Some of my best and worst thinking takes place at 04:00 a.m. and not least because I might well have had a skinful. At this, the 'darkest time before the dawn' that every airline pilot knows to be bollocks, I can't help thinking that all of this is just a belated effort to revisit a wasted youth in which I'd forgone the chance to fly helicopters.
The REM-fuelled dreams on falling asleep again at this hour are equally vivid, and in this morning's instalment I'm visited by a posse of tax-inspectors whose leader I pin down and stab to death with an item from a geometry set ~ the dreams in which other people are dying are the best I've ever had, as Donnie Darko sang.
It's around this time that I also revisit the outline to see if it can be made yet simpler, and wonder if there's an argument for using the same frame to build a quad instead. Turns out there is. Upping those propellers from three to six feet still allows for a respectable two-feet square centre-body, which can be extended as we've seen once pitched above the level of the disks.
The skids are therefore set at about a six-feet width, which will get you through the garage door and onto the back of a flat-bed trailer... all of which I shall recommend to my contact in California as the simplest solution to the question of a kit-build eVTOL. Beside the skids it can be made from just four parts each of arm, perimeter and leg, together with a similar number of connectors or castors.
All I've really done in life is day-dream, fly aircraft or visit transport museums and I do like people who reduce a part-count. Visiting one such place in Arnhem revealed how two Eastern Europeans reduced the components of the STEN gun by two-thirds, after which it became the side-arm of choice for the French resistance.
Furthermore I've much of the material to get Monty the Mannekin flying at half-scale right here and at a weight that won't attract the attentions of the CAA inspectors... whom I could always stab to death with a piece from a geometry set, worst case.
Fact is, the market for eVTOLs is rapidly polarising. The money is on winged types like the one just afforded a two billion dollar valuation in the form of Vertical Aerospace. Their offering is like practically every other out there, a format that was pioneered elsewhere at radio-model scale very many years ago.
But electrical air-taxis occupy a moneyed world of who-you-know rather than what, which has led the Vertical Flight Society (VFS) to declare the multicopter prematurely dead; although hummingbirds, commercial drones or for that matter the manufacturer of the Osprey or Chinook seem to have done well out of it. Some or other dirt-bag like me will inevitably find a way to make these things too ubiquitous to ignore.
"The multicopter is dead. Long live the multicopter!"
