Flying cars, eVTOL and jet pack news and discussion thread

[weatheriscool]

Here are some flying cars that are either close to the market or already available for purchase:
Available Flying Cars
Helix by Pivotal: A single-seater eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) flying car priced at $190,000. It has a range of 20 miles and a top speed of 63 mph. No pilot's license is required, but a two-week training course is included in the purchase price.
https://pivotal.aero/


Samson Switchblade: A two-seater flying car priced at $170,000. It has a range of 450 miles and a top speed of 200 mph. A flying license is required to operate this vehicle. Deliveries have yet to begin, but pre-orders are available.
https://www.samsonsky.com/


PAL-V Liberty: A two-seater flying car priced at $322,000-$599,000. It has a range of 250-310 miles and a top speed of 100-112 mph. This vehicle requires a pilot's license and is available for purchase.
https://www.pal-v.com/en/liberty


Doroni H1: A two-seater flying car priced at $150,000. It has a range of 60 miles and a top speed of 140 mph. This vehicle features an autonomous flight system and is expected to be delivered in 2024.
https://doroni.io/


Alef Model A: A flying car priced at $300,000. It has a range of 110 miles and a road speed of 25 mph. This model is expected to be released by 2026 and has already received 2,500 pre-orders.
https://alef.aero/


Upcoming Flying Cars
Terrafugia TF-X: A four-seater flying car priced at $300,000. It has a range of 500 miles and a top speed of 200 mph. Although the launch date has not been officially announced, this model is expected to be released soon.
https://evtol.news/terrafugia-tf-x/

Terrafugia Transition: A four-seater flying car priced at $279,000. It has a range of 400 miles and a cruising speed of 100 mph.

AeroMobil 4.0: A two-seater flying car priced at over $1.3 million. It has a range of 466 miles and an airspeed of up to 223 mph.
https://www.aeromobil.com/


Klein Vision AirCar: A two-seater flying car priced at $500,000. It has a range of 370 miles and a top speed of 140 mph ¹ ² ³.
https://www.klein-vision.com/



=====


Pivotal BlackFly

Type: Single-seat eVTOL ultralight

Price: ~$190K

Delivered: 5 private owners + 8 to USAF

The BlackFly, a state-of-the-art piece of flying equipment made by the company Pivotal, has been delivered to five different owners on the East and West Coasts, plus the Midwest. In addition, the United States Air Force took eight of the prototype models.

“When I took off from my front yard, I felt an indescribable sense of awe,” recent Massachusets owner Patrik M. bragged in a Pivotal release.

https://nypost.com/2024/10/04/lifestyle ... hatgpt.com


Pivotal delivers 13 BlackFly eVTOL under Early Access Program
15-Oct-2024 Source: Pivotal Pivotal, the market leader in light electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft, proudly announces it has completed delivery of 13 BlackFly aircraft to customers across the country. Pivotal’s prototype eVTOLs are currently being flown by private owners and the U.S. Air Force across numerous states, including California, Delaware, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, and Washington, as part of the company’s Early Access Program (EAP). Read more at https://www.helihub.com/2024/10/15/pivo ... s-program/


...............................
Kelekona proposes colossal 40-seater mass transport eVTOL aircraft
By Loz Blain
May 27, 2021

Most eVTOL companies are thinking at air taxi scale, offering just 2-5 seats. Lilium is a notable exception, putting forth a whopping 7-seat "air minibus" design and prioritizing longer trips. But there are very few companies thinking at the kind of scale Kelekona's talking about.

This audacious New York City startup is thinking in terms of 40 passengers plus a pilot per flight – or an enormous 10,000 lb (4,540 kg) of cargo. And apparently long distances and high speeds, too, since the Kelekona website promises these VTOL sky buses will make the 330-mile (531 km) run between LA and San Francisco in just one hour.

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/kelekona- ... evtol-bus/

[weatheriscool]

Announcing ASKA™ The Electric Take Off And Landing Flying Car For Consumers
By
Press
15 April 2021

NFT Inc, today announced it is now taking pre-orders for the ASKA™, the first electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicle designed for consumers.

The company has also opened the world’s first consumer flying car showroom. Located in Los Altos, the heart of Silicon Valley, the sales showroom features demonstration models of the ASKA™ and also functions as a learning center about urban air mobility.

ASKA™ is a new door-to-door mobility option offering the freedom to choose to travel on the road or in the air. The four-seater ASKA™ drives on the road like a car, capable of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), as well as short takeoff and landing (STOL), and flies like an aircraft. This private commuter vehicle enables people to live in a quality environment outside urban areas and to quickly and easily commute to the city center – door to door.

https://www.suasnews.com/2021/04/announ ... consumers/

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

^ The only hope for flying cars, the only hope there has ever realistically been for flying cars, is passenger drones. And barring the development of antigravity or some equivalent technology, even those will only ever be niche. Heck, even WITH antigrav tech, they'd still be niche. The cold fact is that there's virtually no good reason for flying cars/passenger drones to be used other than for the pure novelty of it.

And considering that we absolutely need AV tech to advance to make them practical, by the time they ARE available en masse, there'd probably be little to no reason to use them practically. Why would you? To get to work? The same workplace that's probably completely automated? To get to the beach? You'd still almost certainly have to take off and land at pre-designated sites, or else it becomes far too dangerous or a public health hazard. And then you factor in those designated sites and the fact they might still be distant from where you want or need to go, so you'd still need a car. Presumably a flying car wouldn't have that problem, except there's absolutely no physically possible way to make a flying car that's anything other than both a shitty car and a shitty aircraft. None! If there was, engineers would've licked that problem in the 1940s. I'm fairly sure it's engineers who are the biggest critics of flying cars.

Again, barring antigravity technology, this is a dead-end field.

Passenger drones are a much better bet.

It's sad but true, and it's more a case of a late 19th century meme for the Future™ that refuses to die. I think flying cars are a meme that keeps getting repeated because they appeal to a sense of old-fashioned Americana, the ideal of that middle-American family on the road— except in this case, they're in the air, flying over the losers on the ground stuck in traffic. There are really a lot of futuristic dreams we have that aren't very practical barring super-advanced technology that could genuinely be thousands of years away even in a Singularity scenario due to needing to rewrite the very laws of physics (or dedicated to the realm of virtual reality, where there's no need to worry about these restraints).

Things like a space navy, AKA the classic sci-fi dream of a bunch of ensigns, engineers, lieutenants, captains, etc. on some interstellar starship engaging in war with some roughly equivalent alien race in what's essentially a naval battle/dogfight in outer space. Virtually nothing about that makes logical sense in real life. Even the possibility of fleshy, biological humans surviving in deep space for longer than a couple years is an extremely long shot that becomes less and less realistic every passing year as our understanding of the nature of deep space and human biological limitations grows.
Heck, even sapient AI may be this. I'm certain general AI is possible, even very probable in an extremely short time frame, but I'm not 100% certain we'll ever lick artificial sapience. We could, it may be easy, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it's genuinely not going to happen for decades or centuries.


This coming from someone who wants all three!

[weatheriscool]

Futuristic Backpack Helicopter 'CopterPack' Takes Flight For First Time
Jun 04, 2021

Australian-based startup CopterPack published a new video on YouTube of what appears to be an electric backpack helicopter flying for the first time.

The lightweight airframe is constructed from a carbon fiber honeycomb, with two propellers on either side of the operator, lifting the person into the air.

The video shows the flight and how remarkably stable the electric backpack helicopter is, all thanks to its self-leveling autopilot.

Judging by the video, there is no tail rotor, as the two main propellers are adjusted by the operator with a joystick for control...........

[weatheriscool]

Innovative batteries put flying cars on the horizon
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-bat ... rizon.html
by A'ndrea Elyse Messer, Pennsylvania State University

The automotive electric vehicle revolution is paving the way for urban air mobility, but people must not be naive in thinking that electric vehicle batteries will suffice for electric flight. The fast-charging requirements, 30x increase in energy throughput, and 3x power requirements demand a new generation of battery. Credit: Eric Rountree, EC Power

Jet packs, robot maids and flying cars were all promises for the 21st century. We got mechanized, autonomous vacuum cleaners instead. Now a team of Penn State researchers are exploring the requirements for electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles and designing and testing potential battery power sources.

"I think flying cars have the potential to eliminate a lot of time and increase productivity and open the sky corridors to transportation," said Chao-Yang Wang, holder of the William E. Diefender Chair of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Electrochemical Engine Center, Penn State. "But electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles are very challenging technology for the batteries."

[weatheriscool]

Archer unveils full-scale, two-seat, autonomous Maker eVTOL prototype
By Loz Blain
June 10, 2021

Palo Alto's Archer has unveiled a full-scale, two-seat, autonomous prototype of its Maker eVTOL aircraft at the Hawthorne Airport in California. This striking aircraft will begin ground tests and flight tests later this year, with air taxi services slated to begin in LA and Miami in 2024.

Just about dead-on to the renders we've seen previously, the Maker uses an intermediate design that's effectively half vectored thrust and half lift & cruise. It's a fairly conventional airplane shape with a V-tail and a large main overhead wing. Along this wing are six propulsion pods, each with a two-blade rear lift rotor and a five-blade front rotor that can tilt forward in horizontal flight. The rear rotors can't be completely tucked away to reduce drag, but they keep things as efficient as they can by aligning themselves with the airflow.

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/archer-ma ... unveiling/

[Yuli Ban]

Airspeeder says it had the first successful test flight for its electric flying racecar
The company is aiming to hold races with the uncrewed vehicles later this year

Airspeeder says its electric “flying” race car, the Alauda Mk3, has had its first unpiloted test flights in southern Australia. The craft, an electric vertical takeoff multicopter (abbreviated eVTOL for electric vertical take off and landing) was remotely controlled and the test flights took place under the supervision of Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority.

The ultimate goal for Airspeeder and Alauda Aeronautics (the former is the racing series, the latter is the manufacturer), both founded by entrepreneur Matthew Pearson, has been to build flying vehicles for the purpose of racing them, which the companies say is the next step. According to Airspeeder’s website, the “successful execution of these flights means that uncrewed electric flying car Grand Prixs will take place in 2021 at three soon-to-be-revealed international locations.”

[raklian]

Airspeeder says it had the first successful test flight for its electric flying racecar

It's looking like this, among other innovations, might be the a precursor to the long-sought elusive flying car for everyday civilian life.

[Time_Traveller]

Flying cars will be a reality by 2030, says Hyundai’s Europe chief

Tue 29 Jun 2021

Flying cars will be a reality in cities around the globe by the end of this decade, according to a leading car manufacturer, and will help to reduce congestion and cut vehicle emissions.

Michael Cole, the chief executive of the European operations of South Korean carmarker Hyundai, said the firm had made some “very significant investments” in urban air mobility, adding: “We believe it really is part of the future”.

Cole conceded: “There’s some time before we can really get this off the ground.

“We think that by the latter part of this decade certainly, urban air mobility will offer great opportunity to free up congestion in cities, to help with emissions, whether that’s intra-city mobility in the air or whether it’s even between cities.”

He told a conference of industry group Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders: “It’s part of our future solution of offering innovative, smart mobility solutions.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... rope-chief

[weatheriscool]

Flying car completes test flight between airports

By Zoe Kleinman

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57651843
2 hours ago

A prototype flying car has completed a 35-minute flight between international airports in Nitra and Bratislava, Slovakia.

The hybrid car-aircraft, AirCar, is equipped with a BMW engine and runs on regular petrol-pump fuel.

Its creator, Prof Stefan Klein, said it could fly about 1,000km (600 miles), at a height of 8,200ft (2,500m), and had clocked up 40 hours in the air so far.

It takes two minutes and 15 seconds to transform from car into aircraft.

[weatheriscool]

Heaviside becomes fourth eVTOL to receive military airworthiness approval
By Loz Blain
July 12, 2021

America's technological leadership is now viewed as an urgent matter of national security, and to make sure the country keeps its edge, the US Military is mustering its impressive resources to accelerate development on a range of commercial tech products that could keep the USA ahead of the game.

The AFWERX Prime programs are designed explicitly to "prime" and accelerate emerging commercial markets, using military missions and equities, as well as test infrastructure, certification authorities, inter-agency relationships and early operational use cases.

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/kitty-haw ... orthiness/

[weatheriscool]

Jetpack Aviation's flying motorcycle prototype aces first tests
By Loz Blain
July 19, 2021

After spending 18 months building an entirely new form of flight control software, California's Jetpack Aviation has completed flight testing on its first prototype of the Speeder, a jet turbine-powered flying motorcycle. Top speeds on the final version will be rather epic.

When we last caught up with David Mayman, inventor, madman and one of the world's very few expert jetpack pilots, he was starting work on a new personal flight device very different to anything else on the market. The Speeder would be a very small VTOL aircraft, powered by the same extremely powerful miniature jet turbines Mayman has been flying his jetpacks around on. In this case, it would carry much higher loads, including up to two people, at higher speeds, and it'd also be much quicker and easier to deploy than a jetpack – you'd just hop on and fly.

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/flying-mo ... n-speeder/

[weatheriscool]

Urban eVTOL announces Leo, a 250-mph hypercar for the skies
By Loz Blain
August 05, 2021
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/urban-evt ... -hypercar/

An electric propulsion specialist and a supercar designer have partnered up on an eye-catching three-seat eVTOL, claiming 250-mph (400 km/h) top speeds and extraordinary 300-mile (483-km) range figures, as well as some extreme flight dynamics and some nifty ideas.

Pete Bitar has been working on vertical propulsion systems for decades now. He's got a DARPA contract to develop his electric jetpack designs, his Verticycle is a competitor in the GoFly personal flight challenge, and he's just won one of nine NASA "Future-Scaping Our Skies" awards for his work on ground infrastructure and air traffic control for the coming eVTOL age.

Now he's partnered up with automotive designer Carlos Salaff to start an eVTOL company. Salaff was behind the outrageous Mazda Furai concept, and has in more recent years been showing his own outrageous coach-built creations at events such as Pebble Beach.

[raklian]

This eVTOL Is Styled Like a Flying Sports Car That Parks in Your Garage

A new concept from Urban eVTOL, the Leo isn’t concerned about copter v. jet—it wants to be like a car. It measures 20 feet by 10 feet, meaning it will fit in most two-car garages. And it has an automotive-style interior, with an easy-to-learn semi-autonomous fly-by-wire control system.

The car-like qualities are far from the only innovations. Propulsion comes via a unique electric jetpack design built by co-founder Pete Bitar’s Electric Jet Aircraft. The system uses five clusters of electrically powered jet turbines. Four of the clusters provide lift and the fifth pushes the Leo forward.

Each cluster works in unison to emulate a single rotor, but the multiple jets per cluster provide safety through redundancy. The turbines’ rotors are housed within the craft’s body, which provides additional safety. Plus it looks pretty damn cool. The system has performed well in tethered test flight and Urban Evtol projects a top speed of 250 mph with one hour of flight time.

Salaff says the plan calls for experimental certification in 2023 and full arrival on the market in 2026.

https://robbreport.com/motors/aviation/ ... 234629439/


Hmmm.... it looks more and more like a flying car we've always wanted.

[weatheriscool]

US Air Force set to showcase 35 high-speed VTOL aircraft concepts
By Loz Blain
August 24, 2021
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/afwerx-hi ... -showcase/

Forget your friendly little electric air taxis. The US Air Force wants to take things up a notch with a new generation of high-speed vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Thirty five designs are about to be presented, here's a sneak peek at the ones we know.

AFWERX is a US Air Force program first announced in 2017, designed to encourage a culture of innovation in the service, both by promoting interesting ideas raised internally and by getting involved with the entrepreneurial tech sector to draw in and fast-track the best ideas in the civilian world as well. It's not just to get sweet new gadgets into the field; America's national security depends on a thriving commercial technology sector, and one of AFWERX's aims is to give US companies a leg-up on development where it's prudent.

AFWERX put the call out in June for companies to make submissions on a new High-Speed VTOL (HSVTOL) challenge. Its current VTOL aircraft get plenty of use thanks to their runway-free convenience and operational flexibility, but its most common helicopter, the Sikorsky HH-60 Pave Hawk, is limited to a speed of 193 knots (222 mph, 357 km/h), due to retreating blade stall.

[funkervogt]

https://www.militantfuturist.com/why-fl ... ever-will/

[weatheriscool]

Lilium releases 5th-gen eVTOL flight test footage with sound
By Loz Blain
September 13, 2021

Lilium's eVTOL is vastly different to anything else in the air taxi world, using 36 small ducted fans in place of larger open rotors. This has advantages and disadvantages, which we've discussed in detail before. Essentially, smaller fans make for vastly lower hover efficiency, but the company says they create less drag than large rotors in forward flight, improving efficiency over longer range flights.

Lilium also says they'll make these aircraft much easier to scale up to 15 seats and beyond without losing the ability to land on standard helipads.

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/lilium-evtol-noise/

[weatheriscool]

First Flying Car Passes Safety Test In Japan, Could Be On-Sale By 2025
https://www.iflscience.com/technology/f ... HfmhRy_Mgk
04 Nov 2021, 16:35

A flying car has gained the first safety certificate issued by Japan, allowing them to commercialize their eVTOL vehicles as soon as 2025. This marks the first flying car to reach this stage in Japan, and could pave the way for this decade to be the decade of flying cars.

SkyDrive’s eVTOL electric flying car concept is currently represented by the SD-03, which made a successful manned flight demonstration in August 2020. Carrying just a single seat, the SD-03 is powered by eight propellers in a quadcopter formation and has a range of around 10 minutes flight time, reaching top speeds of 30 miles per hour (48 kilometers per hour). During the world debut, a pilot took off vertically before flying around a test area and smoothly landing back down.