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Old 21st Feb 2018, 07:54
  #45 (permalink)  
abgd
 
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: The Wild West (UK)
Age: 45
Posts: 1,151
Received 6 Likes on 3 Posts
Personally I don't like the Lillium aircraft - for one thing that's a small model without any significant payload. It simply looks 'wrong' as if it needs a larger canard on the front

However, a few posts back someone pointed out that to compete with a spamcan you would need to carry a huge amount of batteries. One way you can do this is to improve your batteries. Another way is to make your airframe more efficient.

Electric aircraft can do VTOL relatively easily compared to IC engine powered aircraft. This means that you can get away with a much lower wing area as you don't need to worry about stall speed in the case of an engine failure - especially if you also carry a ballistic parachute. Also, if you have to divert or land in an emergency you can land on a postage stamp, so having an excess range becomes less important - you shouldn't need to carry the same amount of reserves as an IFR spamcan. So long as you have two minutes' warning of the batteries running out you should be able to put it down somewhere. Unless you're over water, of course.

The regulators' heads must be hurting.
abgd is offline