A third round trip to Somerset to retrieve the motor-head, which I subsequently drop at a firm more used to designing and building heavy-lift drones for industrial use.
The question is whether the quads should be split top-and-bottom of the phone-box shaped airframe, or joined like this octocopter and fitted to the dome.
Pros and cons to each so it's a best-guess as to which may prove responsive enough in flight to cope with real-world conditions, and not least to gusts.
Drone manufacturers tend to get overly exercised by this, not least I feel because nowadays people expect everything to work 'out of the box'. Nonetheless everything we consider to be a technical marvel was decidedly unreliable at the outset and remained so for some time. The Wright Flyer was not the most gust-responsive airplane and thirty years later airliners like the Dragon Rapide still had a landing 'cross-wind limitation' of just seven m.p.h.
Indeed, that was why all of the earliest hardened airfields had an X or even * arrangement of runways, whereas now none of them do (and I speak as someone who has used Heathrow's long-defunct cross-wind runway). It's been said that people overestimate progress in the shorter term and underestimate it in the longer.
There is every reason to expect the state-of-the-art Volocopter to be flying passengers rather sooner than the original helicopters did and altogether more safely, and no reason why a 'flying kiosk' not unlike a set of rotors appended to a phone-box might not do so too, sooner or later.
So I leave the equipment in the hands of the gods in order to see whether the octo above is literally a flying concern, and whether it will remain so when furnished with a passenger-compartment slung beneath.
In the meantime we've elected for the octocopter be be configured as an X-8, with the pairs of propellers down each side commanded jointly so that the whole thing operates as a giant quadcopter.
All speculation at this stage, and as the Boeing 707 test-pilot remarked, 'A single test-flight is worth a thousand speculations'.
