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Elon Musk's Next Great Idea? Electric Air Travel (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from BGR: Elon Musk is changing the world one idea at a time. First, with Tesla, the man so many people call the real life Tony Stark has done an incredible job of bringing electric vehicles to the mainstream. Second, Musk has been doing an impressive job over at SpaceX in the realm of space travel. And third, Musk's effective rough draft of a high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop is being contemplated and conceptualized in a very real way by some extremely smart people. So where does Musk go from here? Why, Mars of course. Recently, Musk said that he plans to unveil SpaceX's Mars roadmap next September. But on another front, Musk has also been thinking about developing an electric airplane capable of taking off and landing vertically. While answering a few questions during a Q&A session at the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Award Ceremony last week, Musk was asked what his 'next great idea' was. The answer? Electric-powered air travel.
The model airplane community is where a lot of delusions about the possibility of electric air travel come from. I'm sure you've seen the "man-carrying" many-copters that even university teams are working on. Do I need to point out why that is a bizarre and stupid waste of time and resources? Quad copters are a great way of building small vehicles, because small propellers accelerate quickly, so steering by modulating the propeller speed is easy and works well. This doesn't scale up. Large multicopters are hilariously inefficient and difficult to control compared to more conventional helicopter designs. Small electric models beat ICE models hands down because internal combustion engines don't scale down well to that size. Just because something works well when you're flying one or two pounds of foam doesn't mean it's a good idea for an actual plane.