The world's safest helicopter?

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probes
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The world's safest helicopter?

#1 Post by probes » Wed Apr 13, 2016 7:11 am

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35987842

An 18-rotor multicopter has been taken on its first manned flight in Germany.
Alex Zosel told the BBC that his device was safer than a traditional helicopter because its systems had more redundancy built-in.
The Volocopter can continue to fly if some of its batteries or rotors fail, and can land itself when battery power is low.
However, the multicopter can currently fly for only 25 minutes and is expected to cost £200,000 when it goes on sale.

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more here: http://www.engadget.com/2016/04/10/18-r ... ed-flight/
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Rwy in Sight
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Re: The world's safest helicopter?

#2 Post by Rwy in Sight » Thu Apr 14, 2016 6:02 am

The more engines it has the largest a chance of a failure.
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Re: The world's safest helicopter?

#3 Post by OFSO » Thu Apr 14, 2016 12:27 pm

The more engines it has the largest a chance of a failure.

Taking that to extremes, a vehicle with an infinite number of engines will always be in failure mode. Er....
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Re: The world's safest helicopter?

#4 Post by Rwy in Sight » Fri Apr 15, 2016 1:09 pm

OFSO wrote:The more engines it has the largest a chance of a failure.

Taking that to extremes, a vehicle with an infinite number of engines will always be in failure mode. Er....


As the owner of a 5* hotel once explained me, a very difficult task on hotel maintenance is to keep all the smallish led light on the ceiling in a hotel restaurant or function room - one or more will always be burned. The same goes for the engine. I guess it is hard to know how many engines the machine has and how many it needs to fly.
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Re: The world's safest helicopter?

#5 Post by OFSO » Sat Apr 16, 2016 10:34 am

If you look at the STS manual, you will see that if one main engine failed, to reach orbit they'd just burn the two remaining engines a bit longer, using fuel not burned by the failed engine. And after a certain phase if a second engine failed, they'd burn the remaining one a bit longer still. Interestingly the main engines proved very reliable. I would have thought the electric motors on the helicopter would prove even more reliable.
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Re: The world's safest helicopter?

#6 Post by Dirk » Sat Apr 30, 2016 8:17 pm

Electric motors are amazingly reliable and it is pretty easy and cheap to make them so, they have a future in light aviation,
but have to say, I would have a bit of a hard time climbing into something that looks like a toy drone from Maplins
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