Well that's going to kill someone.
SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
41–50 of 157 posts
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#42A part of me thinks this is really cool tech and it would be amazing for anyone to be able to just hop aboard their personal helicopter and fly wherever they want, but then another part of me thinks of the future this would create, skies no longer clear, filled with objects buzzing around and what hell that would be, on top of the already stressful and crazy life we have now. It's the kind of situation where I think…
On the other hand think about the positives: all the terrestrial traffic and distributed refueling and service infrastructure that might no longer be needed; it would revolutionize everything from personal transportation to shipping and logistics. And yeah it would require a vastly enhanced and much more autonomous traffic control system.
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#43Is this the next Uber vehicle?
Or Amazon delivery "drone"?
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#44How am I supposed to "store it inside a standard garage" if it doesn't have wheels to move it in?
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#45Can anyone verify if this thing is actually built and not just some rendering? The shallows in some of their pictures don't seem right so I was wondering if those are pictures of an actual craft or just a Photoshop.
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#46A part of me thinks this is really cool tech and it would be amazing for anyone to be able to just hop aboard their personal helicopter and fly wherever they want, but then another part of me thinks of the future this would create, skies no longer clear, filled with objects buzzing around and what hell that would be, on top of the already stressful and crazy life we have now. It's the kind of situation where I think…
I share this concern, and it will probably be awful in the beginning. However, that being said, I thought i'd hate living next to an airport, and I live by one right now. The sounds of planes over my head are often ignored and I enjoy looking up and seeing a plane coming in for a landing. So what I thought I would hate I actually grew to enjoy. People adapt, that's actually what we're really good at.
An average plane carries around 150 to 200 people and planes are used only for long distances. Living in a world where the affordability of these are like cars, would be far worse, I imagine.
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#47How am I supposed to "store it inside a standard garage" if it doesn't have wheels to move it in?
It looks like casters could easily be added. Or you could even land it on a dolly.
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I empathize but I think that attitude is an artifact of the age we grew up in. I'm sure equestrians felt the same way when those rackety automobile contraptions started zooming around.
I think everyone must have felt this way about automobiles. And by and large, it's worked out just as horribly as they imagined: our communities are divided by dangerous moats we call "roads" -- death traps which we must painstakingly teach our children to avoid, if we dare let our children wander outside on their own anywhere near them in the first place.
I don't get the point - are you suggesting we'd be better off without automobiles? Would we go back to horses? What about global logistics? Agriculture?
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#49I'm very skeptical of their claims of "unparalleled safety". Thanks to "autorotation"[1] regular helicopters can safely land in most situations even with complete power failure. The claims of safety of this craft seems to derive from N+1 battery redundancy which isn't that impressive. They say they have 8 independent motors, but don't say how many are needed to stay aloft. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotati…
Yet even with autorotation, helicopters are somewhere between 27 and 85 times more dangerous than cars (depending on your methodology) [1].
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...