I found this [1] article when I started googling the people in the company, I thought this quite from their CTO Tomasz Patan was fun:
Vi vill inte att folk ska köpa vår produkt och krascha den direkt, så vi har sålt till välkända personer främst i USA som skulle få för mycket skit om de gjorde dumheter med den
which translates to (note: native Swedish speaker, but not a certified translator):
We don't want people to buy our product and crash it straight away, so we have been selling to famous people mostly in the US, who would get too much crap if they fooled around with it"
I enjoyed the directness of that statement. :)
Also learned from the same article:
- The maximum cargo weight including pilot is 100 kg, if you actually reach that then flying time is reduced to 12 minutes.
- The battery pack is charged externally, i.e. not in the vehicle, so you can have spares and swap.
- No mention of the battery pack's weight, but I guess you would have to be quite a bit below those 100 kg in order to have room for another battery.
- New owners get a 2-day course (not a "crash course", I guess :) at Jetson before being allowed to take their new vehicle home.
I saw that video some days ago and thought "that would be a nifty way to get to work and back" ... 12 minutes flight time would actually allow that for me ... but not for a lot of others.
They may have updated the article since you wrote your comment, but as of when I’m reading it, it’s attributing that quote to Peter Ternström, the other founder and CEO.
It's a nice toy, but the problems of personal aerial vehicles were not about electric motors vs ICE:
- Massive amount of sound pollution, current crop won't be allowed near cities in significant numbers; that's why the presentation videos are always silent.
- Exceptionally energy inefficient and limited speed, due to the way lift is achieved; it makes zero sense to spend 10 times the energy to travel at speeds comparable with what can achieved on the ground with the right infrastructure.
- Very limited safety guarantees, can't be safely used by an untrained pilot, typically can't be flow at all over populated areas etc.
Maybe they could reach for a market that can tolerate these drawbacks, ex. air ambulances, and build on that.
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.
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 touching down hard, there's way less angular momentum stored up and you wouldn't have the chaos of giant blades exploding. Of course there's still the batteries, since li-ion cells have only slightly less energy than kerosene when burned.
A parachute is... not the kind of safety feature that should be relied on. Parachutes take >100 feet to open properly. 20 foot falls can easily be lethal.
At least small planes in europe (CS-23) aren't allowed to have humans within an (iirc ~15 degree) cone of them.
This approach here seems to be done with no regards to such regulatory (and well-meant) requirements.
You see this in so many ridable multicopters and it always makes me cringe... the plane of rotation of a heavily loaded, high speed rotating part is not a healthy place to hang out. The shared plane of rotation of 8 of them is 8x as bad.
This is still better than some of the similar designs. Some of them look really easy for the pilot to fall off and get ground up by the propellers. At least this one the pilot kind of looks sort of enclosed so they would not likely be able to fall out into the blades.
Well at 210 lbs you're either tall enough that you probably won't fit in this thing lengthwise or you are in fact overweight and losing a few lbs wouldn't hurt.
I had to do the conversion to kg which is 95.25kg.
My naked weight is 93kg but with clothes/wallet/keys goes up to about 95kg.
I guess I will have to wait for the family version to come out.
They’re limited to 254 pounds empty, and I imagine batteries behind the pilot constitute an appreciable fraction of that weight budget. More pilot weight would probably push your center of gravity too far forward which would put undue strain on the front motors, causing them to fail.
Isn’t it crazy that Moller spent decades trying to get the basics of their flying car, only to give up inches from the finish line?
Tech has evolved so fast in the past few years that a brand new vehicle like this can go from design to production in a few years, and anyone can build a rough working prototype in their backyard.
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 traditional ultralight would. The price tag is much higher, though.
Lots of things start off as only for rich people, and get cheaper as the technology matures and scales up. Making something only rich people can afford can be part of the process of making something available for everyone.
(In this case it costs $92k, so under 0.1% in rich countries)
Knee-jerk ascription of new product classes to elitism isn't constructive.
The iPhone, when first released in 2007, cost $500, or about $800 today after adjusting for inflation, but launched a smartphone industry that today produces devices that are affordable enough that 3 billion own one, including some that go for as little as $50 and have better performance than the original iPhone.
There's a whole crop of aerospace startups now wasting their time on electric airframes that are 10-20 years ahead of their time in terms of battery capability. It's a classic case of solving the easy problem first.
Airframes are trivial. Getting battery energy density to a place that it becomes useful for personal aircraft is not. Yet that is the singular enabling technology to make this stuff a reality.
I was about to leave a snarky "glide ratio = 0" comment until I saw the note about the ballistic parachute. Wish they included the effective altitude though. I assume it would be effective from a lower altitude than the Cirrus, as this thing weighs only ~400 lbs with a human in it.
Parachute opening needs to balance between speed of deployment (because the ground is coming up) and G-force shock (because humans are squishy, and even the aircraft structure they're attached to has a limit).
Cirrus flies fast, so its parachute has a slider / limiter on it to reduce the speed of opening to keep the G shock manageable. On the other hand, since the top speed of this Jetson device is pretty low at 63mph, their parachute must have no slider and can probably be deployed from as little as 200 ft in ideal conditions. Depends on the exact model, your decision/reaction time, aircraft speed, attitude, and stability at time of deploy, etc.
The parachute should cost less than $5K, and its weight is not included in the 255lb weight limit (it's an FAA part 103 aircraft), so it's pretty much a no-brainer to add it to this aircraft, even if it's not very useful in very low level flights.
The official number is 400ft but I've heard anecdotes that there have been successful deployments lower. That said, I see this being operated in the "dead mans curve", ie well below any effective height, for a significant portion of it's flight
Almost looks like a ground-effect vehicle. Doesn’t go too high; which may not really be an issue. Just high enough, so tarmac isn’t necessary.
I seem to recall a discussion on HN, where it was explained that quadcopters don’t scale up too well. I don’t remember the reasoning.
The one thing that concerns me about commodity-level flying vehicles, is the way people drive the ones that are stuck on the ground. I would want autonomous vehicles to be devloped and refined, before flying ones.
Quadrotors use rpm-based control, which is simple and effective, but doesn't scale as the rotor gets bigger and the moment of inertia increases. You could switch to pitch-based control, but then you lose the simplicity, which is a big part of the appeal. The other issue is that the efficiency of any propulsion system is proportional to the disk area. Four smaller propellers have the advantage of zero net torque on the airframe, but carry a substantial penalty in terms of efficiency, which cuts into performance.
Fixing these issues inevitably leads you to a helicopter.
Because smaller prop means you need to spin faster to hit the same airflow. And efficiency usually drops by x^2 as a function of rotation velocity. Also, at high speed you have vacuum issues near the tip of the blade. Therefore, having four small rotors can easily be up to a magnitude less efficient than a helicopter.
Quadcopters scale up fine, in fact as other commenters have mentioned they get more efficient as they get larger.
However, quadcopters are mainly useful because they are simple and cheap. Once you add the amount of redundancy necessary to safely carry a human (I am not convinced they have hit that bar here) it's no longer cheap, and it makes sense to spend a bit more on a helicopter, which is much more efficient.
I’m not sure what reasons there would be for quadcopters not scaling up well. Bigger rotors should be more efficient like with any other aircraft. Perhaps there are scaling issues with quickly changing the speed of larger rotors to maintain flight control? That could be resolved by using variable-pitch rotors, although at that point you’ve lost the key advantage of multirotors (which is their mechanical simplicity) and you’re probably better off with just one even bigger rotor with cyclic pitch control (i.e. a helicopter).
With a 20 minute flight time (and is that with any safety margin remaining? Doesn’t say.) at ~60mph I can only make a 10 mile round trip. 20 miles of each landing spot has a charger (and I doubt there’s weight budget to carry a decent charger with me).
It’s a very cool kit for hobbyists but there are very few missions this can fly with utility.
I don't know - 10 miles across impassable terrain sounds pretty good if the alternative is a 60 miles detour driving around a fjord or Forrest or something.
Still I don't think this is designed for "utility" - seems to me it is more for the fun of it.
If you live in Vanvikan that would be just the right range to cross the Trondheimsfjord to Trondheim, slashing the usual commute by ferry by a factor of 5 or so.
Actually, the power density of a charger shouldn't be an issue for this.
You can get very dense systems if you're willing to cool them appropriately (the frequencies you can use thanks to modern GaN and SiC transistors allow for very compact inductors and make switched capacitor converters feasible for mains voltages).
10 kW/kg is not even exotic anymore, and I doubt you'd want to charge at more than 100 kW with an on-board charger, anyways.
If you're interested in the components, looks like both motors and propellers are from https://www.mad-motor.com
It's quite hard to find high quality electric drive components in this size – too big for drones, too small for full scale airplanes. https://store.tmotor.com/ is another alternative.
I never understood why startups are so infatuated with quadcopter designs. Just design a small electric gyro-copter and you'll get 10X range and half the complexity.
Because it allows you to skip the entire aerospace engineering portion of the design process. Airframe design is complex and requires a lot of domain knowledge in fluid dynamics. Quads just muscle their way along and only require simple control theory to maintain flight so anyone can design and build them effortlessly.
> A complete vehicle is 92 000 USD and is delivered to you as a partially (50%) assembled kit for home completion. It contains everything you need, from the aluminium space frame to motor controllers, propellers and motors. You will also receive detailed build instructions.
Seems odd to not deliver a fully assembled aircraft. Is there any regulatory reason? If cost is an issue, they could probably charge extra (such as $110K total) and deliver it fully assembled.
If you're rich enough for this vehicle, it might be better to rent or buy a single engine plane instead. Yes, you gotta get a license but honestly after you get past the basics you'll probably fly better than Harrison Ford with little issue. I assume the real costs are going to be the hanger rental, insurance, and maintenance.
I think you'd have a far better chance of walking away from a failed engine in that plane too. Assuming it's something like a Cessna you've at least got a reasonable chance of landing it.
There's a reason the racecar frames that "inspired" this thing are made of steel and not aluminum. While this looks sturdy to a layman, I'd imagine this thing would crumple to nothing on impact.
Love to see a crash test and be proven wrong though.
Doesn't matter until there's a breakthrough with battery energy density. Any electric VTOL aircraft capable of carrying humans is limited to less than 50 miles range.
Here's a direct link to the flight demo video. Looks like fun but it only reaches a maximum altitude of about 4 m. Basically it's operating more like a hovercraft than an aircraft.
This is an amazing outcome! Three cheers to the founders and the team working on this project/company.
As with most tech, it does seem like a Pandora's Box in terms of outcomes. Especially regulatory/safety issues.
I come from India, where median folks have a complete and utter disregard for traffic rules and safety regulations. I can't begin to think how we would adopt a technology like this. I mean, how would we start, how would traffic merge? Can we restrict/regulate the flow of vehicles in thin air?
The fact that this is a tech+social problem interests me even more.
I swear I saw something like this in some kids magazine 30 years ago. It was supposedly powered by a vacuum motor. I now understand that can’t possibly work, but for many years I thought it could. I’d love it if someone else knew what I’m talking about and could send me a link to the magazine article. I assume it wasn’t trying to be a joke, this was a relatively serious kids magazine, but maybe I’ve been wrong.
We have gained so much in terms of technological progress, consistently reducing the energy required to go from point A to point B, it surprises me how we are again increasing it for getting from point A to point B.
The concept is great, but the push for mass market adoption bugs me.
These things are not efficient modes of transport. It takes a lot of energy to move one person from A to B.
I agree. No one ever said waverunners were a practical form of transportation, but they still sell millions of them. This does look like a really fun personal toy, though. I can easy imagine some rich dudes taking them for Endor-style races through the forest up here.
> The concept is great, but the push for mass market adoption bugs me.
> These things are not efficient modes of transport. It takes a lot of energy to move one person from A to B.
Will you not entertain the possibility that a form of travel using geodesic distance may be more efficient? Going from Brooklyn to Manhattan and bypassing traffic, for example (a small body of water where flying across would be more efficient for those not familiar)? Or iterative improvements to it, if it gains adoption, would improve whatever numbers you're using for your energy requirements? Or that it may reduce our need to make new infrastructure, and that may also reduce energy costs?
> We have gained so much in terms of technological progress, consistently reducing the energy required to go from point A to point B, it surprises me how we are again increasing it for getting from point A to point B.
It takes exactly the same amount of energy to go from point A to point B as it did 10,000 years ago.
What we've done is gotten better at packing more energy generation in a smaller volume/envelope.
Before I left California I actually looked into personal transport, only half ironically. The real estate costs are so nuts it would be cheaper to get a house inland across the mountains (Southern California) and buy a personal aircraft to commute.
Reminds me a lot of the Martin Jetpack, which received tonnes of media hype when it was first unveiled at Oshkosh 2008, and despite being "almost ready" for the next decade, nothing was ever built and the company went bust.
Incidentally, the remaining assets (including intellectual property) were just put up for auction a few days ago [1].
The market for what's essentially an aerial jetski has always been small, and now due to the drone renaissance it's basically non-existent.
I am 6'3" tall and have the body of a programmer who also lifts weights. That means Ive got some body fat and some muscle mass and I weigh too much for this vehicle. Im not obese though. 210 lbs max weight is going to cut out a large percentage of the folks who could afford one- Athletes. I get this is Rev 1, but there isnt much flight time here and you have to be a small to medium sized person to fly it.
Feels like going back full circle to 1903 and using a propeller to fly :)
I am incredibly excited about the prospect of small flying machines. I also can not imagine that propellers will be where this ends although there are limitations with using electric energy.
There are quite a few concepts flying around these days:
Haven't these been around in China for 5+ years? I'm also a bit skeptical about the 1 item per month build rate... that seems a bit slow to me. Then again, I'm just the armchair critic here...
So, the drone footage used to capture this video makes me wonder:
- Is the camera drone VERY fast?
- Or is the Jetson slow?
- Is this realtime footage or accelerated somehow?
The answer for FPV footage is almost always that it is real time. FPV camera drones can go upwards of 100mph. In the hands of a skilled pilot they are incredibly agile.
They are also almost entirely built by the pilot. The entire FPV scene is a pretty cool hobby to get into.
In the US, you can fly most places and land most places (with permission of the owner) with helicopters, with only general (e.g., must pose no hazard to people and property) rules instead of specific restrictions (outside of controls to keep them out of, e.g., airplane traffic patterns around airports.)
But I can see something like this being available in numbers being the catalyst for that changing fast...
Top speed of 60MPH; let's halve that for a safety margin, which gives a range of ten miles. There's around thirty towns and cities that close to my home. Reaching any of thirty towns in ten minutes would be far from useless.
If you were a rich person living in (say) a village in the UK 20 minutes is easily enough to fly to the pub, charge it a bit, and fly back.
As a non-rich person it'd be useless to me even if I could afford it (I live near other humans) but I can absolute imagine some people I have met buying one.
From the video, it looks like this craft is limited to about 10 feet in altitude (certainly as high as I’d want to go, but I imagine their primary market at first is going to be thrill-seekers). And yet that’s really all you need for a lot of point-to-point transport, especially in rural areas (which I also imagine will be the only legal places to fly these for the foreseeable future).
A thing with what amounts to buzzsaws conveniently mounted at its extremities, flying at 10 ft. (3 m) max altitude? Can't imagine anything going wrong with that...
You want to be higher. Altitude gives you more time in an emergency (like waiting for that chute to deploy). Once you’re above the altitude that will kill you on impact, more altitude won’t make you more dead. Also, wires are at low altitude, and are responsible for many rotorcraft accidents.
The real limitations come from Part 103, which limits ultralights to uncontrolled airspace (Class G). These aircraft will be limited to 1200 ft. AGL in most of the country, and 700 ft. AGL near many airports and their associated approaches.
It does not appear to be limited by the Wing-in-ground effect. This effect apparently tops out at approximately half the vehicle's wingspan; and they are above that.
unwind|4 years ago
Vi vill inte att folk ska köpa vår produkt och krascha den direkt, så vi har sålt till välkända personer främst i USA som skulle få för mycket skit om de gjorde dumheter med den
which translates to (note: native Swedish speaker, but not a certified translator):
We don't want people to buy our product and crash it straight away, so we have been selling to famous people mostly in the US, who would get too much crap if they fooled around with it"
I enjoyed the directness of that statement. :)
Also learned from the same article:
- The maximum cargo weight including pilot is 100 kg, if you actually reach that then flying time is reduced to 12 minutes.
- The battery pack is charged externally, i.e. not in the vehicle, so you can have spares and swap.
- No mention of the battery pack's weight, but I guess you would have to be quite a bit below those 100 kg in order to have room for another battery.
- New owners get a 2-day course (not a "crash course", I guess :) at Jetson before being allowed to take their new vehicle home.
EDIT: Fixed italics for translated quote.
[1]: https://teknikensvarld.se/nyheter/miljo-och-teknik/jetson-on...
fho|4 years ago
Cederfjard|4 years ago
yholio|4 years ago
- Massive amount of sound pollution, current crop won't be allowed near cities in significant numbers; that's why the presentation videos are always silent.
- Exceptionally energy inefficient and limited speed, due to the way lift is achieved; it makes zero sense to spend 10 times the energy to travel at speeds comparable with what can achieved on the ground with the right infrastructure.
- Very limited safety guarantees, can't be safely used by an untrained pilot, typically can't be flow at all over populated areas etc.
Maybe they could reach for a market that can tolerate these drawbacks, ex. air ambulances, and build on that.
paul_f|4 years ago
BurningFrog|4 years ago
Jnr|4 years ago
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.
ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago
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).
hwillis|4 years ago
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 touching down hard, there's way less angular momentum stored up and you wouldn't have the chaos of giant blades exploding. Of course there's still the batteries, since li-ion cells have only slightly less energy than kerosene when burned.
A parachute is... not the kind of safety feature that should be relied on. Parachutes take >100 feet to open properly. 20 foot falls can easily be lethal.
nine_k|4 years ago
OTOH putting the propellers above would change the shape and thus the aesthetics seriously.
namibj|4 years ago
taneq|4 years ago
StanislavPetrov|4 years ago
maxcan|4 years ago
Robotbeat|4 years ago
augstein|4 years ago
satisfice|4 years ago
fastball|4 years ago
peter_retief|4 years ago
teeray|4 years ago
EDIT: CG = center of gravity, for clarity
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
youeseh|4 years ago
ricardobeat|4 years ago
Tech has evolved so fast in the past few years that a brand new vehicle like this can go from design to production in a few years, and anyone can build a rough working prototype in their backyard.
runlevel1|4 years ago
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 traditional ultralight would. The price tag is much higher, though.
29athrowaway|4 years ago
The Jetson One produced a minimalistic 1 seat vehicle.
cbozeman|4 years ago
gorgoiler|4 years ago
Something on their website smells a little whiffy and bovine though:
”[our mission] is to change the way we travel and make the skies available for everyone”
Erm. Everyone? I don’t think so. Your mission is to give the 0.1% yet another way to be jerks, only this time with added noise!
jefftk|4 years ago
(In this case it costs $92k, so under 0.1% in rich countries)
CryptoPunk|4 years ago
The iPhone, when first released in 2007, cost $500, or about $800 today after adjusting for inflation, but launched a smartphone industry that today produces devices that are affordable enough that 3 billion own one, including some that go for as little as $50 and have better performance than the original iPhone.
Tade0|4 years ago
Imagine having - instead of car-centric cities - personal-aircraft-centric cities.
mhb|4 years ago
ramesh31|4 years ago
Airframes are trivial. Getting battery energy density to a place that it becomes useful for personal aircraft is not. Yet that is the singular enabling technology to make this stuff a reality.
voldacar|4 years ago
nikitaga|4 years ago
Cirrus flies fast, so its parachute has a slider / limiter on it to reduce the speed of opening to keep the G shock manageable. On the other hand, since the top speed of this Jetson device is pretty low at 63mph, their parachute must have no slider and can probably be deployed from as little as 200 ft in ideal conditions. Depends on the exact model, your decision/reaction time, aircraft speed, attitude, and stability at time of deploy, etc.
The parachute should cost less than $5K, and its weight is not included in the 255lb weight limit (it's an FAA part 103 aircraft), so it's pretty much a no-brainer to add it to this aircraft, even if it's not very useful in very low level flights.
edrxty|4 years ago
Animats|4 years ago
[1] https://ehang.com/
akie|4 years ago
ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago
I seem to recall a discussion on HN, where it was explained that quadcopters don’t scale up too well. I don’t remember the reasoning.
The one thing that concerns me about commodity-level flying vehicles, is the way people drive the ones that are stuck on the ground. I would want autonomous vehicles to be devloped and refined, before flying ones.
coderenegade|4 years ago
Fixing these issues inevitably leads you to a helicopter.
syntaxing|4 years ago
adamweld|4 years ago
However, quadcopters are mainly useful because they are simple and cheap. Once you add the amount of redundancy necessary to safely carry a human (I am not convinced they have hit that bar here) it's no longer cheap, and it makes sense to spend a bit more on a helicopter, which is much more efficient.
tshaddox|4 years ago
pininja|4 years ago
It’s a very cool kit for hobbyists but there are very few missions this can fly with utility.
mattlondon|4 years ago
Still I don't think this is designed for "utility" - seems to me it is more for the fun of it.
ginko|4 years ago
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/vanvikan/trondheim/@63.49028...
namibj|4 years ago
10 kW/kg is not even exotic anymore, and I doubt you'd want to charge at more than 100 kW with an on-board charger, anyways.
timwis|4 years ago
RachelF|4 years ago
nikitaga|4 years ago
It's quite hard to find high quality electric drive components in this size – too big for drones, too small for full scale airplanes. https://store.tmotor.com/ is another alternative.
fragmede|4 years ago
syntaxing|4 years ago
edrxty|4 years ago
omginternets|4 years ago
rexf|4 years ago
Seems odd to not deliver a fully assembled aircraft. Is there any regulatory reason? If cost is an issue, they could probably charge extra (such as $110K total) and deliver it fully assembled.
skykooler|4 years ago
Hamuko|4 years ago
ladyattis|4 years ago
tw04|4 years ago
There's a reason the racecar frames that "inspired" this thing are made of steel and not aluminum. While this looks sturdy to a layman, I'd imagine this thing would crumple to nothing on impact.
Love to see a crash test and be proven wrong though.
purpleflame1257|4 years ago
BurningFrog|4 years ago
Very different from what a plane is good for.
ramesh31|4 years ago
mrfusion|4 years ago
nradov|4 years ago
https://youtu.be/FzhREYOK0oo
davidzweig|4 years ago
noduerme|4 years ago
JoelJacobson|4 years ago
ramanujank|4 years ago
I come from India, where median folks have a complete and utter disregard for traffic rules and safety regulations. I can't begin to think how we would adopt a technology like this. I mean, how would we start, how would traffic merge? Can we restrict/regulate the flow of vehicles in thin air?
The fact that this is a tech+social problem interests me even more.
auslegung|4 years ago
jawns|4 years ago
Picture of the ad:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/7jrpbu/this_hove...
Animats|4 years ago
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEtZn3YrEEQ
kumarvvr|4 years ago
The concept is great, but the push for mass market adoption bugs me.
These things are not efficient modes of transport. It takes a lot of energy to move one person from A to B.
noduerme|4 years ago
ctvo|4 years ago
> These things are not efficient modes of transport. It takes a lot of energy to move one person from A to B.
Will you not entertain the possibility that a form of travel using geodesic distance may be more efficient? Going from Brooklyn to Manhattan and bypassing traffic, for example (a small body of water where flying across would be more efficient for those not familiar)? Or iterative improvements to it, if it gains adoption, would improve whatever numbers you're using for your energy requirements? Or that it may reduce our need to make new infrastructure, and that may also reduce energy costs?
There are a lot of things here to be so certain.
antisthenes|4 years ago
It takes exactly the same amount of energy to go from point A to point B as it did 10,000 years ago.
What we've done is gotten better at packing more energy generation in a smaller volume/envelope.
bullen|4 years ago
I'm not complaining about the vehicle to transported ratio though, it's about the same as my lead-acid e-bike: http://elhjul.se
aero-glide2|4 years ago
api|4 years ago
Telecommuting is better.
toomanybeersies|4 years ago
Incidentally, the remaining assets (including intellectual property) were just put up for auction a few days ago [1].
The market for what's essentially an aerial jetski has always been small, and now due to the drone renaissance it's basically non-existent.
[1] https://www.skylarc.co.nz/tenders/martin-jetpack/
King-Aaron|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
S_A_P|4 years ago
freediver|4 years ago
I am incredibly excited about the prospect of small flying machines. I also can not imagine that propellers will be where this ends although there are limitations with using electric energy.
There are quite a few concepts flying around these days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sUqJ9bId70
yread|4 years ago
dougSF70|4 years ago
blobbers|4 years ago
We asked for the flying car, YC has not given it to us.
TheSpiceIsLife|4 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28920693
anonu|4 years ago
mrfusion|4 years ago
kelvin0|4 years ago
spookthesunset|4 years ago
They are also almost entirely built by the pilot. The entire FPV scene is a pretty cool hobby to get into.
blablablub|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
yborg|4 years ago
Mengkudulangsat|4 years ago
exhilaration|4 years ago
Aeolun|4 years ago
hiccuphippo|4 years ago
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27904396
notatoad|4 years ago
I assume this is wildly illegal in most jurisdictions?
dragonwriter|4 years ago
But I can see something like this being available in numbers being the catalyst for that changing fast...
TylerE|4 years ago
No different than a helicopter.
Hell, plenty of farmers that have a Piper Cub or similar and operate off their acreage.
cush|4 years ago
sdan|4 years ago
Time to go public haha
pwrplus1|4 years ago
sydthrowaway|4 years ago
dtgriscom|4 years ago
mhh__|4 years ago
As a non-rich person it'd be useless to me even if I could afford it (I live near other humans) but I can absolute imagine some people I have met buying one.
systemvoltage|4 years ago
908087|4 years ago
[deleted]
swatkat|4 years ago
mortenjorck|4 years ago
rob74|4 years ago
teeray|4 years ago
The real limitations come from Part 103, which limits ultralights to uncontrolled airspace (Class G). These aircraft will be limited to 1200 ft. AGL in most of the country, and 700 ft. AGL near many airports and their associated approaches.
SideburnsOfDoom|4 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_(aerodynamics)
aero-glide2|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]