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Flying taxi at the Paris air show is quiet – too quiet
- fh973 3y agohttps://archive.is/I7hLV https://archive.is/I7hLV
- travisporter 3y agoDebut of Volocopter’s electric-powered air cab is drowned out by roaring jets and helicopters at air-industry bazaar
- caditinpiscinam 3y agoAnyone have a sense of how the energy needed to fly something like this compares to driving an electric car the same distance?
- charlieyu1 3y agoWe would have hover cars like we predicted decades ago if it is energy expensive. Lifting a vehicle and passengers is always costly in energy.
- zdragnar 3y agoIt is really a basic physics question, no? Air has little mass, and so provides poor thrust under Newton's third law of motion compared to a tire on the earth. A car on the ground will always be more efficient than something which dumps its energy into air.
- bombcar 3y agoA small plane can carry 1-4 people at 120 MPH consuming about 11 gallons an hour, for a "MPG" of about 11 (miles in the air don't exactly translate to ground because air flows but it evens out over time). Even with modern efficiencies available, I doubt they'd do more than double that, so a car would still easily win, unless the car had one person in it and the plane 4.
- amelius 3y agoTime to resurrect the zeppelin, of course with better safety measures.
- bragr 3y agoAirships never really went away, but "hydrogen go bang" is hardly their only problem sadly.
- someweirdperson 3y agoHydrogen doesn't "go bang" unless mixed with the proper amount of oxygen. Usually, it just burns nice and smooth. Not much of a difference for anyone riding the airship though.
- barelyauser 3y ago>>Usually, it just burns nice Great choice of words to calm the passengers as we lose all our air worthiness.
- merth 3y agowouldn't you recover the energy back while landing in same sense with car breaks that recharges the battery
- palata 3y agoI think (not an expert though) that a multicopter like this is fundamentally less efficient than a helicopter. It has to do with the surface of the rotary wing (many small props cover less surface than a single big one). I know that's not answering the question about the car (btw electric or not doesn't fundamentally change the energy question, except that electric cars like Tesla tend to be heavy, I would say), but still I find it interesting.
- marcosdumay 3y ago> many small props cover less surface than a single big one Well, things change when you make a lot of small props. This one has an entire ring of them, and they fit a larger outer diameter than a helicopter would. That's quite possibly the reason they are quiet, because they have more propeller area, operating on a smaller speed. Very likely, here the amount of noise is a better guideline for efficiency than the usual characteristics of the basic design. (There is no mention of the cost. It is the first thing to suffer when increasing the propeller area.) Anyway, about the car question, the article says it is as noisy as a small grass mower... I guess an electrical car is much more silent than this.
- presentation 3y agoA friend working on this type of technology mentions that altering the frequency at which sound is emitted to those outside the human hearing range can make a big difference.
- crubier 3y agoOne small propeller is less efficient than one big propeller. What drives the efficiency really is the ratio of propeller surface area to mass. So a lot of small propellers are roughly as efficient as a big one. Actually bonus point for the propellers being twisted, which is not possible on helicopters.
- mabbo 3y agoThere are videos online of a cyclist pedaling a craft with enough energy to lift off the ground. Mind you, it was a purpose built craft in a very staged environment with an Olympic level cyclist, but you can still use that as a baseline for how much energy you need to lift a human aloft.
- kleiba 3y ago[flagged]
- hef19898 3y agoEither too many or not enough, depending on use case and / or perspective.
- causality0 3y agoThe company hasn’t disclosed its pricing model, and the aircraft’s limited routes and capacity—one pilot and one passenger—might curb broad use initially. Why would you put a pilot in the aircraft? He's not actually controlling the balance of the rotors, so why can't he be remote? If computer control fails the thing is cratering regardless of what the pilot does. Putting him in it is just wasting energy for no reason. "The pilot is less likely to run into something if he'd die along with the passenger" is that it?
- mozman 3y agoI absolutely want a pilot in the aircraft. Things go wrong and fail, you need someone trained to respond
- TechBro8615 3y agoMaybe the pilot is collateral to prove to the customer that the company has some stake in the thing not crashing.
- iliasku 3y agoNo, there are aviation laws that require a human pilot to be present.
- tlb 3y agoFly-by-wire systems have proven very safe. Most Airbus passenger jets are, for instance. But radio links for remote piloting are less reliable, because interference can be impossible to predict.
- palata 3y ago> why can't he be remote? If the pilot is remote, then there is a radio link somewhere. That increases the surface for failure. It is hard to keep a reliable radio link.
- Ekaros 3y agoLooks like fun and games until someone puts their hand through prop. Will this be any better than helicopter from noise point of view? Or safety?
- esafak 3y agoAny machine can be perilous; cars don't have a good track record compared with planes.
- mihaic 3y agoI'm dreading a bit a future where the skies are swarming with flying taxis. Every urban view is guaranteed to be ruined long-term if this "takes off". Still, maybe it would be ok to have this trade-off to solve traffic.
- Ekaros 3y agoI'm more worried about risks of these falling from sky or making emergency landings all over the place. Specially in 10 or 20 years when maintenance goes south... Or someone hacks one for their own fun use.
- bagacrap 3y agoDon't worry, your AR goggles will filter out whatever elements you don't like in a given scene. Personally I think it would probably look pretty cool so I'll leave them in.
- barelyauser 3y agoCan the AR goggles make other people pretty? That would improve my quality of life.
- tomohelix 3y agoI mean, even now, all the real time filters on Tiktok and Instagram are already capable of giving a no lag experience. When the more powerful AIs get stuffed into handheld devices, I expect them to paint the world however you want. Apple is in prime position to do this btw. Their hardware is uniquely suited to AI stuff and now that they have officially step into the AR business, it is probably going to be strange.
- bagacrap 3y agoWon't take long for Shallow Hal to become reality!
- chaos_emergent 3y agoin your view, is our view of the night sky ruined by commercial airline flights overhead?
- anjel 3y agoThere seems to be many entrants to this new sector of aircraft manufacture. I'm always left with the same 2 questions, unanswered. 1. What's the generic name for these aircraft vs "Helicopters?" 2. Whats the advantage of these aircraft vs Helicopters?
- cubefox 3y ago1. I propose "more quiet helicopter"
- DylanDmitri 3y ago1. I think we’re still deciding. 2. Quieter, easier to pilot, no fuel smell or storage.
- thedrbrian 3y agoon the other hand . no range.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago[flagged]
- palata 3y ago1. I call that a multicopter. There are specialized names for multicopters: if it has 4 props, "quadcopter". 6 props: "hexacopter". Octocopter, etc. Some names give an indication on the configuration. Say you have something that looks like a quadcopter (so a square with one prop on each vertex), but each prop is doubled (so there are 8 in total: 2 "squares" on top of each other). Then I call that a "coax octocopter". Same for VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) vehicles. I usually use VTOL to mean "a fixed wing" (i.e. something that looks like a plane) that takes off and lands vertically, but there are different configurations. A "tiltrotor" will have the rotors facing up when taking off, and then the rotors will tilt to face forward during flight. A "tailsitter" will have fixed rotors, but the vehicle will takeoff like a rocket (so "sitting on its tail", I guess), and then transition to forward flight.
- 3y ago
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago> “That could be a weedwacker,” a Thales spokeswoman, Beth Larson, added. This just reminds me how thankful I am to live in a city that has outlawed gas powered weedwackers.
- bigmattystyles 3y agoHow does that work - are professional landscapers permitted them? I'm so jealous of this but I doubt it would ever work here, in a large, bay area city.
- ericbarrett 3y agoIt might just not work. I lived in a place where gas powered landscaping equipment was illegal and it was widely ignored.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y agoIt's a historic city with small lots which probably makes it a lot easier, and I think the ban only covers certain areas. I couldn't tell you all the details because I only moved here recently, but they banned selling a few years before banning using them. I do see some commercial landscapers still using those wide ones that you sit on like a throne and control with joysticks or something, and I'm sure a lot of people without permission still use gas powered but not on my street.
- walrus01 3y agoElectric trimming apparatus exist. On a 14 gauge extension cord you can safely have things on an ordinary 120 volt circuit with a 1500 watt motor, so there is more than enough power. Noisy, yes, but not as polluting as a small two-stroke engine and not nearly as loud.
- ianburrell 3y agoThere are cordless trimmers and leaf blowers. The run time isn’t great but they can use the same battery. Expensive to buy lots of batteries for whole day, and hard to charge on the truck. But I’m sure they will figure out some solution like quiet generator on truck, or multicharger to extension cord from house.
- pcurve 3y agoI wonder if this has a parachute? If not, I'd feel better in other drone designs that have wings that would let you glide, which would also be better for range.
- someweirdperson 3y agoThe picture shows it is registered as D-M... which is german ultra-light (600 kg max). They are required to have one, unless it can auto-rotate. Maybe there's additional exceptions. And the production model might not be ultra-light.
- rdl 3y agoAn electric multicopter would be wonderful for short distance over either water (e.g. PR main island to Vieques) or mountains (not having to have access roads, or being able to go straight-line for passengers, and a much longer route with switchbacks from a major road back into mountains. Eagerly awaiting aircraft like these; something <$500k and 100kg (ideally 200kg) of load, low speed, 30 mile range would be perfect.
- PeterStuer 3y agoTldr: flying around an extremely loud airshow with constant roaring of low flying jetengines drowning out the accompanying max 'epicness' accompanying mood sountrack blaring from the PA, the engines of this vehicle failed to turn enough heads up from people that were on their phones, according to published wsj infomercial by wannabe flying taxi seller.
- danjc 3y ago18 motors - that's the kind of high availability that feels safe.
- sowbug 3y agoI'd be interested in whether the power source is a SPOF.