Flying cars and jet pack news and discussion thread

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weatheriscool
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Flying cars and jet pack news and discussion thread

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Kelekona proposes colossal 40-seater mass transport eVTOL aircraft
By Loz Blain
May 27, 2021


Most eVTOL companies are thinking at air taxi scale, offering just 2-5 seats. Lilium is a notable exception, putting forth a whopping 7-seat "air minibus" design and prioritizing longer trips. But there are very few companies thinking at the kind of scale Kelekona's talking about.

This audacious New York City startup is thinking in terms of 40 passengers plus a pilot per flight – or an enormous 10,000 lb (4,540 kg) of cargo. And apparently long distances and high speeds, too, since the Kelekona website promises these VTOL sky buses will make the 330-mile (531 km) run between LA and San Francisco in just one hour.
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/kelekona- ... evtol-bus/
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Re: Flying cars and jet pack news and discussion thread

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Announcing ASKA™ The Electric Take Off And Landing Flying Car For Consumers
By
Press
15 April 2021
NFT Inc, today announced it is now taking pre-orders for the ASKA™, the first electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicle designed for consumers.

The company has also opened the world’s first consumer flying car showroom. Located in Los Altos, the heart of Silicon Valley, the sales showroom features demonstration models of the ASKA™ and also functions as a learning center about urban air mobility.

ASKA™ is a new door-to-door mobility option offering the freedom to choose to travel on the road or in the air. The four-seater ASKA™ drives on the road like a car, capable of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), as well as short takeoff and landing (STOL), and flies like an aircraft. This private commuter vehicle enables people to live in a quality environment outside urban areas and to quickly and easily commute to the city center – door to door.
https://www.suasnews.com/2021/04/announ ... consumers/
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Flying cars and jet pack news and discussion thread

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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Flying cars and jet pack news and discussion thread

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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Re: Flying cars and jet pack news and discussion thread

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^ The only hope for flying cars, the only hope there has ever realistically been for flying cars, is passenger drones. And barring the development of antigravity or some equivalent technology, even those will only ever be niche. Heck, even WITH antigrav tech, they'd still be niche. The cold fact is that there's virtually no good reason for flying cars/passenger drones to be used other than for the pure novelty of it.

And considering that we absolutely need AV tech to advance to make them practical, by the time they ARE available en masse, there'd probably be little to no reason to use them practically. Why would you? To get to work? The same workplace that's probably completely automated? To get to the beach? You'd still almost certainly have to take off and land at pre-designated sites, or else it becomes far too dangerous or a public health hazard. And then you factor in those designated sites and the fact they might still be distant from where you want or need to go, so you'd still need a car. Presumably a flying car wouldn't have that problem, except there's absolutely no physically possible way to make a flying car that's anything other than both a shitty car and a shitty aircraft. None! If there was, engineers would've licked that problem in the 1940s. I'm fairly sure it's engineers who are the biggest critics of flying cars.

Again, barring antigravity technology, this is a dead-end field.

Passenger drones are a much better bet.

It's sad but true, and it's more a case of a late 19th century meme for the Future™ that refuses to die. I think flying cars are a meme that keeps getting repeated because they appeal to a sense of old-fashioned Americana, the ideal of that middle-American family on the road— except in this case, they're in the air, flying over the losers on the ground stuck in traffic. There are really a lot of futuristic dreams we have that aren't very practical barring super-advanced technology that could genuinely be thousands of years away even in a Singularity scenario due to needing to rewrite the very laws of physics (or dedicated to the realm of virtual reality, where there's no need to worry about these restraints).

Things like a space navy, AKA the classic sci-fi dream of a bunch of ensigns, engineers, lieutenants, captains, etc. on some interstellar starship engaging in war with some roughly equivalent alien race in what's essentially a naval battle/dogfight in outer space. Virtually nothing about that makes logical sense in real life. Even the possibility of fleshy, biological humans surviving in deep space for longer than a couple years is an extremely long shot that becomes less and less realistic every passing year as our understanding of the nature of deep space and human biological limitations grows.
Heck, even sapient AI may be this. I'm certain general AI is possible, even very probable in an extremely short time frame, but I'm not 100% certain we'll ever lick artificial sapience. We could, it may be easy, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it's genuinely not going to happen for decades or centuries.


This coming from someone who wants all three!
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weatheriscool
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Re: Flying cars and jet pack news and discussion thread

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Futuristic Backpack Helicopter 'CopterPack' Takes Flight For First Time
Jun 04, 2021
Australian-based startup CopterPack published a new video on YouTube of what appears to be an electric backpack helicopter flying for the first time.

The lightweight airframe is constructed from a carbon fiber honeycomb, with two propellers on either side of the operator, lifting the person into the air.

The video shows the flight and how remarkably stable the electric backpack helicopter is, all thanks to its self-leveling autopilot.

Judging by the video, there is no tail rotor, as the two main propellers are adjusted by the operator with a joystick for control...........
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Re: Flying cars and jet pack news and discussion thread

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Innovative batteries put flying cars on the horizon
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-bat ... rizon.html
by A'ndrea Elyse Messer, Pennsylvania State University
The automotive electric vehicle revolution is paving the way for urban air mobility, but people must not be naive in thinking that electric vehicle batteries will suffice for electric flight. The fast-charging requirements, 30x increase in energy throughput, and 3x power requirements demand a new generation of battery. Credit: Eric Rountree, EC Power

Jet packs, robot maids and flying cars were all promises for the 21st century. We got mechanized, autonomous vacuum cleaners instead. Now a team of Penn State researchers are exploring the requirements for electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles and designing and testing potential battery power sources.

"I think flying cars have the potential to eliminate a lot of time and increase productivity and open the sky corridors to transportation," said Chao-Yang Wang, holder of the William E. Diefender Chair of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Electrochemical Engine Center, Penn State. "But electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles are very challenging technology for the batteries."
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Re: Flying cars and jet pack news and discussion thread

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Archer unveils full-scale, two-seat, autonomous Maker eVTOL prototype
By Loz Blain
June 10, 2021


Palo Alto's Archer has unveiled a full-scale, two-seat, autonomous prototype of its Maker eVTOL aircraft at the Hawthorne Airport in California. This striking aircraft will begin ground tests and flight tests later this year, with air taxi services slated to begin in LA and Miami in 2024.

Just about dead-on to the renders we've seen previously, the Maker uses an intermediate design that's effectively half vectored thrust and half lift & cruise. It's a fairly conventional airplane shape with a V-tail and a large main overhead wing. Along this wing are six propulsion pods, each with a two-blade rear lift rotor and a five-blade front rotor that can tilt forward in horizontal flight. The rear rotors can't be completely tucked away to reduce drag, but they keep things as efficient as they can by aligning themselves with the airflow.
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/archer-ma ... unveiling/
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Re: Flying cars and jet pack news and discussion thread

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Airspeeder says it had the first successful test flight for its electric flying racecar
The company is aiming to hold races with the uncrewed vehicles later this year
Airspeeder says its electric “flying” race car, the Alauda Mk3, has had its first unpiloted test flights in southern Australia. The craft, an electric vertical takeoff multicopter (abbreviated eVTOL for electric vertical take off and landing) was remotely controlled and the test flights took place under the supervision of Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority.

The ultimate goal for Airspeeder and Alauda Aeronautics (the former is the racing series, the latter is the manufacturer), both founded by entrepreneur Matthew Pearson, has been to build flying vehicles for the purpose of racing them, which the companies say is the next step. According to Airspeeder’s website, the “successful execution of these flights means that uncrewed electric flying car Grand Prixs will take place in 2021 at three soon-to-be-revealed international locations.”
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Re: Flying cars and jet pack news and discussion thread

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It's looking like this, among other innovations, might be the a precursor to the long-sought elusive flying car for everyday civilian life.
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