Jetson hoverbike flies CEO to work, in world’s first eVTOL commute
earthsky.org
earthsky.org
I mean, the flight video is nice, but this "commute" seems to me very unlike what most people experience daily.
I would also be curious to know what the noise is like. You couldn't tell with the music playing. I wonder if that's intentional. I looked for the db/noise rating in the specs on their site but it wasn't listed. I imagine if you lived in that serene country setting and someone was buzzing your property in their Jetson hoverbike you wouldn't be too thrilled.
... and a pool, like most offices ....
I hear Elon Musk made a quote something about nobody wants flying craft all over their heads, but thats the point of the flying craft. Most people live near high density centres because transportation on land dictates but if we could go up we could have more greenery and spread out a little.
2 cents
Flying cars are running against noise barrier head-on and every proponent of flying cars will be surprised that people really does not like scream of 8 vacuum cleaners at 2am.
I don't want to downplay the achievement. Building this thing was hard, and I'm sure that flying it must be super fun. Heck, I won't even rule out buying one myself. But when I look at this from the perspective of our ancestors who dreamed of flying, and of our future, I must say: This is not the answer. It's one very clumsy, inelegant iteration, like some 1950s mainframe computer. We should be happy that it exists. But it should exist only as an ancestor to something greater. In other words, we shouldn't celebrate and say we "cracked human flight", or "the flying car", or "democratization of flying". We should not be satisfied with this, at all. And we should remember that, if old Lilienthal saw this, he would be disappointed in us. He'd want us to try harder.
(He might even say that it's not "flying like a bird" anymore if it's so loud. That what we've done here is cheating. Like launching a man from a catapult and then claiming we've "solved flying". It just isn't the thing that people imagined when they longed to "fly like a bird".)
I’m curious what the failure mode is like for this. In a plane you and glide and in a helicopter you can autorotate.
With this, I guess it’s a fairly abrupt plummet to the ground?? (Hence a need to limit the height you can fly at?)
On the flip side I guess you may have more redundancies here with the 4x (or is it 8?) motors…
Also, the geek in me wanted to see a nice large cockpit screen with navigation and various vehicle metrics. I’m somewhat surprised that you can make such an elegant looking flying machine but not have much in the way of a computerised (or indeed any) dashboard! (Unless it just wasn’t captured in the video).
These parachutes do take a few seconds to inflate and decelerate a falling aircraft. So there is a "dead zone" in the flight envelope: too low to use the parachute, too high to survive an uncontrolled crash.
at time offset 02:26 it flies ridiculously close to some tree branches. May be the camera angle but that looks too close for comfort
at 02:41 it flies UNDER some power/utility cable, between 2 poles.
Generally throughout the video it's flying way too low, under the tree line, there were so many obstacles at its height. Are they trying to make me NOT want one of these, was it an illegal flight trying not to be detected and fined massively, was it imposed by the local airspace administration (assuming any were aware) ... ?
I’d be curious to know how large a sphere crash dome around the drone you would need to have a 90% chance of survival falling at terminal velocity.
Meanwhile, catastrophic economical failure, food shortages, inflation and climate change are acutely threatening us, but at least some rich dudes can fly around to places without basic infrastructure, over the heads of the starving and struggling poorer quantiles, to “develop” them.
Makes sense.
I will be sure to tell the hn story by the campfire.
You have me wonder how one would explain the concept of rich people to the post apocalyptic generation. We.. ehh i mean they created a contract that says everything in the world may only be used by them and everyone else just agreed with it.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if one day autonomous flight for low cost aircraft like this one would turn out to be much easier than autonomous drive for cars. I mean the computational problems behind it; energy requirements are of course a whole different story though, and will keep prices very high for quite some time, but I can envision a future in which autonomous flying aircraft can talk each other to avoid collisions and/or arrange taking off or landing from/to shared reduced space.
Begin listing the functions for autonomous car. I’ll wait.
True but they depend on roads that are built all different from each other, full of irregular shapes and surprises, bumps, pedestrians, bicycles, absent, broken or different signs when traveling to other counties, etc.
The problem is that there are a zillion different potential failure modes (some involving circumstances completely outside the designer's control) and it's impossible to program in responses to all of them. Where experienced human commercial pilots really earn their pay is in handling those rare emergencies.