This air vehicle from Airev recently dropped across my desk ~ or would have done if I had one ~ but it took a good deal of digging to discover from whence it came.
And then the penny dropped, for trying as an Israeli company to market fun means of transport as against ones for dropping things from a great height must be about as rewarding as a root canal treatment.
They would clearly need a lift and politics aside I do like a good sketch and hope the one here is not the creation of some or other means of artificial intelligence.
Perhaps farthest along the road to a successful personal air vehicle however is what used to be called Blackfly (because I realised after a sleepless night that it was both black and flew) and is now called Pivotal.
And what most struck me from watching a doctor in the Rockies go about his daily business in one was not where to put a stethoscope but how little energy it required once on the move, thanks to a pair of wings.
Basically that dropped from around 80% capacity during a vertical lift-off (leftovers are required should one of the eight motors drop out), to 20% once on the move.
The people designing the Airev claim more like a 60% contribution from that source, which is probably explained by the fact wings are rigged at a more customary angle.
For as an alternative to pitching the propellers over to point forward, the fuselage in either case is pitched over in flight to set the airfoils at a usable angle of attack, as they would ordinarily be stalled at the get-go.
Thus the wings here are rigged at an angle of around 20°, those of Pivotal at close to 45° and a conventional fixed-wing aeroplane (let's choose the Spitfire) at just 2°.
The disadvantage of adverse rigging is that you're never sat level throughout as you would be in a car, but tilted one way or the other depending on the phase of flight.
But then during a take off in the Spitfire you were gazing at the heavens for longer than you'd want, rather than what lay beyond the end of the runway.
(Ed. Colin never got a free flight in a Spitfire, but as with much else in his life, could have done. Age sixteen at RAF selection he shared a barracks with Mark Hanna, and in middle age would rendezvous with his father Ray for a photo-shoot. The saddo is proud of the fact that among a misty horizon in East Anglia, he saw Ray before Ray spotted him: "Achtung, Spitfire!!!" he told the wedding-photographer, deafened by the rattle of his Canon from within their Cessna 182 as the Mk.9 flew alongside. Ray asked if they couldn't go any faster, but how many people get the chance of shooting a Spit with its flaps extended?).
