
Astro's Elroy Personal EVTOL in Flight Testing - prostoalex
https://www.flyingmag.com/astro-elroy-personal-vtol-flight-tests?enews100218
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dylan604
>The fully autonomous Elroy is and designed for densely populated areas

Where do they expect something like this to land? Densely populated areas are
not known for having plenty of open/empty spaces for something with spinning
blades to land. Existing heliports? Those are not typically near anything
convenient, except maybe the pads on top of buildings. However, this has a max
altitude of 60 feet, so it can't reach those.

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magnetic
Where did you see it has a max altitude of 60 feet?

The article just mentions that in a recent flight it flew up to 60 feet. It
doesn't mean it's the max.

It also flew at around 30 mph, while its max speed is 44 mph.

The way I understand it is that they are reporting on recent test flights, not
on projected abilities.

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guepe
I don't think this could be a winning design: it's inefficient because it's
really like a helicopter. IMHO, the ones with some sort of small wings and
horizontal propellers have way more chance to succeed. Efficiency during
horizontal travel is much better - and this is position where you spend most
time - as well as increased max speed and lower noise during travel.

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mtreis86
No autorotation?

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magnetic
The pitch of the blades is fixed (if I believe the photos from their website),
so the variations in lift is simply controlled by the variation in speed of
the given rotor. This is just like any hobby quad/hex/octo/younameit-copters
out there.

That means you can't reverse the pitch to gain angular momentum from a fall,
and therefore, implement autorotation like a "traditional heli" can.

You do have multiple rotors for redundancy (in case one of them fails), but
that's not going to protect you from a complete power failure of course if
that power source is global.

You can increase safety by providing each rotor with its own independent power
source.

