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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?
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!
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.
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...)
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
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.
This is how the world works. "Good enough" usually wins out.
No thanks, I'll stick to my bicycle.
Burn Hollywood Burn
>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."
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.
This is just what we need. Dead people raining through our rooves.
-Moondog
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)?
I think the 1Å is a typo - according to the hard-copy newspaper, the actual time is 1½hours.
---
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.
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
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.