41–50 of 83 posts
https://www.elitereaders.net/flyingkyxz-flying-drone-car-phi...
The PT6A-28 is also a surprising and interesting choice... though I suppose once you get past the idea of not using a piston engine, it's less surprising.
This is very cool. I had to look around a bit, but I found a link to DRACO taking off at at a competition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp3402SOk8A Apparently this distance is about 100ft. Stats are all over the place, but "DRACO will climb at 4,000 feet-per-minute (FPM) and cruise at 180 mph (290 km/h) at 16,000 feet." which apparently blows everyone else out of the water (and it should for a 1M+ plane) Also, 5 m…
That short take off took me totally by surprise. That's not even 100m
i wonder if he considered an electric motor. no horsepower penalty for high altitudes with that. just the battery problems..
I imagine even for bush planes the battery weight will be immense due to the much much lower energy density (it's about 2-3 orders of magnitude and you loose fuel while you fly, batteries don't change weight when discharged).
edit: electric motors do have penalties for high altitude, notably the reduced pressure will make cooling less efficient and reduce the maximum power output (though generally your efficiency overall should remain stable and normal)
There's a few companies designing smaller turbines (100-200 kW size) for aircraft, http://www.turbotech-aero.com/ and https://www.turb.aero/ , competing with Rotax 912, Lycoming, Continental. Guess we'll see if the promises of lower costs come true.
There's also a few companies making diesel aircraft engines, AFAIK these have seen some success in Europe where 100LL is crazy expensive.
Maybe GA is, ever so slowly, entering the jet (fuel) age..?
As someone who does this kind of work, the timeline is absolutely insane. The aircraft started out as a PZL-104MA Wilga 2000 but he redid part of the wing, built an entire carbon fiber cowling and redid the wiring, all on top of the engine install, though that and the carbon fiber he had fairly extensive previous experience with. One thing you'll notice if you watch the build videos is he makes extensive use of very…
Speaking of crazy timelines, Robert X. Cringely attempts to build a plane in 30 days in the documentary Plane Crazy : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0164814/ https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/22/arts/television-review-th...
This pretty much removes any part of "engineering challenge" there