Live data from Hacker News

SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight

workhorse.com

121–130 of 157 posts

Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight

#121
post #63
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We'd be better off with dense cities where automobile is not the primary means of transportation. Like e.g. NYC or many European cities. Cars and large trucks should mostly belong to highways and country roads.

Very much a personal opinion. I hate living in dense cites. Dealing with owning a car in the city makes it worse, but I prefer living in a less dense area and owning a car. In fact I own 5.

Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight

#122
Yet another really big personal quadrotor-type drone. Its a lot like the eHang 184, from 2016.[1] That flies, but they don't trust it with a live passenger yet.

Here's one with a passenger, but they don't want to get any altitude.[2] There are five or six projects like this. Few have flown with a human on board yet.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPARvS31Oq0 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3pi4HfQ0Gc

Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight

#123
> target price: $200,000

That's 148,019.4 GBP. The average wage here corrected for a proper living standard is about 22,000 GBP give or take.

If everybody that could afford this took that money and gave it to homeless foundations, what a world we could live in...

Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight

#124
post #123

> target price: $200,000 That's 148,019.4 GBP. The average wage here corrected for a proper living standard is about 22,000 GBP give or take. If everybody that could afford this took that money and gave it to homeless foundations, what a world we could live in...

price could go down if more affluent people buy, eventually it can become something the average people could "afford"...there are of course other arguments against everyone owning their own flying machine.

Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight

#125
post #14

Video "tour" here (still doesn't show it flying): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elhiaxMiRuY&t=19s Also, the inaugural flight at CES was scrapped due to a "light sprinkling" of rain: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42616034

It's frustrating, and a bit strange, that there's no (easy to find) video of it in flight.

Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight

#126
The fully electric Lilium out of Germany is a far more interesting project. Without a gas engine, the noise and cost problems are greatly mitigated.

I don't know how far away it is from commercialization, but it would appear that the the proof of concept is coming along nicely.

https://lilium.com/

Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight

#127
post #97
post #19

A 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…

This would have to fall into the ultralight classification for someone to fly this without training. The FAA could easily classify this otherwise if they perceived any problem. Also, getting your pilots license is nothing like getting a car license, the training is much harder and requires a certain amount of hours in the car with a licensed flight instructor before they can fly on their own (I believe it's 50 hours…

[deleted]

Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight

#128
post #19

A 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…

If we can have self driving cars, sure these can be self flying then you don't have to worry. With your AR eye glasses and earbuds, it can clean out the clutter showing you a clear blue sky and eliminate all the buzzing.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN