Engineering360: "A Personal Aircraft for Everyday Life"

How many sliced hot dogs will it make when it collides with a crowd?

That depends on how many men are in the crowd.

Does it come with a parachute?

(No wing for gliding, no ability to auto-rotate)

"partners interested in fleets of Flyer for operation in recreational environments ."

Bumper drones anyone? This should be a non-starter.

Battery power??? Weight and range??? Nonsense

ICE's are not necessarily noisy.

I agree with prior comments on gliding capability or a must of auto rotation for a save landing. It is all inspired by the hobby drones. Very limited in the box thinking.

This is the wave of the future people. These brushless motors are very dependable as are the solid state speed controls that are available these days. There are some amazing batteries on the market today and I wouldn't be surprised to maybe see one of these fliers being powered by fuel cells with battery backup. It's possible to build quite a bit of redundancy into this type of vehicle. Use your imagination and I'm sure that several other forms of safe transition from powered flight to safe landing in an emergency are available...one such item that comes to mind is back-up motors with independent batteries, allowing for a safe landing.....not to mention something similar to the parachutes that are used in the Cirrus line of aircraft, among others.....I say this because I have been flying RC aircraft for almost twenty years and all of my aircraft use brushless motors. That being said, I have had virtually zero failures of brushless motors. They are much more dependable than brushed motors.

I guess it would be safe to say you'd bet your life on it.

Brushless motors may be reliable, but you have a motor drive to worry about too. The ECS (Electronic Speed Control) for an RC aircraft is a very crude inverter with few parts, hence they tend to be fairly reliable. Larger motor drives while reliable in the sense of running factory machines are very good, would they stand up to an FAA certification process? That's the real question.

I believe these over-sized toys will remain 'experimental' for a long time.

The problem is that good batteries are always in the future. This model has a 12 minute flight time... assuming you are a light-weight. Maybe it's finally a good incentive to get on that diet :) Short of a breakthrough, these things (in a practical sense) are another 30 years out, given our current rate of battery improvement *sigh* Cool concept though.

"Hey, hold my beer and watch me fly this thing."

Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Fuel cells are probably the answer for a potential energy source. EVs don't work because of human nature. Already in Brissie (Qld. Aust.), I have given several nongs a lift with Electric Scooters. I have loaded them into my ute and dropped them at their work. They "thought" they had enough juice to get to work. Well, it has been empirically proven that "hope" doesn't even cure pregnancy.

So not only do we face a future of streets littered with EVs, whose owners "hoped" they had enough power to get somewhere, but we run a good chance of having drones falling on us at random from the heavens.

We really don't need a HELL. We are quite adept at making our own.