[t0mas88]

12 minutes endurance is absolute madness to any pilot. No way to fly this thing within the current regulations.

A fuel powered aircraft needs to land with a legal minimum fuel reserve of 30 minutes when flying visually (good weather only), in worse weather it's 45 minutes + the time it takes to get to an alternate airport in case of problems at the destination. So usually 1 to 1.5 hour of reserve/alternate fuel on top of the time needed for the flight itself.

[VLM]

Depends a lot on use case.

I have some experience with visual inspection of aerial optical fiber. You can rent a very large and expensive helicopter to fly uncomfortably close to swaying fiber and power lines, or fly this thing up and down the line.

There's also a lot of money in visual inspection of power lines. Not in California, LOL, where they just let it burn, but in better areas, when trees or vines get too close to the power lines, even during droughts, they trim them rather than letting them catch fire and burn off. But I live in a civilized area far from the coasts LOL.

I imagine this will get militarized and police-militarized very quickly. Thirty seconds before kicking the door in over unpaid library fines or writing the wrong politics on twitter, fly the plane over the building and look in all the windows and make some decisions about letting the team kick the door in, or land the plane on the roof or try to find the best vantage point to observe or illuminate the situation. In 12 minutes everyone in the house or everyone in the swat team will be dead, one way or the other. Might be good for last minute verification its the correct house, not that there's ever any punishment for shooting the wrong people, in either military or civilian or militarized police situations.

I suspect there are entire classes of non-tactical military-type use. Aircraft crashes next to the aircraft carrier, a few minutes/seconds of nearly instantly arriving and hovering over the pilot will help the "real" helicopters and rescue crews find the pilot. A human piloted electric drone could hover over a pilot before a turbine helicopter finishes spinning up the rotor... Its not powerful enough to lift people in a rescue situation but is strong enough to drop lightweight supplies.

There are some limited situations where a human being on site making judgement calls is safer and more efficient than a pre-programmed drone or a human very far away and uncoordinated with the folks on site.

I suspect battlefield communications is in a stage much like anti-aircraft defense in Vietnam in the early days, before surface to air missiles existed. I think the USA, and probably the world, has seen the last battlefield of total emcom superiority. In 2030 trying to fly a FPV observation drone will just get automatic counterbattery fire on both the drone and operator, on both sides, etc. The days of you just freely transmit are over. The land battlefield is going to look a lot more like naval sonar situation where if you active sonar ping you get blown up by someone you never even hear. So everyone's got a radio and blue force tracker and all that is kinda over now.

[jefftk]

It's not clear to me from your examples why this would be better than a human nearby piloting a drone?

[nradov]

A US Navy carrier strike group already always has a search-and-rescue helicopter airborne during flight operations. That has been standard procedure for years. They can respond to a crash in a matter of seconds.

[ludocode]

I imagine this would be way too loud to use in any police situation.

Besides, none of your examples require that a human actually be inside the vehicle. They could all be done by unmanned drone. The only reason to put a human in the vehicle is to travel.

Now if they replaced the human with its weight in batteries, or better yet a hydrogen tank with a fuel cell, this would give it a huge flight time which would make it much more useful.

[hef19898]

That depends under which class the aircraft will be certified, depsite it being electric I could image that it falls under the ultra-light class (I'd have to look up the exact Name under EASA so).

[t0mas88]

EASA doesn't have rules for ultra- and microlight aircraft, they're only in national regulations. So then it depends on what the country you're in decides.

But even if you're allowed to fly with only minutes of fuel reserve. The big question is whether you should want to. When you're in a more basic aircraft, that didn't go through all the certification requirements that other aircraft go through, it would not be a great idea to skip all kinds of safety practices like fuel and alternate planning just because you're not legally forced to do it. You're then just increasing risks more and more, while this thing is marketed to non-pilot buyers that may not even fully understand the risks.

[HPsquared]

This also doesn't look like it can glide or autorotate, so if you run out of fuel it's pretty much guaranteed to crash.

Edit: I guess that eventuality is managed by the parachute system and a structure designed to handle the resulting "hard landing".

[squarefoot]

Does this rule also apply to helicopters and other VTOL aircrafts? The alternate airport in this case might be a field or parking lot 100 meters away.

[t0mas88]

In good weather a helicopter is allowed to reduce it to 20 minutes.

In bad weather the alternate must be an airport with the facilities to conduct an instrument landing, so definitely not just a parking lot. And the forecasted weather at that airport needs to be good enough from 1 hour before until 1 hour after the expected arrival. "Good enough" is defined stricter for helicopters than for airplanes.