201–210 of 246 posts
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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?
Lacks the safety features of airplanes (gliding) or helicopters (autorotation), has terrible rotor placement and small air time. I would advertise it as "your personal death machine". :) No amount of money would make me use that thing. EDIT: Ok, sorry, it says it has a parachute, but I still would not use it.
Parachutes have a minimum altitude. For standard human chutes, that’s 300 feet (100 meters) or so. Not sure what the ceiling is on this. They don’t have footage of it going too high. You only need to fall 30 feet (10 m), to buy the farm. Less, in many cases (depending on how you fall, and onto what).
If you have the money, zero/zero ballistic parachutes have been a reliable thing for more than half a century.
For ultralight sized aircraft, they cost about 1/5 the cost of a new airframe.
Generally they don't provide much survivability IMHO. Most ultralight deaths seem to boil down to CFIT and similar "happened too fast too close to ground" incidents with a side dish of refusal to do maintenance, and you know they're not going to maintain their airframe parachute or how its attached or how to engage it if they refuse to maintain their engine... But they are available and in special cases they might be useful.
Lacks the safety features of airplanes (gliding) or helicopters (autorotation), has terrible rotor placement and small air time. I would advertise it as "your personal death machine". :) No amount of money would make me use that thing. EDIT: Ok, sorry, it says it has a parachute, but I still would not use it.
Electric motors can autorotate just fine: https://youtu.be/QADYnVeHQOQ You can't descend quite as slow as a normal engine because the motor has somewhat more friction at low RPM, even though it's similar to free-spinning at higher RPM. That makes for a rougher final approach but just as much glide distance and control. Small rotors will make it more of a hassle but should still be quite safe. Even if you do end up to…
Your video shows an electric helicopter with a full size helicopter main rotor, which is not what the Jetson vehicle uses.
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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…
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 clo…
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The liquid fuels Moller used had much better energy densities than batteries, but it never flew without a tether. The Jetson One claims to have 20 minutes endurance, which is very impressive, but still impractical. I'm not so sure the finish line is within sight yet. This is closer to an ATV than it is to a scooter. It even looks a bit like a Honda Pilot ATV with propellors. It could attract more folks than a traditi…
I had no idea that Honda had first used the name Pilot for an ATV!
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Some gyros can jump-start, as in pre-spin their rotor fast enough for vertical take off. It would add a bit of complexity but it'll still be relatively simple.
Wouldn’t that make the body spin in the opposite direction?
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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…
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 clo…
Besides, none of your examples require that a human actually be inside the vehicle. They could all be done by unmanned drone. The only reason to put a human in the vehicle is to travel.
Now if they replaced the human with its weight in batteries, or better yet a hydrogen tank with a fuel cell, this would give it a huge flight time which would make it much more useful.