It's worth at every stage of prototyping stepping back to review progress and consider if at all it would be worth proceeding... a consideration from within base camp. James Dyson is the UK's most successful contemporary industrialist and in the time he took developing his vacuum cleaner, his son developed from toddler to seventeen year old.
It pays also to identify a marketing niche, and I think this has to be along a DIY route. The kit-built helicopter market has a spotted history, which is unsurprising given the fact that the conventional helicopter is relatively complex, and has to be got right. It is also probably true that like most kit aeroplanes, kit helicopters are rarely completed if only because they are pre-deceased by their owners.
On the other hand the world's most successful helicopter is probably the R22, which was sold ex-factory from the get-go and an examination of its pricing (according to its wiki page) is worthwhile. Pitched at around $18,000 by Frank Robinson at the outset it would eventually retail for nearly double in 1979, and still does so today at $375,000. In other words it sold for around double what he thought it would and continues to do so even nowadays, albeit it at a cost around twenty times beyond expectation.
It does suggest that eVTOLs designed admittedly for a single operator in place of two may in the long term present a viable business opportunity, but most likely in ARTF or 'almost ready to fly' format. This is a halfway house that broadly satisfies regulators as well as insurers and owners, in that it represents a proven product that unlike the run of kits is likely to see daylight.
It will likely to become easier with the passage of time to build airframes like the one in the picture: in the way that personal computing devices started out as a kit of parts that had to be assembled by its owner unlike shiny smartphones that appear from out of a box. And in the long run people will simply build and fly them for fun if the price point is right, in the way that both cars and aircraft developed from their beginnings.
Most electrical scooters in the world (like cars) are operated illegally, in the way most people watch soccer matches on TV illegally. The focus of product development is not so much to outlaw what people would like to do in their own back yard so much as to make sure they don't kill themselves doing it.
We've still retrospective adjustments to make to our people-carrying drone in coming days, so hang on in there.
