Compared to a helicopter : much less noisy (still noisy, but a nuisance at 200m instead of 2km) ; much more redundant as far as faillible systems go (especially rotors and engines).
The electronic flight system also basically trivializes the technical part of piloting a helicopter, just like they’ve done on small drones. No longer do you need to keep balance yourself, manage pitch vs power etc., everything’s done by a program. You just decide where to go.
A few years ago I failed to make a RC helicopter fly, as opposed to bi- or quadri-rotor drones that are no problem to anyone because they’re so trivial to fly with an iPhone.
Peter wrote:
Another oneNice CGI
What would be needed to make this work? Auto autorotation for a start?
I clicked the page out of curiosity. What struck me is that they do not plan to achieve autonomous flight. Instead, they plan to not enable some form of autonomous response from the aircraft, but let it have follow a preprogrammed route, called automatic flight. Doesn’t that mean that someone has to react in case something goes south? But then the pilot still needs to have a license! If yes, where’s the point of that thing in comparison to a helicopter? Because a helicopter on autopilot is doing the same thing, and they even write that on the homepage (not clearly, but clear enough)
Cirrus_Man wrote:
Progress is inevitable and as the battery technology improves
There are but marginal improvements left for batteries. They are fundamentally limited, and we are right up to the limit. Even if we squeeze a few additional kWh, we’re already at the point where the fire hazard is a big problem, and any denser battery will simply add to the danger. The advantage of liquid fuels is that they are naturally limited by the supply of oxygen (which is what most firefighters are trained to do : cut the supply of O2 and the fire stops). A runaway battery just burns all of its energy until there’s no energy left. There’s nothing you can do about it until it’s done, and it generally takes hours.
There’s also very little common experience about the safety of such aircrafts. The guarantees you have to bring in order to make an airworthy system are quite substantial for simple systems, and with such complex multi-rotor adaptative shapeshifting fully electronic system, you can be sure that airworthiness certification is years if not decades away.
I think the idea is neat, and we’ve seen many new applications of lithium batteries in the last few years (drones, skateboards, bikes etc.), but I feel it would be better done with a small turbine powering the whole thing and a battery that holds just enough energy to safely land if the engine fails.
Is this the appropriate thread? Public money. No mention of how wind will affect operations and ground storage.
https://news.stv.tv/highlands-islands/electric-aircraft-airlander-10-reserved-for-highlands-and-islands-as-plans-progress?utm_source=app
You can also adjust the power output on a per-propeller basis and largely do away with control surfaces.
What seems surprising to me about this aircraft, to me, is that it has more wing than I would expect. If I were going to make a VTOL machine I would use the minimum sized wing for a high cruise speed – e.g. if the cruise speed is 200 mph, I’d size the wing to stall at 150 mph and deal with engine/battery/control failure by ballistic parachute.
It sounds as if their ‘lotus’ drone is flying.
Yes, I think we’ll in the future see a lot more leading edge prop type solutions like mentioned NASA, to distribute thrust over wing and increase prop area. The fact is that if there’s no penalty for having multiple props, then more efficiency will be achieved. The more disc area you have, the more efficient things become. At least for subsonic aircraft.
Progress is inevitable and as the battery technology improves, this type of platform becomes more and more viable.
Nasa has already tested the leading edge rotor design and found it to be extremely efficient.
But maybe, who knows?, this is the one that shows us all wrong!
Most certainly not. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should 
