For sure you are right about it having a lot of challenges and the total weight vs battery weight vs payload weight is a huge one.
But remember the wing design is competing against "no wing" so it is easy to be a huge improvement. Normal drones don't really get to throttle down and they have to do all their flight controls through engine speed adjustments. Normal flight controls use almost no power & when this thing builds up a head of steam it will be able to throttle back to cruise.
It looks like a closed edge biplane when it transitions.. the closed edges help efficiency. It can probably be optimized for a very narrow speed range as well so I bet they can come up with a very nice airfoil design.
> It looks like a closed edge biplane when it transitions.. the closed edges help efficiency
Perhaps. It could also be mostly to stabilize the aircraft in forward flight, since that's more efficient by itself with a "pulling" rotor than a traditional quad-copter setup (using differential thrust from each motor to control movement and stability).
The closed wing doesn't look very large, so we'll have to see just how much lift they actually get out of it. The airfoil design may not generate much or any lift but instead just be used for control, such as a typical horizontal/vertical stabilizer of an aircraft.
Or perhaps it does generate some lift and helps a bit. Just looks rather small for that role, but I could be wrong. RC aircraft often defy principles that apply to their full-sized brethren.
> (FTA): Amazon declined to release some specifics on the device, citing trade secrets
I guess we'll just have to wait for some more specifics.
I don't know, just speculating it's not providing much lift with it being so small. But, it definitely would help stabilize the aircraft in it's forward flight configuration. You're probably right in that it's doing both.
Was hoping they'd release more details. It's not like RC aircraft have much secret sauce to them... other than Amazon's proprietary package compartment.
But remember the wing design is competing against "no wing" so it is easy to be a huge improvement. Normal drones don't really get to throttle down and they have to do all their flight controls through engine speed adjustments. Normal flight controls use almost no power & when this thing builds up a head of steam it will be able to throttle back to cruise.
It looks like a closed edge biplane when it transitions.. the closed edges help efficiency. It can probably be optimized for a very narrow speed range as well so I bet they can come up with a very nice airfoil design.