Yeah, I've seen this one before. It rings a lot of alarm bells to me.
- Chinese company rushing to be "first to market".
- Dubai government that will do anything to "put itself on the map", to hell with safety regulations, or proper standards and certification.
- A company whose track record to date is selling toy drones through Amazon and Best Buy.
- A company which has apparently "partnered" with a bunch of other IT companies... don't see anyone with any actual commercial aeronautical design experience in there.
- Their own specs advertise a max power of 152 kW, with a battery pack of 17kWh. This would provide maybe 6 minutes of flight at max power with no reserve.
- Using a consumer 4G LTE link to control the device, with the only backup being some kind of autonomous "find a safe landing site and land". Wow.
- Does 4G LTE even work anywhere near 3500m (claimed max altitude)?
- No mention of any kind of ballistic chute recovery system if the above fails.
- There don't appear to be any "off-the shelf" certified parts being used. Everything has been designed in-house: Props, motors, batteries, hardware and software. But don't worry about that, they're using composites just like "spacecraft"!
...
Look, my scepticism may be unfounded, maybe it will be a raging success.
But, for starters, from a design point of view, contra-rotating coaxial props?
They have been proposed on just about every ground-breaking aerial vehicle since Sir Isaac first invisaged the helicopter (because it seems to make sense on paper). But it's never got past the prototype or concept stage because turbulent aerodynamics dictates that it simply doesn't work (on anything larger than a toy).
Reminds me of the "gull-wing" doors that appear on just about every headline-grabbing concept car that appears in motor-shows, and has done for decades. They do that because it looks cool, and looks great on paper. Never makes it to a real car of course, because in practice it's a dumb idea. Yeah, I know Elon Musk just did it on the Model X, maybe he'll be the first to get it right.
This thread has emphasised that storage specific energy and efficiency is key to electric flight. Even if this vehicle does successfully fly with its contra-rotating props I doubt it would be very efficient.
This strikes me as a scaled-up toy drone. I'm sure it's software is sophisticated enough to conduct a successful demo flight. This company is possibly very good at toy drone software. But is it designed to be mission-critical? Does it run on mission-critical hardware? What sort of fault checking does it run? What sort of automatic fail-over exists? We're only told it has "two" flight management systems. Is that two Rasberry Pi's? Rockwell-Collins and Honeywell make mission critical flight management systems, but I'll bet they didn't even get a phone call from this mob.
Think about the software and hardware requirements in a modern fly-by-wire aircraft. Think about the amount of redundancy, design, testing and certification (and expense) that goes into making it safe. We all know how reliable consumer-grade computers, consumer-grade operating systems, and consumer-grade software is.
A multi-rotor aircraft is about as stable as a unicycle. A computer glitch for a fraction of a second turns it into a plumetting hunk of carbon-reinforced epoxy resin.
Running "100 successful test flights" and launching commercially in Dubai may be great for headlines and possibly fundraising, but I won't be volunteering to be a crash test dummy in this little baby in the near future.
Were there any humans in these "test flights"? I doubt it, because if there were they would have made sure it made headlines. How many of these "test flights" actually flew 25kms from A to B? Is that video of it flying over snow-capped peaks even a real video? Where are the videos from all these "successful test flights"? Surely there must be 100 of them!
Launching commercially as an air-taxi in Dubai this Summer? That's northern Summer... That's a month away. Awesome. Looking forward to it. Don't worry that it takes Airbus or Boeing 5 years of exhaustive testing and certification to get a new aircraft in the air, these blokes will have it up and running in no time.
If they are too proud to even employ an articulate English speaker to create the English-speaking version of their website, what does that say about their employment of experienced aeronautical professionals to design their human-carrying toy drone?
I might wait for Sir Richard or Elon Musk to develop one before I get too excited. At least they would have the funds and skills to do it properly, and get it right. The fact that neither has done so yet probably speaks volmes: I'm sure they're both keen to do so when it becomes properly viable.
Last edited by Derfred; 4th May 2017 at 18:02.