They have such a cool concept. Safer, cleaner and user friendly controls for a Helicopter alternative. I do hope they increase the flying altitude so it can meet the FAA guidelines (500 ft) of flying in congested areas (town/cities).
This is not a helicopter. With the volocopter design, up to 4 of the 18 rotors can fail and you can still fly/control/land, and for contingencies there is a ballistic rescue chute.
Helicopter glide property is important because most are single engine. You could easily put several independent motor + battery partitions in this one.
Indeed. The 18 rotors in two concentric circles (6 in the inner, 2 x 6 in the outer) are each driven by an independent engine, and they're operated by many power trains that supply rotors on opposite sides. So, if a rotor fails (or actually up to 4), no prob, still controllable for expedient landing.
If a power train fails, same.
Those "power-free" landings require a collective pitch rotor system.
The volocopter appears to be direct drive fixed pitch so it wouldn't be able to autorotate.
It also presumably relies on counter rotating rotors to cancel out the torques, so loss of motors may require other motors to be shut down to prevent undesirable yaw.
I remain somewhat skeptical of these being practical beyond 5-10 minute fun flights around a field, but good luck to them.
I really like these. There is something to these kind of inventions that always puts them "just around the corner" category. This has been going on since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar in the 90's.
There is probably a combination of a tendency of people to dream about flying, and how much fun it would be, combined with the ignorance of all possible hurdles, not just physical and engineering ones, but also legal and regulatory.
There's a self-flying taxi drone supposed to start operating in Dubai this summer.
> The Ehang is electric-powered and can travel for about 31 miles with a person and bag that weigh up to 100kg. It can go at speeds of up to 63 miles an hour and takes two hours to charge fully.
I'm a bit skeptical of the eHang 184, built by a Chinese company that's built toys and commercial 10-kg-drones - it has 8 props, namely 1 coaxial twin prop (presumably counter-rotating) at every corner. Does not look hugely redundant to me, plus they're conveniently located to break legs while on the ground (or heads during take-off/landing).
The Volocopter has had manned and unmanned test flights since last year, has 18 rotors in a rotor plane well above your head, can fly with 4 rotors inoperative, has a ballistic rescue chute, and apparently good initial feedback from the regulator.
(Disclaimer: I've invested 1000 EUR in the Volocopter via crowdfunding, so I might be hopelessly biased.)
What I would love on these kind of announcements is a short overview of the specs (just like they make them for cars and motorcycles!)
- range [km]
- battery capacity [kWh]
- flight time [h]
- maximum load [kg]
- weight [kg]
- price [€]
- permissions needed to fly it
...
Instead of a very strange and convoluted website with titles like "jump in and take off" (what else am I gonna do with a personal helicopter?) I would love to have some hard facts.
The current specifications are 15 min max theoretical flight time with one passenger, that never as been proved on real life scenario.
Considering that rotorcopter regulation requires 20 min reserve time unless there is an exception the vehicle can even takeoff battery technology will have to double for a 10 min flight time with 20 min reserve one passenger.
Volocopter is a great project and on electrical VTOL is the current "state of the art" but it's very dependent on a massive battery weight to power improvement.
How I know all this, I run a startup targeting the some problem but with a very different approach.
Two huge bottlenecks for PEVA (personal electric VTOL aircraft) remain, in my view:
* specific energy of the battery. I hope progress is being made there.
* regulation, as you allude to. A VTOL aircraft in VFR with fairly short total flight time could probably reasonably be allowed to fly with lower reserves. Airmen licensing is another huge area - it would be absurd to require a helicopter CPL or even ATPL for shuttling a pax around in this.
While this is not a car replacement for everyone - the Volocopter will require a full pilot license to be flown, it should have a significant impact on small commercial and especially non-commerical flying. Helicopters are very expensive to operate and the Volocopter should bring down operation costs down to the levels of fixed-wing aircrafts, if not even below that, as it lacks any maintenance-intensive combustion engine.
> Volocopter will require a full pilot license to be flown
My understanding is that it'll require a sport pilot license, and the regulator might well introduce an entirely new category (as it is not comparable to a heli or even fixed wing in complexity).
If safety was the primary concern I'd lever leave home. I think if rigorous safety goals are set and meeting those goals comes before meeting any other performance or cost criteria, then I think it's reasonable to say that safety came first.
The initial two-seat design uses battery packs, with a
flight-time duration of only about 20 to 30 minutes. It
will be certified for sport flying, Zosel says, and he
plans to sell the copters for about $340,000. He’s also
working to develop a hybrid power system that would extend
flight time to over one hour.
My guess is that this is intended to a completely different public than planes (short distances). Still looks like totally unrealistic for urban mobility IMO.
Well put. I do appreciate your notion of hope. I was going to express this sentiment as "no fucking way!" but in reality I am glad someone is working on (currently) impossible problems.
Height control seems to be directly on the cyclic, without the combined height/throttle handle. I do not see yaw pedals, either.
Controls of this aircraft seem to be different enough from conventional helicopter (that at least license hours were flown in) to be a serious disadvantage for potential buyers. Another consideration could be how this thing reacts to wind gusts and how different that handles compared to conventional heli. These things could be important factors for potential customers.
Experienced pilots tell me that automatic position control even in modern (non-military) helicopters work worse than experienced hand in non ideal conditions. YMMV, though :)
Out of curiosity, is there a button that's held while rotating the stick to rotate? The stick looks directional, so it wouldn't make sense to just rotate it and keep it rotated...
My understanding is that when you rotate the stick, the angle controls the rotational (yaw) speed of the Volcopter (in other words, you hold the stick straight, it'll keep looking in a fixed direction, say north. Now if you twist the stick a few degrees, it'll slowly rotate in that direction (and keep rotating as long as you hold it twisted). If you twist it more, it'll rotate faster. If you let go (untwist), it'll stop rotating and maintain that heading.)
You can see this in this video of the first manned flight a year ago, at around 2:26.
You can also nicely see the thumb controlled ascent/descent switch at the beginning. Controls look super intuitive.
I can understand such motivation, but aviation is extremely heavily regulated area. I am not sure whether non-standard controls would even be allowed, though. While driver's license is granted for demonstration of rather basic ability to handle a vehicle, even non-commercial pilot's license (which I do not have, so) is granted for demonstrating substantial ability to control an aircraft and number of hours clocked. Enough hours that different controls could seem an obstacle.
If it was about new concept self-driving car with manual controls on joystick rather pedals and wheel, I would have my doubts about its marketability also.
> I am not sure whether non-standard controls would even be allowed, though.
Good point, regulation is a huge issue.
It is my understanding, though, that FAA and EASA are moving away from regulation that is very prescriptive in exactly how to achieve something (which would indeed make it hard to introduce an entirely new control concept) towards regulation that prescribes more what needs to be achieved (controllability, safety, etc.), under the heading of "performance-based certification".
Also, it appears regulators in Germany are somewhat positively disposed towards this, and even considering to establish a new category of aircraft with distinct certification requirements and airmen licensing requirements.
I mean, in fixed wings, you have to demonstrate a certain number of take-offs and landing, which makes perfect sense, but it's not really transferable to this aircraft:
ok, you sit in a Volocopter and then press the switch up with your thumb for take-off for a few seconds, then hold it fully down until touchdown (automatically slowed down when ground proximity is detected), then repeat a few times (up, down), and get your license... :-)
Are multiple rotor blades more or less efficient than a single large rotor?
Also, could a normal helicopter be adapted to use these control systems to make them easier to fly?
Yeah they are less efficient. The reason to use them is that they can be fixed pitch and you get control by controlling their speed, which is very simple to do (it's basically a huge quadcopter). Normal helicopters keep the speed roughly fixed and get control using variable pitch, which is obviously far more complicated mechanically.
Don't know for sure, but considering you can run the blades at higher RPM due to the smaller radius vs approaching the speed of sound, it might be better. (also redundancy).
I think the big issue with this sort of scheme would be noise. Small, heavily loaded props will be super loud. There are a lot of them in this case. The noise wouldn't linearly increase with the number of propellers but it would increase with the addition of each one.
My guess would be that the noise wouldn't carry as far due to the higher frequency but would be very loud closer in, again due to the higher frequency.
The site is not mobile friendly - images weren't scaled on mobile, could not be seen, only their left side, and site could not be aide scrolled. Imho a marketing site should be completely mobile friendly.
It has 18 rotors (basically 3 on each of the corners of a hexagon, 6 in an inner circle, and 12 in an outer circle), each driven by its own engine.
Pairs of rotors on opposite sides are driven by 9 independent powertrains and batteries, so failure of one battery/powertrain induces not much asymmetry and poses no problem.
At least 4 rotors can fail and the aircraft still remains fully controllable.
Beyond that, there is a ballistic rescue chute (as in the Cirrus SR20/SR22 fixed wing aircraft), which you can't really have, by construction, in a traditional helicopter.