Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Homebuilt Helo #41


As a part of that 'base camp' review I decide to ditch the fascias round the uppermost part of the booth. We lose the logo, but this can be transferred to a dome up top that will cover the avionics like a hood.

At the same time there was always the choice as to whether to build the drone apart from the accommodation, but at this stage and possibly into the future the latter may form the basis of the co-rotating octocopter from which the passenger is suspended.

I've taken a side of the original four-pronged drone to use as a means of capping the space-frame, and at the same time transferred the expanded foam sheet to pack out the roof-space.

Principally this aims at damping vibrations from being passed to the flight controller and being interpreted as instant trajectories of the airframe instead of the transient fluctuations they are.

As the NTSB found after Boeing's own personal air vehicle prototype fell from the sky:

The June 4 crash of Boeing's urban air mobility prototype occurred after resonant aircraft vibrations incorrectly activated the vehicle's ground mode, commanding the motors to shut down.

After the incident the manufacturer abandoned development as I recall, and we don't want to give up that easily do we?