
Kitty Hawk’s Flyer personal VTOL has now flown over 25,000 times - username13
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/15/kitty-hawks-flyer-personal-vtol-has-now-flown-over-25000-times/
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blhack
Doesn’t it terrify anybody else that you are right in the rotational plane for
those propellers? If one of them were ever to break, it’s coming right at you.

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ovi256
Those blades are very light, probably carbon fiber. If the propeller breaks,
the blades would be slowed down tremendously by aerodynamic forces in just a
meter or so. Just like a piece of cardboard would be.

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Buraksr
I know these propellers [0] are maybe 1/4 to like 1/8th the size of those
shown but thee 56g weight surprised me a lot.

0-[https://www.robotshop.com/en/t-motor-22-x-66--carbon-
fiber-p...](https://www.robotshop.com/en/t-motor-22-x-66--carbon-fiber-
propeller-pair.html)

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zyang
Is anyone able to find an actual flight footage with unaltered audio. I'm
curious to see how loud this is. Considering all the flight footages are
either muted or edited with music, I assume the answer is very loud.

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Semiapies
Probably, though the only aircraft that aren't incredibly loud are gliders.

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QuercusMax
In case you're not familiar, this is Larry Page's company (not associated with
Google or Alphabet).

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colmvp
And as the article says, the company is lead by Sebastian Thrun who was the
previous founder of Google X and their self-driving car team, as well as still
the president of Udacity.

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PunksATawnyFill
For the near future, I'd speculate that human-scale multirotor copters are not
going to hold enough energy to be practical.

A design that lets you save energy after takeoff by using lift from wings and
forward propulsion... maybe.

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no_wizard
Never heard of this before......this is, quite amazing.

I wonder what the scenario for this is. You couldn't fly these in urban
centers unless it was similar to flying a helicopter, no?

Also, I wonder how fuel efficient they are.

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madengr
Ditto. What's the advantage of flying 10 feet above the ground? Is it a true
aircraft, or a surface effect vehicle?

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no_wizard
I could see the advantage of these in swamplands or the 'bushes' if you will
(places like remote parts of Africa, South East Asia, parts of the Southern
United States, Alaska, come to mind).

But the practical use case I can't seem to envision yet. However, if the goal
is to be able to fly these things like helicopters but get some sort of
massive fuel advantage out of it, I could see them being used for certain
types of deliveries if they can hold a substantial amount of cargo via an
attachment or something.

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mullen
I am no airplane or helicopter engineer, but that just seems like a really bad
idea and just some bad waiting to happen.

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mixmastamyk
Why?

