adoucette
17th March 2008 - 07:52 PM
QUOTE (vkamath+Mar 17 2008, 02:44 PM)
I meant for mass usage instead of cars. These planes cannot take off from the amount space most people have outside their homes.
If you were talking about the various car-plane combinations, then I totally agree, they have all been poor cars and usually even worse planes.
Arthur
Sapo
17th March 2008 - 08:00 PM
Imagine a Frank Herbert Ornithopter, made with materials and engineering courtesy of Scaled Composites. Then, maybe...
PIATLAS
18th March 2008 - 01:54 AM
The FlyCar has two spools with the plastic wound around them. The Titanium-Aluminum wing-rims are swung back when driving. They swing out when taking off. The FLY car is a four wheeled motorbike with a fan and an overhead roll-up delta wing that uses mini-helicopter-tech to tilt the delta wing that looks like a hang-glider wing.
There have been recent innovations in wheel design to make them lighter with them being tube-less/airless steel mesh reinforced tread surrounding spokes. Strong enough to run over a small land mine and still work.
Everything that doesn't have to be steel like high-speed moving parts can be made from much lighter Titanium-Aluminum
Everyone is thinking high powered Kawasaki motorbikes. However smaller flyable versions could be based on engine parts from a 250cc trail bike.
The problem is that when the delta hang-glider wing sweeps back with the plastic winding back on the two spools then the overhead assembly will be longer than the undercarriage that drives on the road. The delta wing has to be smaller if only there was some mechanical way to vacuum above the curve of the wing to give it more lift with less area.
What wing area would be required to lift a clean 300kg (That figure includes the pilot)?
dakfe09
12th August 2009 - 08:13 AM
Intresting, there was a new flying car in the paper the other day. Seems they're still trying to develop the technology to a reliable mass marketing degree.
Ill see if i can find the link.
RobDegraves
12th August 2009 - 02:58 PM
adoucette
Note that the planes you show are taking off with a decent wind blowing towards them (you can see the wind sock in the background of a few shots). If the wind was from the rear or sides, it would be a longer take off.
Also keep in mind that for a mass market, most pilots are not as good as these guys. It's easy to err significantly when the wind is strong and coming from a side angle. I have flown a number of small planes but I would hate to do so in heavy traffic or to take off from my street and dodge tree, wires and poles.
dakfe09
19th August 2009 - 07:52 AM
Horizontal lift would play a major part?
I recall a prototype around 7 years ago that used something like 8-10 mazda rotary engines with fans to generate enough lift to take off and once up several of them would spin 90 degrees to then provide forward motion as well.
I think this failed ultimately as the fuel consumption of so many 13b rotaries was staggering.. lol
anything new in the pipeline?