March-ing On

Good to get back in the saddle and overall the press from the GoFly event in San Fransisco has been favourable. There's a still a continent to travel, however ~  it's thought to have been Schopenhauer who first said that ideas evolve through ridicule and opposition, and are only eventually accepted as self-evident.

Am most proud of the fact we were the only design to have been featured on the front page of the Los Alamos Town Crier, a local newspaper that has survived seventy years despite the precipitous failure of newsprint in the face of the internet.

The fact is, with a flying phone-box we will inevitably appeal mostly to the public, although as they are the most likely to be our future customers then it suits me fine.

Henceforth I plan to reconstitute the prototype with a drone with a conventional octocopter, and accordingly I call up the Mothercare mannekin that I picked up for a song on eBay prior to travelling to California.

This baby's gonna' fly.

GoFly Challenge Phase 3 NASA Ames 2020/02/29

Been a blast...

Drone Furnishings

Probably the first helicopter to have fit the wardrobe at the NASA Ames facility.

Box Clever

Blogging in retrospect here, as the jet lag does its worst, but here's the first helicopter to have been checked in as baggage arriving at San Fransisco.

Both the drone and the box arrived on schedule, despite transit stops at DUB and JFK between LHR and SFO. Missing were the undercarriage skids, bound as a bundle of spars, although that could be forgiven given their matt black finish and the fact that the latter legs of the flight were undertaken in the dead of night.

And even they turned up by courier a day or two later.

Cookin' on gas...

20 (-02-) 20 Vision

Felt like a pair of bank-robbers sneaking in here with the vehicle in three parts, and hoping we're not banned by the Parish Council. It's been twelve months too since  our attempt to fly it in scale-model form. At 25 kilos we're under the limit for FAA Part 107 drone operation and there's a theoretical 100 kilo's worth of thrust, or more than enough to elevate a small human being. Next stop San Fransisco:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNRzOtLePko&feature=youtu.be

Boxing Clever

When a man is to hang in a fortnight ~ and not necessarily from a drone ~ it concentrates the mind. So said Samuel Johnson in eighteenth century London.

Back in twenty-first century London we have to figure out a way of persuading British Airways to let us carry a helicopter as checked-in baggage.

The more I look at this, along with the competition, I realise our USP has to focus on making the world's lightest, most compact and above all most practical means of vertical transport.

Which is why I am still drawn to the idea of a seat.

But looking farther afield (or upwards in fact) I have long struggled with what configuration to arrange the propellers in, and the more I peruse the matter the more I am drawn to the conventional X-8.

If only for reasons of packaging.

Looking at a drawing extracted from the WIPO specification, it is clear that either a quad or else a pair of identical quads stacked one upon the other will fit in a box around one metre square whilst the alternative octocopter layout requires one around 133 centimetres square.

Even my school mathematics suggests the octocopter requires a package one third larger.

And in a flat-packed world, every centimetre counts.

Especially at check-in.

I Left My Art in San Fransisco

For the purposes of the GoFly challenge we're stripping the airframe down to fly as a quad, sneaking under the 25 kilo radar in order to operate it as a drone instead of a manned aircraft. 

People, I feel, will still get the picture.

And it's on this day that I decide that when it is re-equipped with eight propellers then this has to be in the conventional X-8 configuration, which is (at cost of aerodynamic efficiency) the most compact.

You have to ask yourself what your USP is, and ours is this: no-one makes it more compact.