IT'S A FLYING CAR, PET
Although the design of eVTOLs can clearly run to years instead of months, this is no need to be discouraged. The average family car now takes the better part of ten years to go from concept to sales, and there is no guarantee at whichever stage that any model might succeed, at least in so far as repaying its development cost goes. In aviation the stakes are altogether larger, and at the time of writing the world’s largest airliner could better be described as the world’s largest white elephant, especially now that most of them are white beside elephantine, few airlines wanting to advertise their want of perspicuity.
There is ever a yin and yang in the conception of means of transport which vacillates between the mass of people and the personal, and as flight comes to be electrified along with road transport in an ever-warming world the options are as wide as ever. It is ten years since the sinking of the cruise-liner Costa Concordia, and if ever we needed to revisit the symbolism of the Titanic during the opening years of the 20th century in the 21st, then this would have been it: both involving opulence on the grandest scale being swallowed under a night sky by unforgiving Nature whilst chaos and confusion reigned.
There is something ironic about a civilisation bent upon building the very largest forms of transport which calls to mind the desert collapse of the statue of Ozymandias; else of the same civilisation bent upon producing motor-vehicles in ever greater numbers that are set to destroy the sphere of operation they were designed to operate in? Whilst this is scheduled to change with electrification of all that we know, it is clear that electric substitutes for practically everything with which we are familiar do little to ameliorate the situation, generally supplementing what we consume already instead of substituting for it. In other words it is the Tragedy of the Commons extended over time instead of space, for whereas if land is a free-for-all it will be over-exploited, if you ask the current generation to forego pleasures and conveniences in order that subsequent generations might do so, you can probably imagine the response.
But as Herman Hesse said of the flowers that continue to bloom in wartime, we are unlikely to cease fiddling whilst Rome burns and thus any number of products wholly unrelated to addressing the elephant in the room are likely to continue to be developed; not least flying forms of taxi. They will however tick the relevant boxes that politicians focussed on the short-term need ticking in environmental terms, and will thus continue unabated. For there is also the Law of Unintended Consequences, which as we saw from measures in Jimmy Carter’s designed to limit fuel-consumption, resulted in larger and more fuel-hungry cars than ever. Likewise if you or I could produce a cheap-as-chips flying vehicle now adapted to personal mobility then you could guarantee that its uptake would likely damage rather than salve our relations with Planet Earth.
But like those wretches working at the foot of DIY mining-shafts slaving to produce the cobalt we so desperately need for our luxury Teslas, we all need to earn a living and so far as I am concerned it is as much the case that I’d rather my son need not work for anyone else than himself that drives this development in the longer term. For at the end of the day aircraft are a lot of fun, and they are in all events a good deal more economic in operation than all other forms of transport, pound for pound, when you take its speed into account as well. For instance I see what we are building now as being a reasonable substitute in various applications for either boats or all-terrain vehicles. A case in point albeit one involving a billionaire would be Richard Branson’s own domestic situation in having to flit between tropical islands separated by just a few miles (oh, the misery!). How much easier to do this by settling back in the chair of an electrical ‘flying carpet’ and being transported from patio to patio than that schlep down to the jetty and up at the other end, with all of that banging and splashing in between?
Or dropping down to applications among middle classes, how about a means of being elevated to the ski-slopes that avoids all the costly and inflexible infrastructure, whilst at the same time costing a fraction of the expenses involved in launching a helicopter? Or at a level any of us could appreciate, being rescued at the sea-side as a result of a form of half-way house between a rigid inflatable and a coastguard’s helicopter? Else being spirited between one vessel at sea and another? Or being elevated above literal minefields instead of negotiating them on foot? Or adding eyes in the sky to survey or video drones? Or pylon-races accessible to people without Red Bull sponsorship?
And on and on, the one thing being that the newest technologies tend to get used in ways unforeseen by anyone, and least of all their progenitors. The most infamous case of this was possibly Alexander Graham Bell’s belief that the telephone would likely be used by people wanting to listen in on distant orchestral performances, but only discounting IBM’s declaration that the world would likely not need more than about five computers.
I think there is a need too to scale things back in terms of sophistication, or lack thereof, in an increasingly uncertain world. Dyson’s own vacuum cleaners are marvels of engineering with the resources of Formula One racing teams behind them, facts that are amply reflected in their price. But do they really do that much better a job than the Goblin ‘tube’ that I inherited from the old dear next door in South London that was easier to use and did what I consider to have been an altogether passable job? Or do we really need LED light-bulbs that cost around ten times what we would have spent on an incandescent type ten years previously, or are we just taking an inadvertently expensive piss into the wind?
Grumpy old man aside, however, let us examine the design of my most successful prototype to date, and the prospects for its continued development. We have seen that I liked its four-pronged body from its inception, as being the easiest possible airframe to cobble together in the garage next door using only basic materials and manual power-tools. In fact if push came to shove you barely even need an electrical supply to produce it, excepting the fact that hand-drills are no longer available to buy in the UK so far as I can tell.
Although it was always an awkward shape to manhandle and transport for one thing, whilst for another it was decidedly asymmetric in a world of design symmetry. Nonetheless when it comes to servicing the four-sided construct that is the quadcopter there is little to best it in terms of addressing weight and balance issues along with the associated wiring. Its other principal disadvantage however would be in the difficulty of including a sufficient undercarriage within its scope, and if nothing else the necessity for doing so had been reinforced by our experience at Llanbedr. Ideally beside the widest possible track, the motors and propellers also need to be raised as far as is feasible out of harm’s way, harm being the ground in this instance. At the same time the pilot had also to be protected by physically distancing the propeller blades from arms and legs, and this was something that was also enabled by the addition of a square frame that surrounds the original outline of four cantilevers.
There were additional nice-to-haves, like the fact that the motors could be repositioned so as to reflect the ideal crux arrangement with a propeller directly in front of the pilot, one behind and one to either side. In fact this simplest arrangement appeared in the very earliest drones as the simplest possible execution, as to steer it involves a very logical application of power to one or other motor, viz. that at the rear to go forward, that at the front to go backward and those on either side to initiate sideways motion. In fact if you look at the Mission Planner software that accompanies the flight controller, this is the first and foremost configuration that could (and still can) be programmed.
The four points of the square that are formed by the new perimeter also mean however that propellers can be positioned either over or under the airframe, whereas where they occupied the corner they could only be mounted top-side in view of the skids being fixed at these points to the underside. Beside this they also form points at which anything else can be mounted, whether an independent platform for the operator or an identical drone ‘stacked’ upon the first. Modularity and flexibility have long been my own watchwords in design, allied to a means of fabrication that allowed for components to be re-purposed time and agin in order to keep the cost of successive iterations of each design to a minimum.
Not least, too, it does appear in the original patent specification beside some among the foregoing prototypes, so that the DNA of the design ‘coda’ has been preserved. I think it would be true to say that you could look at any of these successive designs and link them to the same origin in the way that say IKEA furniture or Volkswagen cars all retain distinctive features that make them instantly recognisable.
With it constructed therefore toward the end of last year (2021 at time of writing), there still remained how best to wire to for control and among the other binary choices that a designer of a personal air vehicle has to make beside standing or seated operation, is how it is best controlled… whether automatically by computerised means, or by simple weight-shift? In much the same way as previous, however, the same reasoning came into play. Weight-shift, by which everything from snowboards to parafoils can be steered beside powered types of aircraft like gyroplanes, had been used fairly extensively by any number of experimental mega-drones designed to transport people. Nonetheless they remained a curiosity, a spectacle like those trapeze-artists that you’d enjoy watching at the circus without ever really wanting a go yourself. At the same time the tide of history appeared to be favouring computer control itself, now that the bulk of an automobile was dependent upon computer chips (to the dis-benefit of the post-pandemic supply chain). Being seated anyway rather discounted any chance of using weight-shift, and I had already preferred that to flying whilst stood upright (as indeed I had for half a lifetime in the airline business). The idea of sitting back in a Recaro with finger-tip control not unlike that I had enjoyed in an Airbus of one type or another would have distinct appeal.
And thus the die was set. As a precaution I spoke at length to the proprietor of 3DXR, from whom we are sourcing a number of new parts (not least because the experts in the field recommended not using parts involved in crashes or downpours, of which my own parts were veterans). In the event though I persuaded myself to salvage at least four motors and four propellers left undamaged from Llanbedr, not least due to the cost. Serendipity features in every human endeavour, and my unwillingness to spend more equally dictated the build of a quadcopter this time around instead of an octocopter. Nonetheless the subsequent results I feel to have amply borne this gut-feeling out.
There would, alas, be one more hurdle in a sequence off hurdles attending every human endeavour too. I had long transported prototypes on the open trailer, not least because there was a certain PR value in my fellow road-users seeing a giant drone go past with what appeared, Borat-like, to be a child on board. In Aled’s absence from the project due withdrawal, I had selected Angus instead (real name not withheld) to wire and tune the vehicle on a consultancy basis, and arriving at his workshop with the kit in tow he would at once point out that the motors had ingested grit from a rain-sodden motorway while any number of electrical components had been soaked from the same source. And being CAA-registered, refused to fly equipment of such dubious provenance.
It would thus have to return on the familiar trek North, where fortunately the benefit of building a quadcopter from octocopter parts was an abundance of spares. How though I had been put in contact with Angus, an ex-Army captain since self-sponsored in the drone industry and generally involved in experimental trials when not film or survey ~ is serendipitous in itself. My cousin still labours in the airline industry locally, but prior to this was in architecture and had not infrequently rendered my designs in SketchUp. He mentioned in passing though a New Year’s Day TV programme in which celebrity David Walliams had been tasked with getting the eponymous Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ( the flying car and the film) flying again in replica form. He did this by using sizeable drone motors at its corners, and reviewing the credits I contacted the expert involved. He was however is more generally involved in RC helicopters at the highest level, and whilst not wanting to get involved with drones again, put me on to ‘a man who could’.
Whereas the proprietor of 3DXR had at length listed the pitfalls for the unwary that were involved in scaling up drones, not least adverse harmonics and a lack of rigidity, Angus himself felt that the latter might prove to be the prototype’s Achilles’ Heel. On a more hopeful note, Aled himself looking at the airframe suggested that bar a couple of minor issues he figured it would fly and at the same time was reassured by the fact we had returned to the fold in so far as its relative conventionality was concerned. Thus it was that during a decidedly clement weather window at the start of December in 2021, a month that had proven equally auspicious for the Wright Brothers, we awaited news from further south on the Somerset Levels as to how things were progressing on the front line.
And then, literally out of the blue, a YouTube video dropped into my inbox like manna from heaven. The prototype had out-performed all expectations, and has gone on to impress whomever has viewed it since as the basis of what might be a very credible flying machine, and among the easiest to assemble. In fact I had been invited during the summer to pitch inline to investors at a revolution.areo town-hall event where if nothing else, its speed of assembly had impressed as somewhat quicker than IKEA furniture.
And all of this below twenty-five kilos at birth. The picture here though says it all, and what appears to be the faintest of cloud formations in the sky is in fact the test-pilots grinning visage, reflecting his own astonishment that both he and it could possibly be flying so well. Meanwhile if you liked it too, you needn’t click LIKE anywhere either…
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