The Jetson model videos are pretty compelling. Unfortunately, it has already been ripped off by what I assume is a Chinese company displaying a copy at Osh this year. The back drop in their booth was a riot… “Now everyone can be owned aircraft”, for real.
The foundation is the most important part of a house. The weakest part of an electric vehicle is the battery. Why would anyone use the battery as a foundation to build upon?
Colin Furze built one of these in his shed a few years ago. It was barely controllable, but it flew. Find it on YouTube.
No one wanting to make money is targeting this bunch of old, angry codgers.
Cirrus clearly believed they could expand the market greatly, and one of the key reasons they succeeded was they not only attacked the existing market, they went hard after the people who were interested, capable, and not joining our little club.
Talk to some folks in the piston plane business and find out how often they lost a sale to Cirrus when they could get the prospect into a competing demonstration flight. It wasn’t that often. A LOT of Cirrus airplanes showed up at fields with pilots no one had met who often did not have a certificate yet.
Dries had money, and was brilliant, and made better planes. He wasn’t a marketer, or a revolutionary, and he didn’t understand the cesspool that is piston GA.
IMO, the secret to success is navigating Washington, DC. The tech will come. The winner will be the one who gets the game fixed in their favor. Smart investors would be virtually ignoring the fancy demonstration models and asking to shake hands with politicians and bureaucrats who are committed to making the company successful. This ain’t no free market capitalism contest.
As long as those trusting their money and their lives with these concepts are aware of the risks, no issue.
Unfortunately, everything I’ve seen so far is worthy of a bad late night infomercial…though they’re apparently catching enough venture capitalists drunk-dialing after last call.
…while the rest of us not so well funded participants in the national airspace system and residential property owners hang on for the loopy regulatory mess that’s going to accommodate these visions of utopia.
You’re right. Elon Musk is busy with rockets and we only get one of them a century.
The contraption, as is, sucks.
I’m probably a little late to the party and I though I’m not intending to be a bandwagon naysayer, I will be a naysayer. My logbook pales in comparison to many around here but I do have, by my estimation and thanks to the sheer cheapness of it, hundreds of hours behind the sticks of FPV and line of sight multirotors. Not DJI or toy grade ones, the home built, racing and freestyle kind. I’d never accept the risk involved in flying a manned multirotor, let alone a quadcopter. An airplane is highly unlikely to just drop out of the sky unless you make it, a helicopter can autorotate, a fixed pitch quadcopter? Its mode of failure is to drop or, more accurately; tumble, to the ground. A hexacopter will probably allow you to make a safe forced landing, an octocopter may allow you to find an airport, a quadcopter you’d better hope you can bail out as it spins end over end from asymmetric thrust. None of them stay in the air if there’s a complete power failure. There are collective pitch equipped multirotors, I have only flown one since they’re pretty rare and fairly expensive, they may be able to autorotate if there’s a power loss, but any asymmetric condition is still instant and irrecoverable LOC.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.
Don’t tell Paul Moller and Clive Cussler!
I hear ya! I owned a Grumman TR2, and I got a version of tennis elbow after constantly pulling my wallet out.
I think that Cussler already met his dead end.
Moller at 86 while not dead, the company is “dormant”.
Adding a battery does not solve the problems.
Thanks for that perspective. Makes sense
Meanwhile La Moto du Ciel (Sky motobike in English) made by Humbert Aviation has been flying and giving great pleasure since the 1980s…
Always a good point.
BRS
Does a BRS work when you’re tumbling end over end at an uncomfortable but unspecified number of RPM? Multirotors don’t just ignore the laws of physics when there’s a thrust imbalance, hence my comment about tumbling to the ground.
“Visions of utopia”….interesting. People probably said the same thing about the Wright Bros. or cartoonists like Jules Verne. How about Kennedy’s speech in 1962 regarding a moon landing in the same decade?
There will always be scam artists in every industry and there will be sincere dreamers that fail. The road to success is almost always paved with failures.
Thank God for the dreamers and visionaries.
God bless.
They’ll all sell in Dubai!
Is Cirrus viable without the financial power that comes from ownership by the Chinese Government?
Nope.
The vast majority of the entire US GA industry likely doesn’t exist without the massive resources of a foreign power, who owns the various entities for a different reason than simple capital returns.