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Airbus Is About To Build A Self-Flying Electric Robo-Taxi (fastcompany.com)
Airbus said today it is building a prototype of an electric self-flying plane for a single passenger, which it is calling the Vahana. The autonomous plane can fly a single passenger on trips of around 50 miles. From a report on FastCompany: Airbus teased two possibilities for the Vahana on December 14: an electric helicopter and a plane with wings that tilt up to enable vertical take off and landing, or VTOL. After its engineers ran the numbers on both types, Airbus today announced that it's building a prototype of the sci-fi looking tilt-wing plane, which will begin test flights before the end of the year. "The vehicle is being built. Parts are being made as we speak," says Airbus chief engineer Geoffrey Bower. The company's goal is to get air taxis in service in about 10 years, possibly partnering with ride-hailing companies like Uber. "We would love to see what that kind of partnership might evolve into," says Maryanna Saenko of Airbus Ventures.
practical mass flying cars and general-purpose maid robots (Rosie-style)?
Which do you think will be first, and why?
Table-ized A.I.
Is it just me, or does that "flying taxi" look an awful lot like Skynet's Hunter Killer drone.
My only quibble is the design relies on differential torque of the propellers for pivot rotation. I think it would be better to arrange for thrust vectoring for this. Also thrust vectoring would allow you to run identical propellers because the thrust vectoring can eliminate the torque.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
In fixed wing aircraft the thrust from the jet or propeller equals the drag, and the lift produced by the wings. The lift to drag ratio for most aircraft will exceed 10. Thus the plane needs to produce one tenth of its weight as thrust. There are specialized aircraft gliders/sailplanes etc that can push this ratio up to 20. I vaguely recall something called Eppler airfoil that has a lift/drag ratio of 40 for a narrow range of Reynolds number.
But a helicoper needs to produce thrust equal to weight. Thus it can hover and take off and land vertically. But it consumes a lot more fuel than fixed wing aircraft. So much so that it is uneconomical even to serve as air taxis between a metro hub and the suburban airport.
People with deep pockets, military, has been trying various formats to get vertical take off and fixed wing efficiency. The tilt wing aircraft like the Osprey (C22?) have lots of stability issues during the transition. Vectored thrust aircraft like Harrier also suffers from fuel efficiency issues. I do not see how changing the energy source from combustion to electro chemistry is going the change the physics of the problem.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The Word from Management is that we have to do something innovative, or we're out of all of those subsidies! Our countries are looking at all of that Musk stuff: electric cars, rockets that land and can be reused. We need to do something different! But not more electric cars or rockets that can be reused, we can't do the same different. We need different different! So, Marketing says Flying Cars! After all, haven't you heard people asking, since the 1950's, Where Are Our Flying Cars?, Well, we're going to have the answer! Here are your flying cars! We have a great 3D rendering of them! Now, half of the people can't tell 3D renderings from the real thing, and Engineering has to make it work now, so we're off the hook and it's more subsidies for everyone this year! Of course, Engineering had better make it work, or they're out!
Bruce Perens.
This seems to be a perfect product for the Uber app...
No, I think Lyft would be a better fit for this one.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.