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tahanson43206,
1. I'll bet it was tested- by a very experienced test pilot, probably an ATP-certified guy or gal with thousands of light hours and a CFI rating. For that particular man or woman, I'll bet it wasn't a problem at all. Doctors think competence in medicine transfers over to flying high-performance complex aircraft like a Beechcraft Bonanza once per month or per year, and they call those otherwise excellent aircraft "forked-tail doctor killers" for that reason. Whenever you're testing a new aircraft, everyone knows it's common practice to put an inexperienced pilot behind the controls- NOT!
2. The short answer is yes, but if you need stability control in your personal aircraft, then how would that not be construed as a sign that your design requires more training and experience to use without potentially painting yourself into a corner with your lack of skill and experience about what you're doing? I'm not claiming their design is "wrong" or "bad" if their design goal was to create an aircraft that could also drive on the highway, but at that point is this still something you're going to allow a novice pilot to use? Probably not.
We're building a flying car that can hover and go 300mph. It's "so easy to use", because it has augmented stability control. Now we're going to hand over this complex high-performance machine over to a pilot with lots of money but maybe 100 hours to his or her name. What could possibly go wrong?
Read Kathryn's Report if you want an answer to that question. It's pretty graphic, but should also sober up people with more enthusiasm than personal knowledge and experience. Things can and do go wrong a lot faster than many of the people at the controls can handle them. Note the number of highly experienced pilots who were seriously injured or killed in their high performance personal flying machines.
3. Yes, pilots opt for different runways or go-arounds on missed approaches if crosswinds or turbulence are causing problems. Experienced pilots, especially ATP-rated ones, know that firewalling the throttle and going around is the correct way to clean up after a bad approach, but do less experienced ones know this?
Throttle in, gear up, don't touch the flap lever, lower the nose, fly the speed (the one that keeps you in the air, if that part needs to be said).
4. No. You need actual experience landing in crosswinds. Simulators are not a replacement for the immersive experience of flying. That's why you only get a handful of "flight hours" added to your logbook by doing training in a simulator. The rest have to be behind the controls of a real aircraft. The sorts of simulators found in most flight schools are not the same quality as commercial aircraft simulators that move on hydraulics, make noise, and cost millions of dollars- more expensive than all of the flight school's training aircraft sitting on the tarmac.
These are probably not the answers you want, but they still represent the unpopular truth, nonetheless. A "flying car" is a DOA proposition for me. It's either a poor car or a poor aircraft, or it's mediocre at both driving and flying. Calliban already told you why. I'm merely providing more specifics as to the underlying reasons, and yes, it relates back to meeting opposing design requirements. I also think battery-powered cars are still a much better proposition than flying cars, if that tells you anything, and you know quite well what I think of those.
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Not a car and very expensive
Xturismo: Japan Launches The World's First Flying Bike
https://yodoozy.com/worlds-first-flying-bike-is-here/
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/t … 77b37&ei=7
The link above is to an announcement of an all-electric flying car winning FAA approval for testing.
Shipments are planned for 2025. Air range is 115 miles and road range is (about) 200 miles.
These might appeal to Wall Street bankers wanting to commute to homes in the suburbs.
(th)
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A Wall Street banker will take the elevator to the rooftop of his / her place of work, hop into a real helicopter crewed by a pair of professional helicopter pilots, and land on their front lawn. For any motoring that they care to do, they already have a Rolls Royce and chauffeur.
How many people who have $300,000 of disposable income, also want a functionally useless helicopter-car gadget that will never pass a NHTSA crash test and glides like a brick if it ever loses power?
Is this Jim Dukhovny character Stockton Rush's long lost brother from another mother?
If electric VTOL is such a great idea, then why not simply build an electric helicopter and be done with the entire electric gimmick?
Why must there be an endless cycle of pointless novelty to something that could otherwise be a modestly functional flying machine?
They're solutions in search of a problem to solve.
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The video at the link below shows a type of rotor lift system that is new to me ... perhaps other members and readers might find it interesting...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/ne … 9efd&ei=32
The device definitely appears to be able to lift itself, but whether it can do anything beyond that is a question.
(th)
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tahanson43206,
This looks like a Voith-Schneider propeller, but enclosed on both ends instead of just one. IIRC, these devices require continuous control over unsteady state aerodynamic or hydrodynamic forces. I don't know enough about them to know if they provide significant advantages over more traditional types of propulsion, apart from the ability to rapidly change direction, but I suspect there are some fairly substantial tradeoffs at play. As near as I can tell, you're in a helicopter with no auto-rotation capability. It the machine loses power, you're going down at a non-survivable vertical velocity. This may not matter for something like a combat drone, but a serious issue for a helicopter carrying humans. I don't think this is fundamentally new technology, though. IIRC, the cyclorotor was a Russian design from around the dawn of powered flight.
It's intriguing, but mastering this sort of propulsion system is non-trivial. It could be used on a more conventional aircraft to provide both thrust and blown wings or flaps for additional lift. I need to read some more to figure out where the limits are. I suspect it's limited by the reliability of the control system, the longevity of bearing surfaces, and the strength of the blade materials.
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Following up on the tip by kbd512 in post #31, I asked Google for help finding a bit more about the type of fan used in the experimental car at the link in post #30...
Google seems to ** think ** this might be an "axial" fan ...
Axial fans are a line of industrial fans commonly used today. The propeller structure is mounted parallel to the direction of the fan shaft, creating a suction and blowing direction parallel to the fan axis. In the HVAC system, industrial axial fans are used for cooling, ventilation, and air conditioning.Nov 8, 2022
What I learned is that this is ** not ** a "drum" fan ... that description is given to ducted traditional propeller fans.
(th)
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Are Flying Cars Finally Here?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024 … nally-here
China's flying cars ready for liftoff with EV technology
https://asia.nikkei.com/cms/Business/Tr … technology
XPeng AeroHT, a subsidiary of the electric vehicle startup, aims to sell a dual-mode electric vertical take-off and landing
Flying cars: The future of personal mobility
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0hq2hhy … l-mobility
Ingenuity's Flight Map
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7DFnNimSfw
There is still debate how much a flying vehicle can lift on Mars, some say a school bag, maybe something the size of a cat, a bag of grain and seeds, some bottles of medicine or a few guinea pig hamsters.
There was also a time when some very educated people with experience in physics and engineering said nothing would ever fly on Mars
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For Mars_B4_Moon re #33
The sentiment you have reported in the quote below is well documented to have happened on Earth.
I suspect you might have projected the experience documented on Earth on to Mars.
I would be quite surprised if you are able to find a quote from anyone with a degree in engineering or physics who would have made such as prediction for Mars. The science of flight has advanced significantly since 1903.
As a challenge, please see if you can find ** any ** such prediction by a person with a reputation at stake.
There was also a time when some very educated people with experience in physics and engineering said nothing would ever fly on Mars
What I think you ** may ** find are predictions (by knowledgeable people) that flight on Mars will be very difficult.
A prediction that something will be difficult is ** not ** the same as a prediction that it is impossible.
Per Google...
New York Times about difficulty of air flight
1956 Astronomer Royal of Britain about space flight
(th)
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As a challenge, please see if you can find ** any ** such prediction by a person with a reputation at stake.
(th)
Lots of Anonymous chatter out there, you find people on quora or medium or stackexchange or twitter or slashdot or facebooks or substack for example, those who have made their private info public I will not ruin a reputation by mocking them, they can ruin their own reputations making bad prediction.
and here also Twenty years back 2004,
this guy an old forum member was quiet knowledgeable at times, he was a well educated man by the way he wrote and from his style of writing had some engineer experience. I never got much public info on him but he claimed to have worked in some indirect way with industry or even 'Nuclear Energy' at times he seemed obsessed with Nuclear gas-core-reactor rockets and thought they would be the solution to Mars colonization, he registered in 2003 and stopped posting in 2008.
2004 quote
A neat idea, but i'm going to have to weigh in against, I don't see the idea as having enough merit. Short-term (<1 martian day) scouting with an airplane that is too light to hold much useful equipment and too light to carry a good communications system to transmit it isn't worth it.
There might be a reason some people who do have experience but talk online quietly with no personal info out there, have not put too much reputation in public and communicate by anonymous user name or anonymous twitter avatars
2004 was also a time when people were still plugged out of 'The Matrix' lets say and somewhat off the grid, before all the facebooks, video gamers and online educators and youtubes and every other social media
with the success of Ingenuity in 2021, nicknamed Ginny we can see a type of aircraft can hold 'useful equipment' and can indeed hold communication systems to transmit
Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2024-04-21 07:08:03)
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staying on the flying car topic
'Volocopter becomes world’s first eVTOL Approved Training Organisation'
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-ing … ye-for-now
and back to the Mars Helicopter
'NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Team Says Goodbye … for Now'
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