Re: construction

Hurts to do so but I have to re-jig the airframe in light of the fact that the batteries are likely now to be fitted to the overhead in the avionics dome of my 'flying phone-box', which frees up the under-seat space which seemed the logical place for them at the outset.

This reduces the dimensions of the structural airframe to 1000 x 500 x 500 mm, and allows space for one seated passenger. Replacing the bottom-end of this frame will be a frangible foam box that will double as both a stand and 'crumple-zone'.

Among the top three companies to have raised venture capital recently has been Volocopter. People forget ~ all to easily ~ that they used a gym ball as a means of such undercarriage in their prototype.

But if to works, it works. I read recently of an earthworks engineer who was most proud of the fact his company had underpinned the ramps connecting a freeway with... polystyrene foam: in shear it's like custard but in compression it's a cheaper and lighter form of cement.

This chassis is thus down to 24 pounds from 35 today, a figure Weight Watchers would be proud of.

New Years Re: solution

Left to conventional wisdom in aviation, aircraft like this (seen on Parlick Fell yesterday) would not exist. Though I'd tax returns to file, sometimes you have to get out and about for inspiration, because I'm sure I can do for the helicopter what these people did for the aeroplane.

Re:box

After wrestling with how to support the drone overhead in a way that I could live with throughout 2020, since just after midnight on the 27th I have had a solution. It will involve reducing the size of the airframe seen above, which you will recall included a seat and a two-pack of batteries stored beneath.

This will also reduce its weight, which I was never happy with. I had guessed for the FAA that it was around 15 kilos and it turns out I was spot on... 15.40 kilos in fact, or precisely 34 pounds. I figure I can practically halve that and still produce a working solution.

The optimism of mis-spent youth?

Christmas Baubles

I make a Christmas sojourn down the Welsh borders again to check on developments with the powered rig that will sit atop the 'phone-box' styled flight compartment ~ principally how the software and hardware hang together and spin those propellers. There remains debate as to whether it is worth persevering with the unconventional array of rotors seen here, but from my point of view there are good reasons for doing so. A conventional X-8 configuration would be more of an 'off-the-shelf' solution, but then I've never considered myself as overly conventional. Season's Greetings!

Contact!

First time all eight props have been spun up, and it's music to my ears...

In the Lap of the Quads

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'.

Four Square

Sense of trepidation as the top-end of the flying phone-box is readied for first flight...