Wisk Aero: Autonomous Urban Air Mobility
wisk.aero
wisk.aero
The aircraft need to take off and land from somewhere, and given that they're multi-ton objects with rapidly-spinning metal protrusions, that'll need to be designated spaces. Designated spaces mean rate limiting - think of a taxi queue outside an airport. These will not just be allowed to fly _anywhere_ - they will have approved flight paths, because there's no way we'll allow a substantial number of flying vehicles to just fly wherever without some kind of controls, and they'll absolutely require more space between them than cars on a highway get. They've got a range of 90 miles, which is nice, but what's the turnaround time look like? How long between flights does it take to get the air taxi back in the air?
This may be a fine way for the wealthy to avoid traffic between their tower and the airport, but there's absolutely no world where this makes any kind of genuine impact on traffic or urban transit broadly.
HeliNY says from NYC to the Hamptons is "Round Trip – $2,995" by chartered helicopter where each way is a little over half an hour.
Ziprecruiter says "As of Oct 2, 2022, the average hourly pay for a Helicopter Pilot in the United States is $47.41 an hour"
So eliminating the pilot is probably not that lucrative?
Although, there are inexpensive helicopter rides in NYC. $200 for a seat in a 5 minute flight from Manhattan to JFK.
https://thepointsguy.com/news/when-helicopters-landed-on-man...
It did not work out so well...
On May 16, 1977, the landing gear failed on a Sikorsky S-61L (N619PA) while it was taking on passengers on the roof of the Pan Am Building. The aircraft fell onto its side. Its spinning principal rotor blades killed four passengers waiting to board (including movie director Michael Findlay) and injured a fifth. Parts of a broken blade fell into the streets below, killing one pedestrian and injuring another. The accident precipitated the permanent closure of the heliport.[11]
(And it's not like autopilot is full automation. You still need a pilot.)
Are companies really going to put the C-suite in one of these, given the parade of potential horribles?
I'd say "yes", once the idea is proven and the kinks are sorted.
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-releases-vertiport-design-s...
And FWIW, there is more space in the sky than on earth, where cars are rather prevalent.
There's older video of a previous prototype taking off, landing, and flying around.[1] That gives a sense of how it handles.
It's a reasonable design. More practical than the eHang.[2] The eHang has been around for years; it's a quadrotor drone scaled up to carry people. It has the big problem of all pure-thrust craft - no glide capability. Flies OK, but not much range. There have been a few other drone-like vehicles built like that. None seem to be deployed. Range and battery life are a huge problem.
Having a wing helps. Once transition to forward flight has been made, power requirements are much lower. So the range becomes useful. And there's at least the potential to glide to a controlled crash on power failure.
There's been a lot of interest lately in VTOLs that take off on electric power and then use a wing and pusher prop for cruise. There are even drones like that, with ranges of hundreds of miles. This is much simpler mechanically than tilting wing concepts, which are mechanical nightmares. Look up how the Osprey's power train works.
It's also nice seeing those props above head height, rather than down at ankle and head level like the eHang.
This has potential.
If you are going to believe the BS header video, you might as well believe this BS story.
To be fair, the posters were absolutely correct. It was soon after Kitty Hawk that it became possible and even commonplace to fly on commercial passenger aircraft from NY to Paris in 15 hours or less. Of course, this depends on exactly how you define "soon"...
A couple observations. Commercial airliners like Airbus with electrically actuated control surfaces have redundant power buses, crossbars, actuators etc.
A multirotor doesn't actually need full power to emergency land, just enough o hold a descent rate of 10-20 kts like a parachute. If run all your motors at less than full power normally, then if you lose a few, you have some capacity to throttle up the remainder in concert to emergency land.
I'd be more concerned about how it selects an emergency landing spot over a city.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/watch-this-chinese-flying-taxi...
"Watch This Chinese Flying Taxi Take Flight Above Dubai"
> The XPeng X2, an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicle from EV firm XPeng Inc, soared in the skies of the United Arab Emirates city during a test flight on Monday. While the flight was uncrewed, the company said that they conducted a manned flight in July 2021.
> Watch the action for yourself below:
I’m not sure that this solves our traffic problem. A four passenger plane might end up just like a 4 passenger car - mostly empty, but because it’s flying using more energy, taking up more space, and creating a lot more noise. It opens up more capacity than using a road alone, but when everyone wants to go to the same football match by air-taxi, you’re going to end up with these things circling for miles.
I would hope these would be standard on vehicles that cannot "dead-stick" (glide) to landing like a fixed wing, or auto-rotate to the ground like a helicopter.
In VTOL, safety is a much greater concern. Six props with what appear to be independent motors makes me feel a lot better about it from the start, though. What’s its TWR?
My point being that if the TWR is > ~1.5 - and I’m quite sure it is, or VTOL would be very difficult - then you can “safely” lose a prop and still be able to get back to the ground.
However, there will be several different batteries and powertrains and control systems, eliminating any single point of failure.
For the Volocopter (an aircraft with 18 rotors), at least three rotors or one battery system can fail and it can still land in a controlled manner.
There is also the option of fitting a ballistic chute.
Side issue -- also, the volume on the video is too low.