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Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

jetsonaero.com

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Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#131

Post by t0mas88 »

fho wrote: post #128
unwind wrote: post #126

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…

I saw that video some days ago and thought "that would be a nifty way to get to work and back" ... 12 minutes flight time would actually allow that for me ... but not for a lot of others.

12 minutes endurance is absolute madness to any pilot. No way to fly this thing within the current regulations.

A fuel powered aircraft needs to land with a legal minimum fuel reserve of 30 minutes when flying visually (good weather only), in worse weather it's 45 minutes + the time it takes to get to an alternate airport in case of problems at the destination. So usually 1 to 1.5 hour of reserve/alternate fuel on top of the time needed for the flight itself.

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#132

Post by bartread »

peter_retief wrote: post #100
satisfice wrote: post #65

Maximum pilot weight of 210lbs? I suppose if I were rich enough to buy this I could also get myself a personal trainer.

I had to do the conversion to kg which is 95.25kg. My naked weight is 93kg but with clothes/wallet/keys goes up to about 95kg. I guess I will have to wait for the family version to come out.

Me too. If I got down to 90 - 91kg and 10% body fat I could just about squeeze in but with clothes and my work bag as well? Nope.

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#133

Post by rbanffy »

msla wrote: post #77
kumarvvr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will you not entertain the possibility that a form of travel using geodesic distance may be more efficient? I completely agree. But for mass market personal aerial vehicles, regulation would eventually force vehicles to fly close to ground (for safety of self and others, better fall 30 feet than 300 feet) In this scenario, geodesic distance hardly makes any difference. Personal aerial vehicles are never going to be…

The way to make flying cars (and let's drop the sophisticated terminology, we're discussing something called Jetson One) safe for the mass market is to make them available as fleet vehicles for taxi companies such that you can ensure all the drivers are trained and sober and all the vehicles are maintained and inspected. Even if the hivemind insists they'll be self-flying, it's still unsafe beyond normal bounds of un…

Either that or automate the flight controls so much you effectively remove the human from the scene.

I can see a PAV that can’t be flown manually outside designated areas or a city where full automation is mandatory for all cars within its limits.

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#134

Post by t0mas88 »

lxmorj wrote: post #123
edrxty wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Surely there are flight patterns that can minimize this risk: ie diagnostic hover at 10ft for X seconds to rule out start up failures, followed by an ascend to 500ft, flight path maintains that height, similar pause prior to descent on landing...

This is usually done in helicopters, but it's not straight up and hover but instead a departure over the runway with forward speed. You can use that speed/energy in an emergency like losing an engine.

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#135

Post by pininja »

mattlondon wrote: post #117
pininja wrote: post #112

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.

Totally agree it’d be great in those situations, but I just don’t think there are a lot of people who need that. It’s probably a lot of fun to fly.

It’s just stressful to think if something isn’t going right in flight and I want time to think and react.. every minute is 5% of my battery. I also saw in another post that fully loaded the battery life is 12 minutes total.. nearly 10% a minute brand new (which every charge cycle reducing my total energy).

They also said the batteries are swappable, so if I had 3 in a rotation they could all be charging/flying with up to an hour of flight. Sounds like a fun day!

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#136

Post by t0mas88 »

syntaxing wrote: post #15
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #12

Almost 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…

Because smaller prop means you need to spin faster to hit the same airflow. And efficiency usually drops by x^2 as a function of rotation velocity. Also, at high speed you have vacuum issues near the tip of the blade. Therefore, having four small rotors can easily be up to a magnitude less efficient than a helicopter.

Efficiency drops by "propeller" speed and then falls off a cliff when the prop tips go super sonic. So you really can't just make them bigger and spin faster.

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#137

Post by tdeck »

bullen wrote: post #104
kumarvvr wrote: post #24

We have gained so much in terms of technological progress, consistently reducing the energy required to go from point A to point B, it surprises me how we are again increasing it for getting from point A to point B. The concept is great, but the push for mass market adoption bugs me. These things are not efficient modes of transport. It takes a lot of energy to move one person from A to B.

At 100km/h this thing only has a roundtrip range of ~15km with the 20 minute onboard energy. I'm not complaining about the vehicle to transported ratio though, it's about the same as my lead-acid e-bike: http://elhjul.se

This comment makes me wonder if something like this could be supplemented with human power to extend its flight range.

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#138

Post by hef19898 »

t0mas88 wrote: post #131
fho wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that video some days ago and thought "that would be a nifty way to get to work and back" ... 12 minutes flight time would actually allow that for me ... but not for a lot of others.

12 minutes endurance is absolute madness to any pilot. No way to fly this thing within the current regulations. A fuel powered aircraft needs to land with a legal minimum fuel reserve of 30 minutes when flying visually (good weather only), in worse weather it's 45 minutes + the time it takes to get to an alternate airport in case of problems at the destination. So usually 1 to 1.5 hour of reserve/alternate fuel on to…

That depends under which class the aircraft will be certified, depsite it being electric I could image that it falls under the ultra-light class (I'd have to look up the exact Name under EASA so).

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#140

Post by hef19898 »

rbanffy wrote: post #127
fastball wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have this problem with Lotus cars. They “fit like a glove”.

A correctly sized glove I hope!
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