Volocopter 2x – Safer Alternative to a Personal Helicopter • Hacker News Board

Re: Volocopter 2x – Safer Alternative to a Personal Helicopter

#61

Post by dmitrygr » Fri, Apr 07, 2017, 8:21 PM UTC

ben_bai wrote: post #36

1ba9115454 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For urban moblity, let's take a use case of flying someone from central london to heathrow airport i.e. 20miles or 30km. Assuming this thing could fly at 60km/h then a flight time of 30 minutes would be required. I'm not aware of any electric VTOL vehicle with this capability at the moment. But we live in hope.

The 2X predecessor is called VC200 and reaches 70km/h and had a flying time of around 20 minutes.

In EU and USA, flying a passenger aircraft requires reserves of 30 minutes minimum (more in some cases, never less)

if your flight time is 20 min, you cannot legally take off

if your flight time is 31 minutes, your flight cannot legally be planned to be over a minute long

Re: Volocopter 2x – Safer Alternative to a Personal Helicopter

#62

Post by valuearb » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 2:42 AM UTC

peterwaller wrote: post #49

rdtsc wrote: post #14

I really like these. There is something to these kind of inventions that always puts them "just around the corner" category. This has been going on since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar in the 90's. There is probably a combination of a tendency of people to dream about flying, and how much fun it would be, combined with the ignorance of all possible hurdles, not just physical and engineering ones, bu…

Interesting video of Moller himself talking about it (while sitting in one of these cars): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOR_SzLW2Ns There's some grainy test flight footage at the end, too.

With all that Moller has accomplished, he's the expert.

Re: Volocopter 2x – Safer Alternative to a Personal Helicopter

#63

Post by tempestn » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 3:20 AM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #51

tempestn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, is there a button that's held while rotating the stick to rotate? The stick looks directional, so it wouldn't make sense to just rotate it and keep it rotated... Anyway, sounds like a cool setup.

My understanding is that when you rotate the stick, the angle controls the rotational (yaw) speed of the Volcopter (in other words, you hold the stick straight, it'll keep looking in a fixed direction, say north. Now if you twist the stick a few degrees, it'll slowly rotate in that direction (and keep rotating as long as you hold it twisted). If you twist it more, it'll rotate faster. If you let go (untwist), it'll s…

Ah, right, of course. That makes sense.