know how little bug free code is out there... (NASA comes pretty damm close on the shuttle code, but it is very expensave and slow code to have written, and doesn't to as much real-time machine vision and control system work as this would...)
That skycar(on the main page) looks badass! Looks like something Speed Racer would fly.
could you really?
Long as the sea between russia and alaska is frozen over, sure. (and weren't they talking about a bridge?)
I believe that it is theoretically possible to walk from the tip of south america to capetown. Massivly impractical, but possible. When you're on foot, a straight line is rarely the best route between two points.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
And do you know how many cars with busted taillights/underinflated tires/rusted out bodies I've seen on the road?
Forget PP-ASEL/AMEL - have you ever tried a helicopter? They don't exactly glide well when the donkey quits - mess up an autorotation and you're extremely dead. I seriously doubt this thing can even autorotate. And don't give me any of this BRS nonsense either: a ballistic chute will probably never have zero-zero (zero airspeed, zero altitude - or near enough not to kill you) capabilities without costing a fantastic amount of money.
The other snake-oil solution is Moller's skycar. That thing will never fly. He's been hawking it for years, but it's never got airborne. Moller has an interesting dream, but only the gullible invest.
Dylan Smith (PP-ASEL, IR)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
And let's face it, you probably drive a car, ride a bicycle, or take a bus and thus share the road with those idiots every single day. The difference is that I can put *considerably* more space between myself and them in an aircraft than I can in a car.
Additionally, licensing would probably inherit the primary-safety-first attitude of the aircraft administration powers-that-be rather than the "let any moron loose in a lethal weapon" attitude that persists in some (not all, try getting a car license in most of Europe) countries with regards to cars. Hopefully, therefore, many of the morons would either have it educated out of them or wouldn't get a license.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Truth be told, nearly everything you say applies just as well to cars as it does to planes.
Bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. People (including me) drive in conditions every day that would kill you in a private plane. People expect to and do drive in snow storms, freezing rain, harsh winds, thunderstorms, etc etc etc. People drive to freaking Starbucks when the State Police are going on the radio to say "Stay home unless you absolutely have to because we need the roads clear for emergency vehicles." You try that stuff even once in a flying machine, and you probably will die. Maybe the first time you'll get lucky, but on the second or third, you'll die. Not "stuck in a snow bank waiting for AAA" - dead.
Any problems with uncontrolled/stupid flight or equipment failure can be solved with a ballistic recovery system
Bullshit again. Read "I Rode The Thunder" for a description of what it's like to be under a parachute in a thunderstorm. The guy was trapped in one for over an hour, got the shit beaten out of him by the hail and the wind, and major frostbite.
Just for reference, I've had about twenty-five hours of instruction.
Lose the arrogance and the ignorance, or quit flying before you kill somebody. I've lost a couple of friends because one of them got away with flying in clouds with ice in them the first couple of times, and didn't get away with it the last time. I also lost my Aviation Medical Examiner because he took off in fog without an instrument rating and flew into a hillside. I guess he figured his hand-held GPS with an obstruction database would show him the hills.
A polyanna "technology will take care of it" attitude has no place in aviation. Pilots live or die on the strength of the go-no go decisions they make on the ground, and the vast majority of the non-flying public is neither equipped to make those decisions, nor do they have the patience or time to learn to make those decisions.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
What is this futuristic transporation marvel? A motorcycle.
doctors to fly to emergencies
Yeah, air scooter accidents.
--
There's a great deal of concern about having people who you wouldn't trust on a bicycle flying these things - perhaps it would be required to have these things fly themselves (you punch in the address and away you go)?
You might even make this kind of thing into a taxi service - ask for a pickup on your wireless PDA (or watch), the thing will come flying down to a sidewalk nearby, you strap yourself in & punch in the destination address, and away you go!
There could also be a central traffic management system to keep track of all the air-taxies, plus some default behavior in case of loss of communication.
As far as people learning to trust the things, I'd anticipate that once a decent number of people were flying around in these things with a very low percentage of accidents, then people would gradually start trusting them (just like they learned to accept cars going faster than 40mph...)
The SoloTrek stands on its own feet, not the operator's, which is a big improvement. On the other hand, the SoloTrek prototype doesn't appear to have much give in its landing gear. Controlling the rate of descent of this thing will be tough, because it's done with the throttle alone. The blades are fixed pitch. This implies a control lag that the pilot must compensate for. That's a tough piloting job.
On the stability and control front, this thing has no automated stability augmentation, which is suprising. Helicopter and VTOL craft are far tougher to fly than ordinary aircraft; they have less intrinsic stability and more control inputs. I would have expected more smarts in this thing, to make the piloting task manageable by mere mortals. Enough marginally stable VTOL craft were tried back in the 1950s that it's clear the pilot needs help. At least attitude stabilization seems indicated. A radar altimeter system to help control vertical speed at landing is probably needed, too.
The Moller Skycar supposedly has stability augmentation, but those guys have been hyping their vehicles since 1968 (yes, 1968) without producing anything flyable. I have their 1974 brochure, and it was Real Soon Now back then. Their web site has had the same Real Soon Now hype for a year now.
See the Popular Rotorcraft Association for ultralight gyrocopters and similar air vehicles you can buy and fly right now. Less hype, and those things fly just fine.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
1) I have already seen a model of such a device that can be bought, and had, and used, relatively cheaply.
2) I believe that they meant approximately 1 hour.
Eh...
This is how the world works. "Good enough" usually wins out.
Does anyone have any idea how traffic control would be handled with these things, if everyone were using them at some point in the future? :)
I mean, airports use very complex control systems that CERTAINLY wouldn't be practical, but with no clearly defined streets in the sky, you couldn't exactly do red lights and stuff like we do now
and yet, given how dangerous accidents would be with one of thse, there'd have to be something I think...
Actually, the trick is stay CLOSE to the ground. This gives you the stability without the drag. An example of such personal "aircraft" is the Airboard personal hovercraft from Sydney Olympics Opening Ceremonies.
They go upto 30 mph, and cost around $7,000 AND ARE AVAILABLE TODAY!
The website also claims they are VERY safe. They are marketing them at first as a kind of go-cart without wheels for use at theme parks. I think that is their strategy until they can get them certified as street legal in various jurisdictions.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
No thanks, I'll stick to my bicycle.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Assuming they can get cars to fly, there exists the possibility (no matter how small it is) that Milla Jovovich will bada boom right through the ceiling. The only thing better than that would be meeting the blue opera lady, but hey, I'm a realist...
I disagree. I think they meant the 1 Anstrom... kind of like traveling in light years, or making the Kessel run in 12 parsecs.
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
>There's no doubt it will fly, if the engines are powerful enough. But one needs to ask what would a pilot do in the event of an engine failure
scream like hell and cross your fingers!
1) When Airscooters Collide
2) When Airscooters Crash to Earth
3) Airscooter Chases Caught on Tape
"My mother works for Microsoft now. A whole other cult."
Stephen Notley did a fun little cartoon on this subject a while back...
Up!
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Does this mean, We will have bigger and more bloody bugsplat's on our windscreen. Even the thought makes me shiver.
This Post was entirely made up of recycled electrons making up recycled signals to generate recycles ASCII to generate t
I hope they have one hell of a legal department and VERY deep pockets to deal with the liability issues. This thing's deceptively simple-looking, but it's basically a twin-rotor helicopter. And though they emphasize that it's neutrally stable, got redundancy out the ying-yang, etc., the fact is, if the drive train or the blades buy it, so will you: Your flying Yuppie toy will either roll inverted and drop like a rock, start some godawful eyeball-bugging yaw rate like a washing machine on spin cycle, or shake itself to pieces in midair. Not good. And even if it works perfectly, the FAA better jump all over pilot certification. This puppy seems to have NO INSTRUMENTATION apparent in the illustrations; I suppose it's a drag having to constantly pay attention to mundane things like dials. How do you know your fuel state? If you're dumb enough to get caught out in the dark or in fog, what in the hell are you supposed to do -- shut up and die gallantly? Death by hubris: I see some wealthy Malcolm Forbes-wannabee CEO or twentysomething brilliant-but-stupid software developer deciding to go out on a lark, getting a little too unwound, and clean forgetting about airport approach patterns, telephone/power lines, trees, cell-phone antenna masts (nasty hard-to-see guy wires) or migratory birds (don't laugh -- a hitting 20-lb. Canadian goose at 30 kts can do one hell of a lot of damage). We've already seen NASCAR driver Davey Allison fly his brand-new Hughes 500 into a chain-link fence because he wasn't paying attention to the surface winds; the same thing can happen with this kind of aircraft. (Fixed-wing aircraft aren't much better: They don't call the vee-tailed Beech Bonanza the "fork-tailed doctor killer" for nothing.)
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
1Å = 10^-10m, (or 0.1 nm), an old unit most often used in measuring wavelengths of light.
Physicists, especially in relativity or particle physics, often use factors of c (speed of light) and sometimes G (gravitational constant) and h-bar (Plank's constant) to change the units of quantities. A common example is to say that the rest mass of an electron is 511,000 electron volts - measuring mass in units of energy. This appears to be such a case.
We can convert length (Å) to time by dividing by the speed of light. The speed of light in Å/hr is 1.07x10^22, hence 1Å hours is 9.3x10^-23 hours.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Tomorrows World (UK science program)done a program last year showing a backpack helicopter from Japan with 2 counter rotating blades to keep it stable. It had a few hours flight time, could do 100 mph and they were getting ready to start production.
I once worked in a place that was positively crawling with Boston Brahmins -- old, old money. It was an interesting experience having grown up in a poor, city neighborhood. They were very nice people, but clueless when it came to the other half and generally ignorant of the level of privilege they enjoyed. I walked into the cofee room and of them was talking about a plan to relieve congestion and noise in East Boston by using the decomissioned air force base in Concord, a very nice, wealthy and semi-rural suburb where many of these folks lived.
"How could they think of putting something like that in Concord of all places?" she asked.
"Since when do the folks in places like Concord think twice about putting any nasty crap they don't want to live with themselves in East Boston? And the people in Concord are doing lots more flying," I replied.
If this guy's vision of the future comes true, I can imagine what 8:00 AM will sound like in places like Buttercup Lane and Horsebridle Path.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That sounds great, but my umbrella sheild might pop your pillows! Oh no! then we'de both have broken necks.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is just what we need. Dead people raining through our rooves.
-Moondog
You might get a little more distance if you tried to glide this thing when it runs out of fuel. Wait!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Can you imagine flying through the airport that's between my house and my job? How about pushing each other out of the way to launch and land? What are the effects of cutting each other off. Air-Rage?. Do they have running lights so they don't crash into each other in rush hour? Bad weather? How do you police them? Drunk drivers? What about the prop wash from the inevitable 6-fan 6 passenger SUC (sport utility copter)?
Well, they will have to avoid the DCA as it might be possible for the force generated by the fans to trigger the mines if they are too close from the ground.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Auto-pilot on a comercial jet can be fairly fucked up as long as it will turn off when the trained pilot or copilot grabs control to save the plane. The comercial planes also only use the auto-pilot in the relitavly safe part of the trip, the non-take-off/landing part.
If you want to do the same on a single-person flight craft, then they have to have the same kind of training. If you want to skip that training then the auto-pilot has to be far better then current auto-pilots. It isn't complex, pick one.
Yeah, some people are. Others are lising off real problems, ones that might spark someone else's good idea, or at least make us realise that putting our life's savings into an air-car-start-up may not be such a hot idea.
I didn't even say "it can't be done". In fact I came right out and said NASA has pretty bug-free code in a place or too. It is expensave and slow to write. I fully intended people to gather that maybe an air-car auto-pilot could actually be pretty damm bug free, but it will take a while to write, and cost real money. That ain't never.
Point: it doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to be close. Point: the shuttle's code is close. Please connect the dots. Did you get hard but not impossable?
I did. I wrote some code to visualise dependencies from a make file, shot a roll of color film (if I'm lucky it'll have three good pictures), and most of my first roll of Tmax ASA3200 black n' white film (I'm looking for a lot of visable grain), no idea if any of those shots are good. Oh, and I got back my last few rolls of film, including some three and a half OK shots of my dog jumping a fence.
No flying though. Not today.
Did you get to do anything productave?
I think the 1Å is a typo - according to the hard-copy newspaper, the actual time is 1½hours.
---
There are plenty of people that like to embark on such risky endeavours as base-jumping. The "Xtreme" crowd might be willing to pay top dollar to tool around with one of these things in remote areas.
Having said that, I think you are probably right about day-to-day personal transportation. I doubt too many governments would allow the average human to cruise around downtown in one of these things.
I'll wait until Ron Popeil comes on TV to pitch these. I mean, getting these will be REALLY cool, but it'll be even cooler, if it comes with kitchen utensils, beef jerky maker and fishing rod.
Babes will be knocking down my door.
In the case of a flying car, that problem SHOULD be fairly easy to avoid; modify FAA regs slightly to allow vertical take offs and landings from places other than airports and still require a pilot's license to operate a flying vehicle. Let the stringent requirements of getting and maintaining a pilot's license weed out the people who will be dangerous in the air.
Some people might complain that this attitude is elitist. I'd like to volunteer those people to fly in a 747 pilotted by a person with just a driver's license.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
/. posts stories like this once every couple of months, and it's always one of the same five scam artists with a prototype that has flown--once--a couple hundred feet.
90-minute flying time on a tank of fuel? Somebody please wake me up when someone flies one of these for ten minutes straight.
The highways have long been a butcher shop, and this hasn't resulted in fewer people using cars, highways, etc. Obviously you would have to have more stringent requirements for licensing, somewhere between the current requirements for a car license (do you have a pulse?) and a plane license (sort of difficult).
You ever had a single flying lesson? Screw MS Flight Sim (which is what gave me the flying bug to begin with), but an actual hour or so behind the yoke or stick of a real airplane. Probably a Cessna 152 or 172.
You generally don't get into the left seat until after you've had a bit of ground instruction, save for "discovery flights". One of the biggest things pilots learn is weather and a bit about how air works. Yes, air. A great big, honking, bloody ocean of fluid dynamics. The instant you are airborne, physics as you are used to it changes, and drastically.
The FAA and most other civil aviation authorities require a minimum of 40 flight hours to get a basic pilot's license, allowing you to fly certain basic types of low-power, single-engine aircraft in very nice weather. And unless you live in a few places in Florida, Texas and Nevada, you don't get a whole lot of continual "nice" weather.
Flying is easy, but it's hard. It's complex as hell, conditions can change instantaneously and if you screw up, you make the news, posthumously. The largest block of deaths in General Aviation are pilots with less than 150 hours of experience, and you have at least 45 of those behind you before you even get your ticket to go out on your own, unsupervised.
Nobody with a pilot's license believes any of these "everyone will be flying a personal craft in the next 10 years" stories. We never have and we never will, because we learned, the same way that Linux users learn not to do anything as root except locally, that experience is a mutha.
And don't even bother talking about the idea of automatic, computer-controlled flyways and such nonsense. You may love your OS, but you would not actually risk your life on it. It only takes a drop of about 20 to 30 feet to kill you.
Spare me, please.
BadDoggie, PP-ASEL/AMEL (Aircraft, Single-Engine Land, Multi-Engine Land)
Once you have flown, you will walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, there you long to return." -- DaVinci
From their site:
No notes on airbags, Bewulf clusterability, onboard mp3 players or OnStar buttons (in case of problem press & scream - quickly!)I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
It seems to me that this would be the only possible recovery from this air-scooter; as you would often not be high enough for a parachute to work; and the typical helicopter autorotation would clearly not work.
But, deflated airbags don't weigh much or take up much space, and can be deployed instantly. If you could get the terminal velocity down to 80fps or so with big enough airbags (no problem) then there'd have to be about 5ft of airbag between your bod and the ground to have a pretty survivable crash-landing.
Without that; these will not be practical. Having no recourse for engine failure absolutely not an option -- piston engines are *way* too unreliable for this.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Yes, these things are wildly dangerous. Our highways, on the other hand, are fine....
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
This answer jives with the number in the article. The maximum SPEED is 80 mph. The maximum DISTANCE is 150 miles. Assuming maximum distance could be reached at maximum speed (which is, of course, untrue), then the thing can fly for 1 hour, 52 minutes. Of course, if you're optimizing for distance, the time you spend aloft is probably going to be much longer.
So, you can probably make a safe assumption that you'll get anywhere from 1.5-3.0 hours flying time on a tank of gas, not taking into account things like crashes, engine failures, bathroom breaks (!), etc.
We take a lot of simplicity for granted when on the ground. You get a whole lot of stability for free; no worrying about pitch and roll - and yaw is far more precise. You get very efficient braking and holding for free too. No, air vehicles will be too difficult to control and too expensive to operate for a _very_ long time.