Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

They should add on crush core legs to handle falls lower than parachutable.

The Jetson is an improvement over the status quo: no flying cars.

What are you comparing, deaths per flight, per flight hour, per participant per year? Do you distinguish tourists, hobbyists, and competitors? What about injuries?

Credible and reliable data for such comparisons does not exist, unfortunately.

Paragliders who aren't idiots don't spend much time at 40ft AGL in weather conditions that can cause a collapse. And not every low altitude collapse is fatal. Spine compression injury is more likely, and they wear padding on their butt to minimize that (some even have airbags).

For better or worse, the main predictive risk factor in paragliding is personal attitude, and I suspect it's the same in parachuting.

Thats the drone pendolum fallacy. The center of lift is largely irrelevant: https://drones.stackexchange.com/questions/1102/is-it-better...

Depends a lot on use case.

I have some experience with visual inspection of aerial optical fiber. You can rent a very large and expensive helicopter to fly uncomfortably close to swaying fiber and power lines, or fly this thing up and down the line.

There's also a lot of money in visual inspection of power lines. Not in California, LOL, where they just let it burn, but in better areas, when trees or vines get too close to the power lines, even during droughts, they trim them rather than letting them catch fire and burn off. But I live in a civilized area far from the coasts LOL.

I imagine this will get militarized and police-militarized very quickly. Thirty seconds before kicking the door in over unpaid library fines or writing the wrong politics on twitter, fly the plane over the building and look in all the windows and make some decisions about letting the team kick the door in, or land the plane on the roof or try to find the best vantage point to observe or illuminate the situation. In 12 minutes everyone in the house or everyone in the swat team will be dead, one way or the other. Might be good for last minute verification its the correct house, not that there's ever any punishment for shooting the wrong people, in either military or civilian or militarized police situations.

I suspect there are entire classes of non-tactical military-type use. Aircraft crashes next to the aircraft carrier, a few minutes/seconds of nearly instantly arriving and hovering over the pilot will help the "real" helicopters and rescue crews find the pilot. A human piloted electric drone could hover over a pilot before a turbine helicopter finishes spinning up the rotor... Its not powerful enough to lift people in a rescue situation but is strong enough to drop lightweight supplies.

There are some limited situations where a human being on site making judgement calls is safer and more efficient than a pre-programmed drone or a human very far away and uncoordinated with the folks on site.

I suspect battlefield communications is in a stage much like anti-aircraft defense in Vietnam in the early days, before surface to air missiles existed. I think the USA, and probably the world, has seen the last battlefield of total emcom superiority. In 2030 trying to fly a FPV observation drone will just get automatic counterbattery fire on both the drone and operator, on both sides, etc. The days of you just freely transmit are over. The land battlefield is going to look a lot more like naval sonar situation where if you active sonar ping you get blown up by someone you never even hear. So everyone's got a radio and blue force tracker and all that is kinda over now.