These things have absolutely no viability unless they're quiet
Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle
111–120 of 246 posts
Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle
#112With a 20 minute flight time (and is that with any safety margin remaining? Doesn’t say.) at ~60mph I can only make a 10 mile round trip. 20 miles of each landing spot has a charger (and I doubt there’s weight budget to carry a decent charger with me).
It’s a very cool kit for hobbyists but there are very few missions this can fly with utility.
Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle
#113Almost looks like a ground-effect vehicle. Doesn’t go too high; which may not really be an issue. Just high enough, so tarmac isn’t necessary. I seem to recall a discussion on HN, where it was explained that quadcopters don’t scale up too well. I don’t remember the reasoning. The one thing that concerns me about commodity-level flying vehicles, is the way people drive the ones that are stuck on the ground. I would wa…
Quadrotors use rpm-based control, which is simple and effective, but doesn't scale as the rotor gets bigger and the moment of inertia increases. You could switch to pitch-based control, but then you lose the simplicity, which is a big part of the appeal. The other issue is that the efficiency of any propulsion system is proportional to the disk area. Four smaller propellers have the advantage of zero net torque on the airframe, but carry a substantial penalty in terms of efficiency, which cuts into performance.
Fixing these issues inevitably leads you to a helicopter.
Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might want to meet some football players/wrestlers/gymnasts etc before you tell someone to lose some pounds, just based on weight alone
What are the odds that someone posting on this site falls into those categories?
More common than you might expect!
You do not need to be a professional sports person - keen hobbyists exist and there is definitely a group here that are into power lifting.
Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are also enough false deployments that caused harm with these parachutes (edit: instances where pilots didn’t deploy when they should have) that the jury is out on how much of an improvement these are to safety, overall. Operator skill and training is a big factor and this product isn’t targeted at highly trained pilots.
I haven't heard of any deaths as a result but I'm sure there are a few. Usually it's just a hull loss. That said, this looks like another Icon A5 situation...
I don’t have great sources, so take my claim with a grain of salt. But overall this analysis of Cirrus incidents over 25 years [0] was interesting to read.
In response to fatalities and pilots choosing not to use the parachute when that could have saved lives, Cirrus improved training and saw significant safety record improvements.
> By then, Cirrus had already upgraded its training twice, eventually pulling it entirely in-house. All new-aircraft buyers take it.
They also have training for the used market, and saw owners that didn’t do it often had worse safety records.
Since a Cirrus has a wing, the parachute is primarily a super last resort.. the passenger safety training I took even said it’s mainly to be used if the pilot passes out and a passenger engages it.
The jetson doesn’t have a wing, so I’m happy they have this parachute. I hope they can offer great training too.
[0] https://www.aviationconsumer.com/safety/cirrus-at-25-a-safer...
Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle
#116Really impressed a swedish company has gone and done this.
We asked for the flying car, YC has not given it to us.
Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle
#117With a 20 minute flight time (and is that with any safety margin remaining? Doesn’t say.) at ~60mph I can only make a 10 mile round trip. 20 miles of each landing spot has a charger (and I doubt there’s weight budget to carry a decent charger with me). It’s a very cool kit for hobbyists but there are very few missions this can fly with utility.
I don't know - 10 miles across impassable terrain sounds pretty good if the alternative is a 60 miles detour driving around a fjord or Forrest or something.
Still I don't think this is designed for "utility" - seems to me it is more for the fun of it.
Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle
#118I was about to leave a snarky "glide ratio = 0" comment until I saw the note about the ballistic parachute. Wish they included the effective altitude though. I assume it would be effective from a lower altitude than the Cirrus, as this thing weighs only ~400 lbs with a human in it.
Parachute opening needs to balance between speed of deployment (because the ground is coming up) and G-force shock (because humans are squishy, and even the aircraft structure they're attached to has a limit).
Cirrus flies fast, so its parachute has a slider / limiter on it to reduce the speed of opening to keep the G shock manageable. On the other hand, since the top speed of this Jetson device is pretty low at 63mph, their parachute must have no slider and can probably be deployed from as little as 200 ft in ideal conditions. Depends on the exact model, your decision/reaction time, aircraft speed, attitude, and stability at time of deploy, etc.
The parachute should cost less than $5K, and its weight is not included in the 255lb weight limit (it's an FAA part 103 aircraft), so it's pretty much a no-brainer to add it to this aircraft, even if it's not very useful in very low level flights.
Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am aware crazy people do exist. It's a matter of degree and I would suggest that flying this thought a forest Endor style would be far more dangerous than free solo climbing.
It's more or less like wingsuit flying, just faster and with obstacles much closer. So yeah, I would say orders of magnitude more dangerous than free solo climbing...
Wingsuit flying is pretty well known as a hobby that eventually kills almost everyone who does it. It seems once you start flying as close to rocks as you can for fun there's some sort of skill-risk feedback loop that eventually kills you.
Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle
#120EHang has a vehicle like that.[1] There are a few other quadcopters big enough to carry a human. So far no real products, but some nice demos. [1] https://ehang.com/
Have to say that EHang's version looks nicer and safer. They also have a two seater version. Same flight time (20 minutes).