TRANSPORTS OF DELIGHT
In truth, whereas the child is considered father to the man there would be nothing that might hint at my own future beside a leaning toward transport in all of its forms; and it is conceivable that my attempts at designing boats and VTOL aircraft derive from missing out on careers featuring either. And in truth, I enjoy driving articulated trucks in view of the fact it doesn’t need to be done at the exclusion of all else… although there are any number of hauliers out there that are happy to arrange your life that way. And besides, didn’t Mike Davis combine trucking and meat-packing with academic treatises on his home town of Los Angeles or the condition of both working classes and environment?
As autumn beckoned in 2022, though, I finally had the leisure to consider whether building a personal air vehicle retained any traction in my daily affairs. Was it not Solomon who had said that as as the dog returned to its vomit, so the fool returned to his folly. Bit harsh, that one, and I prefer the one about all progress having always depended upon the unreasonable.
It might then be a time to revert to first principles, and these had been to build a form of transporter in the shape of an upright booth. Originally and in view of the weight of what is involved in producing sufficient lift, I envisaged this booth being surrounded by an airframe sat at ground-level initially for fear of it toppling over. Subsequently it would power itself up into the overhead, where it would engage with the overhang of the booth so as to elevate it skyward. This notion would fall at the first hurdle when you looked into the detail, for drones are controlled by a computerised flight-controller that ideally sits at the centre, where my airframe had to include a void that enabled the accommodation to take centre-stage. Beside this successive build showed that this centre-section was where the structure derived much of its strength.
One get-around featured instead of a booth merely a set of four tubes that allowed the drone to rise whilst including only a hole at each corner. It allowed the flight-controller to remain centred, though it would mean a passenger boarding once rotors were turning up top. In terms of rigidity it could also be made to support a considerable weight were it braced around half-way up, where it effectively halved the length of each tubular column. Nonetheless, a rigid space-frame still knocked it into a cocked hat and especially so when reinforced in the same way. It also helped secure the operator whilst providing both an armrest and a deck upon which to mount flight-controls in the form of sidesticks. Whilst in its original form it had been made of a single piece that could be pulled upward like a pair of underpants (and you won’t find that in the Airbus lexicon), eventually it proved both to be more snug and more practical if split fore and aft.
Above all, however, it rendered the vehicle altogether more purposeful in both my own eyes and more importantly, those of potential purchasers. A sure sign too that there was interest out there was when I posted ‘how-to’ on the blog instead of opinionated fare that frankly few of us would be interested in. Without windows and without some form of restraint the box also looked like something people might step out of at a great height had they seen the latest gas bill… might that be my killer app? All in all, as I assembled it step-by-step during the closing months of 2022 it appeared to be an altogether better proposition than the one with the same form of drone fitted with a seat above instead.
In ergonomic terms too it held out better prospects, for the moment you introduce a seat you have to consider shapes and sizes accordingly and there were even books out there that listed average dimensions from among the general population. Thus it was that Jetson did list a target size around which their own vehicle had been designed: five feet ten inches, as I recall? This is less of an issue however where only manual controls are required, which only go to show what sort of a sea-change the electrification of flight would prove to be. For among the most complex part of designing every airliner is how the seating might be arranged on the flight-deck in order that pilot and co-pilot are able to reach every possible control that they might need to… not least the rudder-pedals, which had been fitted to aeroplanes from around the get-go.
Thus were the ‘drone was concerned where it could be fitted up top, it meant that the booth might be broadly configured to both the shape and size of an individual whilst still retaining a standardised means of connection (you can tell I’ve long drafted patent specifications) between the modular ‘drone and phone’. This was especially so as regards the height of each of us, where for example my elbows rest at a height of a metre such that a box two metres high would be suitable ~ “Suits you, Sir!” ~ when considering that the batteries would be stored in its roof-space.
There was also a good deal of latitude when it came to the dimensions of the box determined by the distance at which each upright were fixed. Although I had tinkered with rectangular outlines (because we are generally wider than we are deep), the brand called for a square ‘phone-booth’ and not least in order to emulate my booth of choice in the shape of the General Post Office’s magnificent K8. I had even considered buying one of these to mount in the garden, but settled for taking pictures of such wherever they might still be encountered. Note to fellow boxers: there remains one in the village of Ingleton. For what I had noticed early on, and which went to show that there was no substitute for experimental builds, was that we could actually slip sideways into a much narrower gauge of box than we might imagine. You needed to be careful including your child in such experiments, incidentally, for fear of being viewed as the kind of Victorian gentlemen who’d send them up chimneys in days of yore. Even where I was concerned myself, though, I figured I could be squeezed amongst four pillars spaced as little as a foot apart and still be suspended from a giant drone in my dreams.
The half-scale prototype in view featured a foot-square outline, and this raised the question as to whether its occupant could comfortably stand with their upper limbs inside the box, or hanging without. The only way to tell was to secure a child-sized mannekin that had articulated arms, and a sweep of the ‘net proved these to be as rare as unicorns in a post-pandemic world that had disrupted supply chains everywhere. I managed to find one such, however, and it would eventually show that whilst it might be squeezed into the box like a sardine, it would be rather more comfortable with its forearms resting outside of the box with a pair of sidesticks to hand. In the event with the articulated type looking somewhat heavy for the choice of motor I envisaged, I would also travel to what can only be called Britain’s largest mannekin graveyard… but that’s another story. (Standing child-sized rigid mannekins were easier again to locate than seated, though I had to confess I’d looked up so many online that I feared a visit from the Vice Squad.)
The new mannekin stood proudly a metre tall, as it seemed to be a fairly standard measurement. This meant happily that it would fit inside a box constructed of metre-long tubular sections, a relief in itself in view of the fact that was the measure that they came in as well. This was only though because the tube-connectors that terminated each of the uprights added a couple of inches to the interior volume. It raised the question of where to include the sizeable battery-packs, and in the end I would settle for doing so in the loft space of each booth. It meant that such an area would have to be added in future builds, but the advantage of the modular design was that both box and drone could be modified wholly independently of each other. More importantly the TELEDRONE logo could appear in the sides fitted at the upper end of the booth, which would surround the battery-bay as those at the lower end did in order to form the foot-well.
The lighter of the two mannekins ~ by dint of rigid fibreglass arms instead of wooden ~ was used as well as the articulated version in the studio shots, but at the time of writing it is the articulated type that will form the phenotype to the design’s genotype: it was nonetheless looking like no mannekin would appear in flight-testing at the outset in view of the paucity of power from the motors that had been selected. I was comfortable with the prospect not least because we had flown both the drone in its current form, as well as a drone with an underslung accommodation box. At the same time if you looked at the history of aircraft design it has been one of manufacturers desperate for engines that produced more power in order to get the proposed outline off the ground.
The decision then to include an upright operator was proving to be sound; looking further afield it appeared too that one thing electrification offered to VTOL designers was the freedom to decide where and how to include that operator. Almost invariably those alternative designs out there mounted people atop drones, for the very obvious reason that it was easier to pitch what were increasingly massive drones at floor level and then let the pilot clamber on top. The laurels of victory I considered would go to those able to conceive of ways to reverse the arrangement. This was not least because having learned aerobatics at the very earliest stage of learning to fly, I preferred the idea of the vehicle remaining upright in the event of a power-off and hands-off freewill. This was something not every eVTOL was assured of, especially if it were the case that the pilot up top were the heaviest aspect of the ensemble, whilst the draggiest part in the form of its feathers viz. propellers were beneath: think of the way a dart settles under gravity.
Why though not follow the alternative any number of projects had adopted, as gad the car before them, with a support at each corner albeit a motor instead of a wheel? To a great extent though this ‘flying car’ configuration was neither novel and nor indeed did it require a great leap of imagination, in so far as drones (and especially racing versions) were universally configured along he same lines. It may yet be that such a layout evolves to become as standard a layout as had the four-wheeled car prior, yet I was unconvinced that this would be the case. Principally this was because, whilst it was true that the main-rotor helicopter dominated the market it would never yet supplant three other successful variants in the shape of the Chinook, Kamov or Kaman. It might yet be that a distributed array of electrical propellers would eventually render each of these configurations extinct in the way that mainframe computers would be overcome by a multiplicity of distributed processing power in the shape of smartphones.
A further advantage lay in the fact that a modular solution might prove as resilient, in so far as a vehicles like the Jetson or Blackfly was a unitary construct like the car that could not take up less space by being separated into principal components and hung from the garage wall, for instance. Finally however I felt that the TELEDRONE might occupy its unique ecosphere from the point of view that its appearance was at once familiar (except to the very youngest, for whom it might appear to be a relic of TV repeats from Star Trek or Doctor Who), and at the same time readily connected to its layout viz. pilot suspended from drone. A final reason for not having abandoned the branding too, was that my father brought us up upon the earnings of a telephone engineer. Were then my son to inherit the mantle of TELEDRONE engineer, things might be viewed as having come the full circle.
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| Forty kilos up. |
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