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NASA Designs All-Electric Personal Flight Vehicle
MikeChino writes "NASA is currently working on a personal aircraft that will put jet packs to shame. The Puffin is an all-electric one-man airplane that could be the start of some new and amazing air travel technology. With two prop electric engines, lithium phosphate batteries and a top speed of almost 300 mph, the vertical take off and landing vehicle was originally designed for covert military insertions because it has a lower heat signature than combustion engines. The Puffin would also be super quiet – 10 times quieter than current low-noise helicopters, and since the engine is electric it has no flight ceiling and can fly up to 9,150 meters high, uninhibited by thin air."
"since the engine is electric it has no flight ceiling and can fly up to 9,150 meters high, uninhibited by thin air." I presume they mean in this context no substantial flight ceiling where the engine gives out from lack of oxygen and you have a very bad day. That's backed up by the original article which says that "It has no flight ceiling--it is not air-breathing like gas engines are, and thus is not limited by thin air--so it could go up to about 9,150 meters before its energy runs low enough to drive it to descend." So in fact you could fly this much higher than 9,150 meters if you started out high up (from say a larger aircraft) or had a parachute. This leads to a question: How high up could it go before the air becomes too thin to generate enough lift to continue ascending?
By March, the researchers plan on finishing a one third-size, hover-capable Puffin demonstrator, and in the three months following that they will begin investigating how well it transitions from cruise to hover flight. They are already looking past the Puffin, however.
And that's why we'll never see a full sized vehicle.
The next-generation of this design might incorporate more than just two pairs of prop rotors, so that if one was struck by, say, a bird or gunfire, the aircraft could survive on redundant systems. "We could make it so there's no single point of failure--that's the cool next step," Moore says.
Ya know what a cool next step would be? Actually making the vehicle.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Those little bars on the display that shows the charge remaining? Don't trust it. It does not work.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The U.S. government will never allow widespread use of such a craft. The FAA is trying to essentially eliminate community airfields with their regulations and "anti-terrorist" programs. While I'd love to be able to fly to work, it's just not.going.to.happen.
This is an ex-parrot!
Well, let's see...
FTFA:
[...] the Puffin can cruise at 240 kilometers per hour [...] With current state-of-the-art batteries, it has a range of just 80 kilometers if cruising [...]
So it can stay up about 20 minutes.
It would work for me. I could get to work in about 15 minutes and plug it in. At the end of the day, it's all charged up and I take it home.
So, yes. I want one.
Somewhere in Switzerland, Yves Rossy is wondering what took NASA so long.
I will believe it when I see it. Batteries that good are a dream. And as far as the nearly 30,000 foot ceiling of this device cold and thin air might be a serious issue. Pilots generally like to breath and being turned into a frozen, air starved corpse is not a goal for most of us. Or are we supposed to think this thing with have a closed cabin with oxygen and heat available? Jesus, we can't even get good batteries for electric bicycles yet.
I don't understand why so many flight related programs are named Icarus. Let's remember what happened in the myth of Icarus: He flew too close to the sun and so he died. I can't tell if such program names are deliberately humorous (hah! Let's see if we can get pilots to fly in something named Icarus! Yeah, I already did that. Let's try to see if we can get them to test out a project named after a flightless bird. Maybe something like a kakapo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakapo that sometimes gets hurt from thinking it can fly when it can't), or if they just don't know any other myths related to flight, or if this is a deliberate comment about how many classical claims about "hubris" simply hold humans back from genuine progress. But would it hurt if occasionally a program was named after Horus or after Odin's raven?
how quickly will it hit the ground if it runs out of power.
You should be able to auto-rotate like you can with a helicopter. Also, there's always the parachute option.
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Note well that the highest flying prop plane ever, the Aerovironment Helios, flew to 96,000 ft -- far higher than almost any other plane (probably the only one that could sustain that altitude was the SR-71). The Helios was powered completely by solar cells and electric motors.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
From TFA:
electric aircraft are much quieter than regular planes—at some 150 meters, it is as loud as 50 decibels, or roughly the volume of a conversation, making it roughly 10 times quieter than current low-noise helicopters.
I admit that I never have gotten a handle on math beyond algebra but am I wrong by being bothered by statements like 10 times quieter? Wouldn't be better to say "makes only one-tenth the noise?" Or am I being pedantic?
This ain't rocket surgery.
Li-ion-anything has an energy density equaling 1% of gasoline. Lithium phosphate batteries are worse than others in energy density, but safer.
So for the same fuel weight, instead of a 2 hour flight reserve, you would have 72 seconds.
Until there is a radically different battery, this is unrealistic.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Not in any way, shape, or form. Getting to 20-30000 feet, if it was capable of that, with a very small payload, it essentially worthless in terms of orbital. To get into orbit the chief challenge is velocity. To get that (without other far more interesting technical breakthroughs) you need a HUGE rocket with very large amounts of fuel. So there is really no role at all for this teeny little helicoper/VTOL airplane.
Brett
I'm not implying they could get into orbit with this vehicle as it obviously will require atmosphere for the rotor blades to be effective, but in a general sense. Specifically getting a launch vehicle as far into the atmosphere as possible before switching to a different means of propulsion like a typical rocket.
Achieving orbit is about speed ('delta v'), NOT altitude. It takes much more energy to get the horizontal speed to the required level than to reach the required altitude. Getting above the atmosphere helps, but not all that much.
PSA: don't blindly search Google if you want to find out what a "three-holer" is - I don't think any of the top hits are what he's referring to.
"Puffin Man" doesn't have quite the same ring to it though, compared to the names of other super hero's...
I see dead people.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
The Antares 20E made its maiden flight in 2003. It is a self-launching glider with battery powered engine:
http://www.lange-aviation.com/htm/english/products/antares_20e/antares_20E.html
A wonderful glider. Sad it's so expensive (several 100k euros).
Go read Bob Shaw's 'Vertigo'.
The changes this would make to society are too great. The politicians would never allow common people to have that much freedom. No borders, no passports, no way of stopping people from going where they wanted, when they wanted. And that's without assuming any purpose more nefarious than a cheap weekend in Amsterdam.
One asshole with one of these and a pocketful of golf balls could cause carnage in a city centre at rush hour - no way to track or find the culprit afterwards. As long as there's idiots who think throwing rocks off motorway bridges is a fun thing to do, there'll be idiots who'll be delighted to abuse this even worse. Drug dealers, criminals of any kind who want to make a clean getaway (get 10 feet off the ground and nobody's catching you, no matter how fast the police car).
It's not the physics of flight, or fuel capacity, or engine efficiency that will stop us ever getting personal flight vehicles - it's the politicians who will legislate it out of existence for all but the very rich, because whatever rich people want is always all right. And they'll do it in the name of safety, and it'll be for our own good. There'll be a huge furore in the media when the first one crashes and kills someone, and that'll be it done with.
Wow! And I thought I was nuts for loving HALO[High Altitude, Low Opening] jumps!
[With full equipment/kit load+body wt. @ around 275 lb./125 Kg] I was told that the max. velocity was around 130 mph/209 kph...compared to 714 mph, I guess I was a piker!
Offtopic side note:The highest we ever jumped from was around 17,000 feet altitude; I found my minimum altitude for releasing my chute was approximately 385 feet, but it hurt!
(we were advised that the minimum altitude was 500 feet...I had to test this)
[using the US Army version of the Ram Air-square type 'chute]
That was also where I got over my fear of heights, once I was thrown out of a perfectly good airplane!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
No. Rocket staging has nothing to do with requiring different propulsion systems in different parts of the atmosphere. Rocket staging is about shedding weight and attaining velocity. The more mass you are trying to lift, the more propellant you require. The more propellant you require, the more tankage you need. The more tankage you need, the greater the mass you are trying to lift. Since, after a while, the tanks are mostly empty, why bother continuing to lift them? They aren't needed anymore. Divide the propellant into separate tanks, and when one tank is empty, ditch it.
Now, it's a lot easier to drop the tail end off of a rocket than the forward end, so you drop the engines and the tanks, then switch to a different set of engines. Coincidentally, once the first stage is done you've left the thickest part of the atmosphere, so it makes sense to switch from engines that are efficient on the ground, to those that are efficient in a vacuum.
So, the process isn't "Hey, I'm in a vacuum now, so I need to switch engines.", but "Hey, I'm carrying a lot of dead weight. Let me cut some loose.".
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!