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by donquichotte 3364 days ago
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.

1 comments

range: ~30km

battery: ?

flight time: ~20min

max. load: 2 persons... 150kg?

weight: under 450kg fully loaded

price: ~300k EUR

permission needed: difficult... no airclass yet for those things except. "ultra light"

Those figures are from a presentation of the VC200 and might not be exactly right for the 2X.

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.

Fully agreed.

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.