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The End of Solotrek
bobetov writes "For those of us fed up with gravity and gridlock, the Solotrek XFV personal VTOL aircraft has been the real IT. A Segway is a nice scooter and all, but this thing can fly. But it all comes down to dollars in the end, and, with a recent test-flight accident and a missed milestone, Trek Aerospace is calling it quits."
The skycar is coming along nicely.
These things wouldn't even work if they were all controlled by some kind of ubercomputer to keep them in line, nevermind if they were just go-n-fly's completely at the whim of the operator.
A list, if you will, of things I never wan't to see coming my way, especially from above, and a few other things I don't want to see, either.
1. Idiot hot rodders whamming around over your head and between the trees.
2. Slashdotters who had cracked the codes on the ubercomputer, going seriously against the grain.
3. Low maintainence goobers who won't keep their rig in proper flying order.
4. Bank robbers (or worse), fleeing the scene of the crime, guns blazing.
5. People who drop things.
6. Horny losers, staring at some girl's butt, from just below treetop level.
7. Idiots on the ground with guns pointed at the sky and a psychotic grin on their face.
8. The bad eyesight brigade, especially when near overhead powerlines.
9. People who forget to check the gas gauge before driving down to the store.
10. Folks altered chemically, including the chemical alcohol.
11. Heart attack victims.
12. People who all of a sudden regurgitate dinner, or perhaps didn't wear their depends.
13. Suicidal types (including the overly religious ones).
Thirteen's enough, yes?
Is it fascism yet?
If they could use them in some of the current roles of expensive to operate police or search helicopters, 5 million would be chump change.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Congratulations Mr. Marthouse, You've Invented The Train.
OK, time to share a personal experience. This happened my last year at UVa. Every engineering student was required to do a 4th year thesis, something that was held out as a matter of pride in the rigor of the engineering program. Mine was some software that tracked the edge of the roadway using splines. The justficication for it was that one day we'd have real-time MI that could drive cars, and that the technique might be a useful component of that.
Another student was designing a "volkscopter" personal flight vehicle.
Well, we all had to give presentations (including a Q & A) during the development phase, and I made the Trent Lott-like blunder of bringing up the fact that such things were routinely advertised in Popular Mechanics when I posed a question.
We were all so busy, I never got around to settling this issue with people. I just got some hardball questions during my Q & A from students sympathetic to the other guy, which I was able to dodge. The thesis project taught me as much about politics as it did about engineering!
To the student who was designing the volkscopter, I apologize. There was no need to drag you into what I was discovering.
First, I realized that asking an entire class of engineering students to do an "original" research project is just ridiculous. Truly original ideas are like winning lotto tickets.
Second, the whole idea of self-driving cars is just ridiculous. Why not just put us all back on trains? Well, we subsidize roads way too much. We're plunking $1 billion into the Springfield Interchange near where I live, and although I must say it has added some aesthetic flair to Springfield, it won't solve gridlock. Contrast this with how much money Amtrack needs to stay afloat. I don't think Amtrack was even asking for $1 billion, wasn't it $900 million? Regardless, the point is that if we subsidized rail at the same rate per passenger and freight mile that we do highways, things would, in my opinion, be a lot better.
So, at some point it dawned on me that my thesis was really just inventing the train. I thought to myself, Congratulations Mr. Marthouse, you've invented the train. Of course I never disclosed this to my profs. I wanted to graduate. My only form of protest was to refuse to change the title of my thesis to "An application of rational uniform bezier splines for edge detection in an automated navigation system" from "Snakes: an improved method for highway line following". I swear I'm not making this up. The prof was really disappointed I wouldn't give it an important sounding title.
What does this have to do with personal flight? Well, it's only safe if you build a train-like system where the vehicle "locks on" to a program and the user doesn't actually have to pilot the vehicle.
People will not accept this in a personal flight system until they accept it in a ground transportation system. If you try to do it in a ground system, they will ask themselves the same question I asked: why not just use trains.
The answer, like many things, has more to do with politics than engineering.
--Steven Marthouse, UVa ENGR '93.
p.s., the story of my "greening" after graduation has some interesting turns, but you'll have to buy my book. :)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The Solotrek was at best, an ill-conceived concept with many drawbacks and a long list of flaws that doomed it from the start.
Firstly, it offered few real benefits over earlier options such as the Hiller flying platform.
Most of us will have seen archive footage of these platforms that were so stable that a regular foot-soldier (or man in the street) could learn to fly one in just a few short minutes.
Hiller poured a lot of money into these devices in the 1950s but ultimately they were deemed to be impractical for numerous reasons -- most of which are shared by the SoloTrek.
Actually, the Hiller might even have been superior in a number of areas -- such as being far simpler in design and construction. Remember -- when you double the complexity of something you reduce its reliabilty by more than an equivalent amount. When my life is dependent on a piece of technology, I want that technology to be as simple and reliable as possible!
I plan to build my own flying platform when time/funds allow but have no illusions that it will be anything other than a curiosity. There are certainly no plans to turn it into the personal transporter of the 21st century.
Moller's Sky Car falls into the same category as the SoloTrek -- it's an overly complicated, hideously expensive and completely impractical device.
That the SoloTrek and Moller Skycar managed to get any external funding amazes me.
And, if you're interested in personal VTOL transport then check out this ambitious amateur jet-pack project which may be very ambitious, but is also astonishingly impressive in its engineering.