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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
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?
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.