Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle(jetsonaero.com) |
Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle(jetsonaero.com) |
The real limitations come from Part 103, which limits ultralights to uncontrolled airspace (Class G). These aircraft will be limited to 1200 ft. AGL in most of the country, and 700 ft. AGL near many airports and their associated approaches.
Incidentally, the remaining assets (including intellectual property) were just put up for auction a few days ago [1].
The market for what's essentially an aerial jetski has always been small, and now due to the drone renaissance it's basically non-existent.
I am incredibly excited about the prospect of small flying machines. I also can not imagine that propellers will be where this ends although there are limitations with using electric energy.
There are quite a few concepts flying around these days:
We asked for the flying car, YC has not given it to us.
They are also almost entirely built by the pilot. The entire FPV scene is a pretty cool hobby to get into.
I assume this is wildly illegal in most jurisdictions?
But I can see something like this being available in numbers being the catalyst for that changing fast...
No different than a helicopter.
Hell, plenty of farmers that have a Piper Cub or similar and operate off their acreage.
Time to go public haha
As a non-rich person it'd be useless to me even if I could afford it (I live near other humans) but I can absolute imagine some people I have met buying one.
Vi vill inte att folk ska köpa vår produkt och krascha den direkt, så vi har sålt till välkända personer främst i USA som skulle få för mycket skit om de gjorde dumheter med den
which translates to (note: native Swedish speaker, but not a certified translator):
We don't want people to buy our product and crash it straight away, so we have been selling to famous people mostly in the US, who would get too much crap if they fooled around with it"
I enjoyed the directness of that statement. :)
Also learned from the same article:
- The maximum cargo weight including pilot is 100 kg, if you actually reach that then flying time is reduced to 12 minutes.
- The battery pack is charged externally, i.e. not in the vehicle, so you can have spares and swap.
- No mention of the battery pack's weight, but I guess you would have to be quite a bit below those 100 kg in order to have room for another battery.
- New owners get a 2-day course (not a "crash course", I guess :) at Jetson before being allowed to take their new vehicle home.
EDIT: Fixed italics for translated quote.
[1]: https://teknikensvarld.se/nyheter/miljo-och-teknik/jetson-on...
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.
- Massive amount of sound pollution, current crop won't be allowed near cities in significant numbers; that's why the presentation videos are always silent.
- Exceptionally energy inefficient and limited speed, due to the way lift is achieved; it makes zero sense to spend 10 times the energy to travel at speeds comparable with what can achieved on the ground with the right infrastructure.
- Very limited safety guarantees, can't be safely used by an untrained pilot, typically can't be flow at all over populated areas etc.
Maybe they could reach for a market that can tolerate these drawbacks, ex. air ambulances, and build on that.
Forget electric, it needs the highest density fuel system to allow at least an hour of flight, maybe a LPG fuel cell, or a piston engine geared with electromagnetic power couplers to the propellers for very rapid dynamic response.
A two person craft, lifting maybe 250Kg overall to allow for medical gear, the medic operates during liftoff/landing then autopilot takes you to predefined hospitals on predefined flight paths that are known to be safe.
This should be a thing already.
No amount of money would make me use that thing.
EDIT: Ok, sorry, it says it has a parachute, but I still would not use it.
OTOH putting the propellers above would change the shape and thus the aesthetics seriously.
EDIT: CG = center of gravity, for clarity
Tech has evolved so fast in the past few years that a brand new vehicle like this can go from design to production in a few years, and anyone can build a rough working prototype in their backyard.
I'm not so sure the finish line is within sight yet. This is closer to an ATV than it is to a scooter. It even looks a bit like a Honda Pilot ATV with propellors.
It could attract more folks than a traditional ultralight would. The price tag is much higher, though.
The Jetson One produced a minimalistic 1 seat vehicle.
Something on their website smells a little whiffy and bovine though:
”[our mission] is to change the way we travel and make the skies available for everyone”
Erm. Everyone? I don’t think so. Your mission is to give the 0.1% yet another way to be jerks, only this time with added noise!
Airframes are trivial. Getting battery energy density to a place that it becomes useful for personal aircraft is not. Yet that is the singular enabling technology to make this stuff a reality.
Cirrus flies fast, so its parachute has a slider / limiter on it to reduce the speed of opening to keep the G shock manageable. On the other hand, since the top speed of this Jetson device is pretty low at 63mph, their parachute must have no slider and can probably be deployed from as little as 200 ft in ideal conditions. Depends on the exact model, your decision/reaction time, aircraft speed, attitude, and stability at time of deploy, etc.
The parachute should cost less than $5K, and its weight is not included in the 255lb weight limit (it's an FAA part 103 aircraft), so it's pretty much a no-brainer to add it to this aircraft, even if it's not very useful in very low level flights.
I seem to recall a discussion on HN, where it was explained that quadcopters don’t scale up too well. I don’t remember the reasoning.
The one thing that concerns me about commodity-level flying vehicles, is the way people drive the ones that are stuck on the ground. I would want autonomous vehicles to be devloped and refined, before flying ones.
It’s a very cool kit for hobbyists but there are very few missions this can fly with utility.
Still I don't think this is designed for "utility" - seems to me it is more for the fun of it.
It’s just stressful to think if something isn’t going right in flight and I want time to think and react.. every minute is 5% of my battery. I also saw in another post that fully loaded the battery life is 12 minutes total.. nearly 10% a minute brand new (which every charge cycle reducing my total energy).
They also said the batteries are swappable, so if I had 3 in a rotation they could all be charging/flying with up to an hour of flight. Sounds like a fun day!
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/vanvikan/trondheim/@63.49028...
10 kW/kg is not even exotic anymore, and I doubt you'd want to charge at more than 100 kW with an on-board charger, anyways.
It's quite hard to find high quality electric drive components in this size – too big for drones, too small for full scale airplanes. https://store.tmotor.com/ is another alternative.
It could handle the required rpm to create lift/takeoff (up to 18k according to their marketing material, it would probably overheat if you had that kind of rpm for an extended period of time though), but you'd probably need a cable to an energy source.
Seems odd to not deliver a fully assembled aircraft. Is there any regulatory reason? If cost is an issue, they could probably charge extra (such as $110K total) and deliver it fully assembled.
There's a reason the racecar frames that "inspired" this thing are made of steel and not aluminum. While this looks sturdy to a layman, I'd imagine this thing would crumple to nothing on impact.
Love to see a crash test and be proven wrong though.
Very different from what a plane is good for.
I come from India, where median folks have a complete and utter disregard for traffic rules and safety regulations. I can't begin to think how we would adopt a technology like this. I mean, how would we start, how would traffic merge? Can we restrict/regulate the flow of vehicles in thin air?
The fact that this is a tech+social problem interests me even more.
Picture of the ad:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/7jrpbu/this_hove...
Building this started a several years long obsession with hovercrafts. Multiple science fair projects, digging on the internet, etc. My family ended up taking a trip to Europe and I was able to ride across the channel from Calais to Dover on a giant hovercraft. Literally a dream come true at the time. Too bad I was also 14 and super embarrassed by my parents' attempts to take pictures, etc. ;-)
The concept is great, but the push for mass market adoption bugs me.
These things are not efficient modes of transport. It takes a lot of energy to move one person from A to B.
Telecommuting is better.
Not sure what the ceiling is on this. They don’t have footage of it going too high.
You only need to fall 30 feet (10 m), to buy the farm. Less, in many cases (depending on how you fall, and onto what).
If you have the money, zero/zero ballistic parachutes have been a reliable thing for more than half a century.
For ultralight sized aircraft, they cost about 1/5 the cost of a new airframe.
Generally they don't provide much survivability IMHO. Most ultralight deaths seem to boil down to CFIT and similar "happened too fast too close to ground" incidents with a side dish of refusal to do maintenance, and you know they're not going to maintain their airframe parachute or how its attached or how to engage it if they refuse to maintain their engine... But they are available and in special cases they might be useful.
You can't descend quite as slow as a normal engine because the motor has somewhat more friction at low RPM, even though it's similar to free-spinning at higher RPM. That makes for a rougher final approach but just as much glide distance and control.
Small rotors will make it more of a hassle but should still be quite safe. Even if you do end up touching down hard, there's way less angular momentum stored up and you wouldn't have the chaos of giant blades exploding. Of course there's still the batteries, since li-ion cells have only slightly less energy than kerosene when burned.
A parachute is... not the kind of safety feature that should be relied on. Parachutes take >100 feet to open properly. 20 foot falls can easily be lethal.
That angular momentum is what allows autorotation to be possible. Theres zero chance a quadcopter blade could maintain enough energy to autorotate while carrying the weight of a person. The blades are also fixed pitch, which would make a landing flare impossible.
Your video shows an electric helicopter with a full size helicopter main rotor, which is not what the Jetson vehicle uses.
(In this case it costs $92k, so under 0.1% in rich countries)
The iPhone, when first released in 2007, cost $500, or about $800 today after adjusting for inflation, but launched a smartphone industry that today produces devices that are affordable enough that 3 billion own one, including some that go for as little as $50 and have better performance than the original iPhone.
Imagine having - instead of car-centric cities - personal-aircraft-centric cities.
Imagine cities built without any thought given to how people who don’t have their own aircar will get around. Roads can be used by foot or cycle traffic. Some places might be completely cut off from the outside world except for air traffic.
Imagine buildings towering high into the sky, tiny aircraft vying for ways in and out of the landing bays that pepper the building’s sides like holes in a tree full of birds.
Imagine a significant portion of these aircraft shrieking their way over your head are piloted by people who are badly trained, drunk, arrogant assholes, or otherwise uncaring of the rules of the road. Imagine some of these people have disabled the sophisticated collision-avoidance methods the law would surely require - maybe because it broke in their old aircar and they can’t afford to get it fixed/replaced, but can afford an illegal workaround; maybe because a business can get just enough profit to feel like it’s worth the risk and fines, maybe because they are bored teenagers playing chicken. Imagine two air cars crashing near their flight ceiling, right above a busy convergence of routes. Or above the tower you live in.
Imagine aircars maintained to the standards of personal vehicles, rather than expensive airplanes. Imagine the equivalent of a rust-bucket with several dents, a fender held on by wire, and one wheel running on a spare. Imagine the shittiest thing you’ve seen on the freeway, translated to the air.
Fixing these issues inevitably leads you to a helicopter.
However, quadcopters are mainly useful because they are simple and cheap. Once you add the amount of redundancy necessary to safely carry a human (I am not convinced they have hit that bar here) it's no longer cheap, and it makes sense to spend a bit more on a helicopter, which is much more efficient.
> These things are not efficient modes of transport. It takes a lot of energy to move one person from A to B.
Will you not entertain the possibility that a form of travel using geodesic distance may be more efficient? Going from Brooklyn to Manhattan and bypassing traffic, for example (a small body of water where flying across would be more efficient for those not familiar)? Or iterative improvements to it, if it gains adoption, would improve whatever numbers you're using for your energy requirements? Or that it may reduce our need to make new infrastructure, and that may also reduce energy costs?
There are a lot of things here to be so certain.
And in your water example, building a bridge would be drastically better for a high traffic use case.
In cases where you can't justify infrastructure build out, it will still be more efficient to use all terrain ground vehicles.
And no, hovering in the air and fighting gravity ever moment of active travel will never be anywhere close to the efficiency of a rolling vehicle.
I completely agree. But for mass market personal aerial vehicles, regulation would eventually force vehicles to fly close to ground (for safety of self and others, better fall 30 feet than 300 feet)
In this scenario, geodesic distance hardly makes any difference.
Personal aerial vehicles are never going to be safe. Not for the lack of innovation or technology, but for human nature. Ever see how many people drive their cars with the "check engine" lights on? Or how many fail to get theirs serviced in time, or change the oil in time? The mass market is not fit to drive their own personal aerial vehicles.
There are niche uses, such as medical emergencies, policing, etc. Putting these into the hands of everyone is a disaster waiting to happen.
It takes exactly the same amount of energy to go from point A to point B as it did 10,000 years ago.
What we've done is gotten better at packing more energy generation in a smaller volume/envelope.
Only against conservative fields like gravity, not against friction! When I bike 10 blocks, I use less energy than when I walk 10 blocks.
I'm not complaining about the vehicle to transported ratio though, it's about the same as my lead-acid e-bike: http://elhjul.se
There are no such thing as predefined flight paths that are known to be safe, at least not in the areas where air ambulances have to operate. There is always a risk of collision with other aircraft operating under VFR. And a human pilot is always needed to cope with in-flight emergencies that autopilots can't handle.
There could be a limited use case for military casualty evacuation drones. The military is researching those for use in combat zones where sending a manned helicopter would be too risky.
https://taskandpurpose.com/gear-tech/army-drone-helicopter-m...
not to forget Opener BlackFly
2) There are classes where you're allowed less in exchange for easier certification. If the craft isn't operated commercially and doesn't need to leave national airspace, certification is typically far easier (at least for anything not heavier than a medium SUV).
The 51% rule is extremely common in experimental aviation.
[1] https://www.eaa.org/eaa/aircraft-building/builderresources/g...
Credible and reliable data for such comparisons does not exist, unfortunately.
Paragliders who aren't idiots don't spend much time at 40ft AGL in weather conditions that can cause a collapse. And not every low altitude collapse is fatal. Spine compression injury is more likely, and they wear padding on their butt to minimize that (some even have airbags).
For better or worse, the main predictive risk factor in paragliding is personal attitude, and I suspect it's the same in parachuting.
In my parachuting experience I saw only one really bad accident: in an accuracy contest, a guy who was going to miss the target by a few feet, reached out with his feet and landed on the base of his spine. Stretchered away.
My own skydiving parachute malfunction occurred on opening at approx 2500 ft. The bastard main failed to emerge and I deployed my front-mounted reserve. The act of flipping onto my back unjammed the main and for a moment I had two canopies opening. The main won and I spent half a minute pulling in the reserve canopy so I could see where the fuck where I was going.
I didn't get the shakes until about ten minutes after landing. The jumpmaster confirmed the sequence of events and I got back on the horse and jumped again 40 minutes later.
YMMV
Yet, people still do it..
That said, this looks like another Icon A5 situation...
In response to fatalities and pilots choosing not to use the parachute when that could have saved lives, Cirrus improved training and saw significant safety record improvements.
> By then, Cirrus had already upgraded its training twice, eventually pulling it entirely in-house. All new-aircraft buyers take it.
They also have training for the used market, and saw owners that didn’t do it often had worse safety records.
Since a Cirrus has a wing, the parachute is primarily a super last resort.. the passenger safety training I took even said it’s mainly to be used if the pilot passes out and a passenger engages it.
The jetson doesn’t have a wing, so I’m happy they have this parachute. I hope they can offer great training too.
[0] https://www.aviationconsumer.com/safety/cirrus-at-25-a-safer...
You do not need to be a professional sports person - keen hobbyists exist and there is definitely a group here that are into power lifting.
I guess if you could attach the vehicle to the ground and spin up the propellor and then release you could get the same effect.
Or another option is if the rear propeller could turn its rudder against the spin direction.
There will always be some subset of people willing to do crazy dangerous things when similar safe alternates exist.
And I for one am excited to see the race footage.
Yet people still do it (and regularly die) and keep pushing the limits of what we thought was possible.
It’s one of the reasons you don’t see gas powered quads. Gas engines just cannot react fast enough and precise enough to correct subtle changes in attitude.
The Jetson One video seemed to show them flying pretty close to the ground - I was wondering if that was to reduce fall height in the event of loss of power.
Your comment seems to indicate that one is sort of trading problems, not really significantly reducing risk (at least at the speeds one would want to go) - do I understand that correctly? Mind slightly expanding? Is the problem that you basically hit the ground with your full speed rather than having some wind resistance reduce your speed before impact?
That's called an ejection seat, right? As in a rocket-propelled vehicle to launch you sufficiently high out of your aircraft to allow your parachute safely to deploy (i.e. about a hundred meters, as described in the prior post)
I don’t know how marginal jumpstarts are, possibly very, which would limit the utility. Especially where there is a runway nearby.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: I guess that eventuality is managed by the parachute system and a structure designed to handle the resulting "hard landing".
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.
> There are niche uses, such as medical emergencies, policing, etc. Putting these into the hands of everyone is a disaster waiting to happen.
Listing all of the things that could go wrong with a technology hasn't worked well for us. Imagine doing this exercise for the automobile. New infrastructure, a slip of the hand killing pedestrians, etc..
I acknowledge that there are many issues.
What I see:
The price point is reasonable enough that if there isn't regulatory enforcement, some employees at big tech will start flying these things along the water from downtown San Francisco to work / in-person meetings, saving them 2 hours a day. Convenience and time at this price point is very appealing to a certain demographic outside of any general nerding out over futuristic tech. The same conditions exist in New York City. If this is allowed to happen, this space is interesting, but of course, we're talking about ~20 vehicles over 2-4 years here.
I am did not list anything wrong with the technology.
My point is that human nature itself is at fault. Would you trust a flying machine in the hands of a drunk driver? But, no amount of regulation / laws / punishment will deter such incidences.
You're talking about degrees of damage. The issues presented here are present in cars. We've worked around them in cars (relatively well I'd argue) because of the trade-offs in convenience and time savings. There's nothing that says this mode of transaction, if viable, wouldn't have the same pressures applied to make it safer.
The wider point is convenience / time savings is a significant motivator, and betting against a technology that seems to include both has never turned out well.
If it became a real problem, it would be easy enough to do something like a mandate built in breathalyzers
This thing in particular has a parachute. I bet from 300 feet it doesnt have time to save you or let you glide to a spot without people under you, but from 3,000 feet it would.
I can see a PAV that can’t be flown manually outside designated areas or a city where full automation is mandatory for all cars within its limits.
In fact, the sport is growing.