121–130 of 246 posts
It's quite hard to find high quality electric drive components in this size – too big for drones, too small for full scale airplanes. https://store.tmotor.com/ is another alternative.
Maximum pilot weight of 210lbs? I suppose if I were rich enough to buy this I could also get myself a personal trainer.
Well at 210 lbs you're either tall enough that you probably won't fit in this thing lengthwise or you are in fact overweight and losing a few lbs wouldn't hurt.
I 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.
The official number is 400ft but I've heard anecdotes that there have been successful deployments lower. That said, I see this being operated in the "dead mans curve", ie well below any effective height, for a significant portion of it's flight
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In fact, the sport is growing.
Vi vill inte att folk ska köpa vår produkt och krascha den direkt, så vi har sålt till välkända personer främst i USA som skulle få för mycket skit om de gjorde dumheter med den
which translates to (note: native Swedish speaker, but not a certified translator):
We don't want people to buy our product and crash it straight away, so we have been selling to famous people mostly in the US, who would get too much crap if they fooled around with it"
I enjoyed the directness of that statement. :)
Also learned from the same article:
- The maximum cargo weight including pilot is 100 kg, if you actually reach that then flying time is reduced to 12 minutes.
- The battery pack is charged externally, i.e. not in the vehicle, so you can have spares and swap.
- No mention of the battery pack's weight, but I guess you would have to be quite a bit below those 100 kg in order to have room for another battery.
- New owners get a 2-day course (not a "crash course", I guess :) at Jetson before being allowed to take their new vehicle home.
EDIT: Fixed italics for translated quote.
[1]: https://teknikensvarld.se/nyheter/miljo-och-teknik/jetson-on...
Maximum pilot weight of 210lbs? I suppose if I were rich enough to buy this I could also get myself a personal trainer.
Well at 210 lbs you're either tall enough that you probably won't fit in this thing lengthwise or you are in fact overweight and losing a few lbs wouldn't hurt.
I found this [1] article when I started googling the people in the company, I thought this quite from their CTO Tomasz Patan was fun: Vi vill inte att folk ska köpa vår produkt och krascha den direkt, så vi har sålt till välkända personer främst i USA som skulle få för mycket skit om de gjorde dumheter med den which translates to (note: native Swedish speaker, but not a certified translator): We don't want people to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moller tried making an actual car-sized vehicle with 2 seats. The Jetson One produced a minimalistic 1 seat vehicle.
There are quite a few other companies building larger scale VTOL vehicles: Joby, Lilium, Airbus, Archer...
not to forget Opener BlackFly
With 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.