Your Next Car a Plane?

EppyGA

EppyGA

Touchdown! Greaser!
Joined
Jan 6, 2009
Messages
10,663
Location
Hoschton, GA
Display Name
Let's Fly
Home Airfield
KLZU
What's cooler than a hover-capable, electric-powered, super-quiet personal VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft? If you answered "absolutely nothing," do read on, because NASA is preparing to oblige you. The space agency's Puffin aircraft design will be officially unveiled tomorrow, showing just how far personal, electrically propelled flight could change the ways we live and get around.
Click to expand...

http://www.popsci.com/technology/ar...uffin-aircraft-stealthy-one-man-vtol-aircraft
 
Why is it that all I can see in that picture is Bugs Bunny smashed up in the tip of that nose cone in an old brown multi engine airplane?
 
One of the articles mentions the possibility of redundant propulsion. The way it's currently configured it appears that you're dead if either side quits. The Osprey has a mechanical interconnect between the two pods and is also designed to be able to land if vertical flight capability is lost. No such features here even if it could lift off with only 60 HP. There was also a statement that because the motors don't breathe air there's no altitude limit. Obviously the writer didn't know much about aerodynamics.
 
Last edited:
Hopefully the next vehicle will be an airplane. I just replaced my 160,000 mile 1998 Sunfire with a 160,000 mile 1998 Chrysler Concorde. Hopefully I'll get a good 5 years out of it.
 
jesse said:
Hopefully the next vehicle will be an airplane. I just replaced my 160,000 mile 1998 Sunfire with a 160,000 mile 1998 Chrysler Concorde. Hopefully I'll get a good 5 years out of it.
Click to expand...

Traded up huh. :D
 
There was a time when people who squandered their days daydreaming and building strange, worthless contraptions, were thought of as at best, eccentric, at worst, crazy. These lazy stupid people went ahead and came up with things that changed our world forever, in spite of the multitude of naysayers.

Ideas that are different, or could never work using the technologies that are available today, quite often are rescued from obscurity by other thinkers and visionaries. People who dare to buck accepted notions of what will work,or what could be.

John
 
John Baker said:
There was a time when people who squandered their days daydreaming and building strange, worthless contraptions, were thought of as at best, eccentric, at worst, crazy. These lazy stupid people went ahead and came up with things that changed our world forever, in spite of the multitude of naysayers.

Ideas that are different, or could never work using the technologies that are available today, quite often are rescued from obscurity by other thinkers and visionaries. People who dare to buck accepted notions of what will work,or what could be.

John
Click to expand...

60 horsepower isn't bucking convention -- it's bucking physics.
 
dmccormack said:
Straight up with 60 hp?

Yeah, right... :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
I'm inclined (prone?) to agree. :D

Especially after you add the weight of an O2 system (so you can cruise at 30,000 feet as advertised), avionics, a HUD... and your baggage (which will be limited to a Chapstick and a credit card). :D

Yeah, somebody's "Puffin" something at NASA... :D

But what the hey, daydreams and fun experiments provide fodder for truly elegant, useful technologies.... I could actually see some use for something like this... it makes more sense than a jet-pack. :D
 
dmccormack said:
60 horsepower isn't bucking convention -- it's bucking physics.
Click to expand...

Then of course, is it possible that one day, a motor or source of power, might be reduced in size and weight, yet produce considerably more horse power? You can bet that the battery inclined people are working feverishly on just that.

Have the "laws" of physics, as we knew them, ever been broken, then re- written to accommodate the new discoveries?

What about that particle smasher they are working on in Europe? What about dark matter? Will that be a source of energy some day, or lead us to one?

In the great scheme of things, what we little **** ant humans know probably amounts to next to nothing. Because an idea does not conform to "conventional wisdom" does not mean it will not one day be viable.

There are a few among us who are so passionate about their ideas that they are willing to risk not only all of their worldly possessions, but humiliation and defeat as well.

Perhaps we are naysayers simply because that is the safest, most publicly acceptable path to take. If it does not work, we can proudly proclaim our intelligence by stating "I told you so."

Should this idea we fervently said no to, actually turn out to be right on, and a winer, we can either buy stock, or hope they hire us. Either way, we will want to cash in on it somehow.

John
 
Last edited:
John Baker said:
Then of course, is it possible that one day, a motor or source of power, might be reduced in size and weight, yet produce considerably more horse power? You can bet that the battery inclined people are working feverishly on just that......

{snip}

Perhaps we are naysayers simply because that is the safest, most publicly acceptable path to take. If it does not work, we can proudly proclaim our intelligence by stating "I told you so."

Should this idea we fervently said no to, actually turn out to be right on, and a winer, we can either buy stock, or hope they hire us. Either way, we will want to cash in on it somehow.

John
Click to expand...

OK, ok...

Let's put it this way -- if they think they can takeoff vertically with 60 HP at SL and then climb to 30k, then they've convinced me they don't know anything about vertical flight, and so I don't give much weight to any other claim of advanced thinkage.
 
dmccormack said:
OK, ok...

Let's put it this way -- if they think they can takeoff vertically with 60 HP at SL and then climb to 30k, then they've convinced me they don't know anything about vertical flight, and so I don't give much weight to any other claim of advanced thinkage.
Click to expand...

Whatever "they" may know about vertical flight, I know considerably less.
With that, I have to agree with your more knowledgeable retort to my previous rantings. :redface:

John
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top