I think I'll wait for like... version 5.
SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
131–140 of 157 posts
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#132A 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…
You can get a private pilot's license with 40 hours total time. (Most people do it in around 60-80.) I don't have as good a feeling on the stats on time until solo, but the average is almost surely under 20 hours.
Agree that this isn't going to be a hobby for the average unmotivated teen.
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#133Yet 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
If they wanted to prove the design, why can't they offer package delivery services with the drones and ramp up volume to at least 100 flights a day until it's proven?!
If they've proven it works, they should get the money necessary to test it and deploy it. They need to get to market and see if it sells.
I think the problem is crashing over populated areas, even if it's not occupied? Hard to make deliveries if you can't fly over actual people.
But in any case, let me know when they are doing at least 10 flights per day (no days off for bad weather, they should be testing in multiple locations and climates too).
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I didn't read the comment as a suggestion of being better off without automobiles - merely an observation that the same reservations were felt by people transitioning from horses to automobiles...
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't worry about that. Most people can't even drive cars in "2D" safely, never mind helicopters. The general public will never be given the skies, unless the flights are automated.
Don't today's drones and airplanes demonstrate that automating flying is a lot easier than automating driving?
No they don't. Drones are generally only allowed to fly at very low altitude in most US airspace because they can't reliably see and avoid manned aircraft operating under VFR.
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#136Guaranteed vaporware. If these guys had even a fraction of a clue they would have gone with a 6 rotor design.
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't worry about that. Most people can't even drive cars in "2D" safely, never mind helicopters. The general public will never be given the skies, unless the flights are automated.
It's much harder to hit something in the air.
As any pilot knows, the stomach unfriendly words from Tower are: "Caution, Wake Turbulence".
The air, being a sparse fluid, can change fast. Especially so if another aircraft has flown through it recently. It's not that there isn't anyone there, it's the air they left behind is all non-laminar now. Doubly being suddenly downwind of stationary objects like towers, wind farms, and mountains.
Also, quick point of caution: One reason early flyers died a lot because they flew so low. Even after a few meters of height, just about any crash is likely to be deadly. Paradoxically, the higher you fly, the better off you are (in certain cases). In flying, your height can be measured in 'mistake recovery time'. The higher you are, the more time you have before you hit the ground, the more time you have to fix a mistake. If your engine cuts out, you have a longer glide time to look for a lake. You can get a fuel pump restarted or unfrozen. You have more time to grab a parachute and bail. Etc. It took a long time and a lot of lives to realize this. As such, personal drone-choppers will be more dangerous and I fear we will have to re-learn the lesson of height being a friend in aviation.
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#138> 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.
Is that even the ethical approach here, though. If you can afford a flying machine, you can afford to keep a roof over a family for 3 years (Assuming two earners earning 22,000 GBP / year (Which is far more than my parents ever earned in their lives)). Or you could pay 6 people's expenses off for a year.
If you have that much disposable income, and you spend all of it on something that benefits only yourself, what does that say about you as a person?
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't worry about that. Most people can't even drive cars in "2D" safely, never mind helicopters. The general public will never be given the skies, unless the flights are automated.
Don't today's drones and airplanes demonstrate that automating flying is a lot easier than automating driving?
I work in the field. Basically, yes. On average it is easier to fly than it is to drive, mostly because there's far fewer things to crash into. But on the other hand, almost any failure can become catastrophic - falling out of the sky will usually have much worse consequences than, say, bumping into the car in front of you.
Re: SureFly – a personal helicopter designed for safe and easy flight
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's much harder to hit something in the air.
As any pilot knows, the stomach unfriendly words from Tower are: "Caution, Wake Turbulence". The air, being a sparse fluid, can change fast. Especially so if another aircraft has flown through it recently. It's not that there isn't anyone there, it's the air they left behind is all non-laminar now. Doubly being suddenly downwind of stationary objects like towers, wind farms, and mountains. Also, quick point of cautio…
It comes with a parachute