During a conflab with organisers of the GoFly challenge I suggest death and injury need not necessarily be precluded at the fly-off, bread and circuses being a staple since Roman times whether at the amphitheatre or the Daytona 500.
Sadly neither GoFly nor the FAA incline to this view, especially in view of the fact we are supposed to be designing for the future of urban air mobility.
This is not altogether a bad thing, for as someone said of hanging, it concentrates the mind.
Despite a long interregnum I feel the time has not been altogether wasted as it is essential for one thing that we field a marketable product, and for another it now behoves us to pin the final configuration down to specifics.
I thus return to two separate configurations that featured in the patent spec but which I am more than happy to share in order to advance the cause.
They each look like something from an Edward de Bono primer on psychology, so here goes: which provides the greater disk area given that on the left drives 36-inch propellers and that on the right 25-inch?
The answer is neither... they both total twenty-eight square feet.
The difference is that the configuration on the right is safer and more compact whilst that on the left is more efficient and flexible (as the ratio between the size of the propellers and the centre-deck is variable).
The market in a (litigious) USA errs toward safety however, and that's where I must err.
Ralph Nader made a name pursuing Porsche after the death of James Dean, yet Europeans were undaunted: I've flown airliners downwind alongside cars on autobahns going as fast.
