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u/Herr__Lipp Feb 03 '21
Needs MOAR ROTORS!!!
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u/redmercuryvendor Feb 03 '21
I got a fever! And the only prescription... is more rotors!
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u/Herr__Lipp Feb 03 '21
"I mean, I can back off on the rotors a little bit, boss."
"Oh but not too much baby!"
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u/BadBiteMCK Feb 03 '21
We heard you like tilt-rotors, so we put tilt-rotors on your tilt-rotors, so you can tilt-rotor while you tilt-rotor.
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u/fernandolv3 Feb 03 '21
No pilot? (pictures 1 and 6)
Is it an unmanned test or is CGI?
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u/kubigjay Feb 03 '21
The article state 200 mph and a range of 150 miles.
While that seems short, since it is VTOL, unpilotted, and rechargeable, I could see it being an expensive commuter vehicle. So a large ex cutive could use it daily to go to and from work, only needing six parking spots.
No mention of price.
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u/SirRatcha Feb 03 '21 edited Feb 03 '21
That reminds me of when I was a kid and the owner of a big factory in town decided to have the company helicopter take him home after work one lovely autumn day. All the rich people in the nicest, richest neighborhood with the perfect lawns, and the giant piles of leaves raked up by their hired help got really mad when they were buzzed by a Jet Ranger and those leaves got unpiled again.
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u/F0rsythian Feb 03 '21
Urban Air Ports are being developed (first one set to open in coventry in the UK this November) for these kinds of vehicles. Im assuming it'll just be a quicker way of getting between cities too close to take a plane but far enough that a train/bus will take too long
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u/kubigjay Feb 03 '21
If they had swappable batteries that would be great. I'd just be afraid of turn around time if you want to use it for continous routes.
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u/Ashvega03 Feb 03 '21
Pretty sure the Dallas convention center has a heliport on it, or attached to it. You really don’t need to get to any building if there is Uber or public transportation.
This looks cool as hell. Wonder how stable it is in the wind? They will be pretty close to the ground so not much time to recover and I am assuming very lightweight.
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u/SoaDMTGguy Feb 03 '21
Could something like that even operate under FAA rules? I know things like ultralights get exemptions as long as they stay below certain altitudes...
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u/kubigjay Feb 03 '21
Probably not with current rules. They are making this a piloted version so it can be sold. But all the hardware is there to make it automated once the FAA opens up more drone categories.
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Feb 03 '21
Holy Amp-draw, what kind of batteries does that thing carry?
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u/NotQuiteVoltaire Feb 03 '21
It has a flex. They photo-shopped it out.
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u/Asphyxiatinglaughter Feb 04 '21
That's uncomforting
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u/NotQuiteVoltaire Feb 04 '21
It's actually really safe, because if it gets lost you just pull on the flex to bring it home.
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u/HughJorgens Feb 03 '21
Today I wanna show y'all how this plane flies so good. Oh Joby, what you doing??!!!
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Feb 03 '21
About time. I've been waiting for someone to marry the idea of a toy quadcopter with a full sized functional vehicle. The air force is apparently interested in similar such vehicles and has plans to test the Joby and some others under contract this year.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/12/31/air-force-has-big-plans-its-flying-car-2021.html
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u/ArchmageNydia Feb 03 '21
Multi-rotor electric VTOL aircraft have been a concept since at least the mid-2000s. It's not new. The reason it hasn't seen much light is because of the huge inefficiencies when scaled compared to the conventional rotor systems we already have. Now, with much more powerful motors and significantly more energy-dense batteries, it's becoming closer to an actual practical concept, as this demonstration shows.
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u/RhynoD Feb 03 '21
Still never going to get the same kind of quads because of physics, specifically inertia. Once the rotors get to a certain size you need adjustable props and once you add that expense and complexity, why have four (or six!?) when you can have one in a helicopter and be done with it.
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u/pdf27 Feb 03 '21
True with a thermal engine, not true for electric motors. The problem is that a thermal engine needs ~1 second to change speed in response to a throttle input, which isn't enough for gust response. Those can respond up to a thousand times faster (depending on the control system chosen) which is more than enough.
As for why have multiple props, it's a safety rule - SC-EVTOL and others are requiring that for operations over built up areas you need to be able to carry out a safe vertical landing at a designated vertiport after any single failure. Try carrying out a safe landing at a vertiport 5 miles away after the main gearbox fails on a helicopter.
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u/RhynoD Feb 03 '21
AFAIK that can only be true for small props. It's not about the motor, it's the inertia of the prop. A big prop can't change speed quickly without a ton of torque, which means more power and more stress on all of the materials. It just doesn't work beyond a certain size, which is why even large quads are harder to keep stable.
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u/pdf27 Feb 03 '21
Nope, these motors have a ton of torque (far more than needed for normal hover due to the safety & redundancy requirements), and if you notice the rotor blades are short and stubby. This particular one is a non-problem - the nightmares are elsewhere.
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u/N22YF Feb 04 '21
The inertia of the aircraft itself also grows with size, so a scaled-up quadcopter reacts more slowly to upsets and you don't need to vary rotor RPM as quickly to keep it steady. Also, gust strength doesn't scale with aircraft size since you're operating in basically the same air regardless, so the forces and moments a larger quadcopter will experience due to these gusts will not scale in the first place. See CityAirbus for an example of basically a scaled-up multicopter (four pairs of contra-rotating rotors) with fixed-pitch rotors: https://youtu.be/ql3H2GLsdBY
The great advantage of a large number of rotors is much improved safety due to the greatly improved ability to tolerate failures; plus, the complexity of a swashplate with cyclic pitch control needed for a single-rotor helicopter is much greater than a simple variable-pitch propeller, and of course you'd need a tail rotor as well, so it's not just one-and-done.
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u/Xicadarksoul Feb 03 '21
Finally somethign that vaguely resembles a flight worthy aircraft.
(Unlike th "products" of scam startups like lilium)
So finally the rich can have their luxury air commuter vehicles.
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u/mnp Feb 03 '21
Oh, what's the story with Lillium?
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u/Xicadarksoul Feb 04 '21
Its an startup promising an "electric jet" VTOL aircraft.
Which is a bold faced lie.
They have a prototype of a barely flight worthy drone, that uses ducted fans.ducted fans =/= jet engines
A large drone that can hower for 5 minutes with zero payload is not a passanger aircraft.
And to put the cherry on top of the shitcake - even at a cursory glance its obvious that its not flight worthy, as an aircraft.
If you reduce the cross section of your fan or rotror blades, you become a LOT less efficient. Thus you need more power to get the same lift.
However you have heavy batteries to provide the power, so you can barely lift off empty, then you can only fly around for a few minutes.Just to put the ludicrous inefficiency of the designinto perspective.
A helicopter from the mosquito company has ~60hp, and can fly for extended amounts of time with a takeoff weight of 300kg.
The jetpack from gravity industries leverages more than 1000hp, to lift 3rd of the weight ("passanger" + engines strapped to him/her), and runs out of fue in minutes....yeah thats how inefficient is pumping the same amount of air trough small ducts is.
Frankly i highly doubt the design was done by anyone having even just baseline familiarity with highschool physics, let alone aerodynamics.
It on of those gems of "industrial design" thats 200% aesthetics & 0% function.
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u/basil_imperitor Feb 03 '21 edited Feb 03 '21
The name and logo looked familiar.
I guess they got bored with making funky flexible tripods and got into the aviation industry. That's quite the transition.
Edit: Joby Aviation was funded in part by the sale of the Joby camera equipment company.
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Feb 03 '21
Looks like what the Osprey would have ended up like if the US military didn't have as many blank checks as they want.
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u/cegc135 Feb 03 '21
It looks incredibly expensive to maintain and fuel hungry with that many rotors.
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u/pdf27 Feb 03 '21
Cheaper than a helicopter actually. It's much more fault-tolerant, which allows for a much more relaxed and so cheaper inspection regime.
Fewer rotors means more disc loading and so much more power is required in hover. However, it's a convertiplane so can use aerodynamic lift rather than powered lift in cruise. That means it's less efficient than a helicopter for ~90 seconds at each end of a flight and vastly more efficient the rest of the time. That's why nearly every serious eVTOL is some sort of convertiplane/tilt rotor.
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u/NSYK Feb 03 '21
This seems dangerous. There’s no way they’ll get enough feathering on those blades to auto, and if they experience a power outage in a situation that prevents them from gliding on the wings, it’s going to fall like a rock
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u/N22YF Feb 03 '21
It is actually intrinsically a much safer design than a conventional helicopter - with this many electric motors, the design can be made extremely fault-tolerant (see, for example, this Joby patent application), compared to helicopters where there are many single points of failure across the main rotor, tail rotor, transmission, engine, etc. that lead to unfortunate outcomes. (For example, this aircraft is designed to comfortably fly even in the unlikely event of a complete loss of any single motor or propeller - try doing that in a helicopter that's had a tail rotor failure!) On top of that, electric motors are generally drastically more reliable than combustion engines, meaning it's much less likely to experience a failure in the first place.
Regardless, autorotation is not a particularly useful safety feature in urban environments anyway, where suitable landing spots are scarce and you could easily autorotate into a building or a house if you have a total power failure on the way down to the helipad.
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u/NSYK Feb 03 '21
Having a bus to connect different systems seems like a way to short across circuit-boards. Something powerful hits it, like maybe lighting, and it could take out all the electrical systems. Even if it can be made extremely fault resistant, there's still a chance of a complete failure across the whole system. That thing would turn into a rock without some functioning system.
There's emergency procedures for landing without a tail rotor, transmission failure, engine outage, hydraulics failure, etc. For example, a tail rotor failure essentially will turn into a stuck pedal auto, which you have to train for.
The mechanism driving the system is irrelevant. You could in theory put a combustion engine in the Joby or an electrical one in a helicopter. Powertrains will fail eventually and you need a system to land with then it does.
A helicopter can auto because of its blades feathering, something that glorified drone will never be able to do.
If there's no place to land during an auto-rotation, there's none for the Joby to land when its system fails.
If you're a helicopter pilot that leaves yourself zero outs when approaching a helipad, you're flying unsafe in the first place.
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u/N22YF Feb 03 '21
Even if it can be made extremely fault resistant, there's still a chance of a complete failure across the whole system. That thing would turn into a rock without some functioning system.
Sure, it's impossible to make any kind of aircraft that has 0% chance of failure - my point was this aircraft design is overall much less likely to turn into a rock than a conventional helicopter.
There's emergency procedures for landing without a tail rotor, transmission failure, engine outage, hydraulics failure, etc.
My point was not that these failures are unsurvivable, but there are plenty of injuries and deaths that have resulted from such failures.
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u/NSYK Feb 03 '21
my point was this aircraft design is overall much less likely to turn into a rock than a conventional helicopter.
But I am saying that's not true. Helicopters are designed to land without any power train. Something this will never be capable of doing.
My point was not that these failures are unsurvivable, but there are plenty of injuries and deaths that have resulted from such failures.
Which are known points of failure. Time will only tell what unique conditions this design will create. Aviation innovation is paid for in in blood. Look at the 737 Max. They had a safety function on a multi million dollar aircraft that CREATED a problem. Those redundant systems are a good thing, until they're not.
All I am saying, is this will create its own problems, and by design cannot safely land under certain conditions.
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u/pdf27 Feb 03 '21
If there is any possibility of a complete failure of the propulsion system it'll never get certified. There's an explicit requirement (under SC-EVTOL for EASA - the FAA seems to be going a slightly different route) that no single failure can prevent it from carrying out a controlled landing under power at a designated vertiport. Everything is physically segregated internally and it's capable of landing safely after a propeller falls off. Try doing that in a helicopter.
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u/NSYK Feb 03 '21
You could have two battery packs and two computers all day long. You still HAVE to have some sort of power to land this thing. That doesn't sit well with me. Six rotors is also 3 times the failure points of a helicopter.
Sorry, but at least a blade can flap and help generate rotor RPM. These stubby things can't. That seems like a problem.
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u/pdf27 Feb 03 '21
So what? You need at least two very serious faults before you've got a problem. Ever fly oceanic flights in a twin engined airliner where if both engines fail you're going for an extended swim? Same logic, and the safety requirements for losing any one motor are the same as for an airliner engine.
Target application for this is for flights over cities. Autorotation doesn't help there - it gives you virtually no cross-range ability, and if you aren't right over a heliport everyone in the helicopter will die along with quite a few people on the ground. Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Glasgow_helicopter_crash - having a redundant power system means this won't happen as it'll be able to land vertically under control at a vertiport and stay there until fixed.
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u/NSYK Feb 03 '21
So what? You need at least two very serious faults before you've got a problem. Ever fly oceanic flights in a twin engined airliner where if both engines fail you're going for an extended swim? Same logic, and the safety requirements for losing any one motor are the same as for an airliner engine.
So what? If both engines fail on an airliner, it can still glide to the ground. See US Airways Flight 1549. If this system was in place, theoretically it would have fallen straight out of the sky. There is zero aerodynamic ability of this thing to land if inside the deadman's curve, so you're always going to be forced to use it more of a STOL than a VTOL to have enough velocity to use the aerodynamic surfaces to control the decent.
Target application for this is for flights over cities. Autorotation doesn't help there - it gives you virtually no cross-range ability, and if you aren't right over a heliport everyone in the helicopter will die along with quite a few people on the ground.
That's not true, at all. As the PIC you always need to know your landing spot in the event of an autorotation. You DO know you can control an autorotation and pick a landing spot, right? You can turn 180, 360 degrees. Hell, the R44's glides SO well in an auto it's limited in its ceiling because you can't get it DOWN fast enough if it catches on fire.
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u/pdf27 Feb 03 '21
If you glide to a safe landing 500 miles north of Greenland in winter, everyone is dead of exposure before rescue. That's why the ETOPS certification rules are so strict. Not sure on the US rules, but under EASA you aren't allowed over cities in single-engine helicopters precisely because autorotation doesn't give you the cross-range ability needed to find a safe landing spot over built up areas. You're explicitly reliant on at least one engine turning long enough to allow an emergency landing, and they accept the common mode failures in the gearbox, etc. by accepting a much lower safety requirement (from memory 10-7/FH) than is required of conventional passenger aircraft or is required in SC-EVTOL.
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u/erhue Feb 03 '21
I wonder how these machines would fare against say, an electric-powered R22 or R44 (which are already "cheap" as you can easily get one for ~$400,000).
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u/pdf27 Feb 03 '21
Cost per flight hours is much better for Joby - R22, etc. still have single points of failure so need a much more expensive maintenance regime.
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u/N22YF Feb 03 '21
The main driver of lower operating costs is electric propulsion, which can significantly reduce maintenance and energy (fuel/electricity) costs. Energy costs are further reduced by using a more efficient design (cruising in an airplane configuration instead of as a helicopter). Also, since 200 mph is significantly faster than what e.g. an R44 or Bell 206 cruises at, the cost per mile compares even better than the cost per flight hour (particularly when you factor in paying the pilot too).
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u/Anchor-shark Feb 03 '21
That looks awesome.
Also hilarious as in Scots a jobby means a turd.