We keep hearing, and reporting, that the era of the individual flying device … traveling car … air taxi … call it what you will … is ideal about the corner, with backing from major gamers like automakers or aircraft businesses. In some imaginings, you would be a passenger when these electrical vertical takeoff and landing plane are flown by a cabbie/pilot. In other folks, you’d be useless fat (wait, let’s not say useless) staying ferried aboard an autonomous drone. But bodyweight and engineering staying limiting things right here, the career of flying just might come down to you. So it’s possible you have wondered: Could you do it?
We 1st instructed you about a Silicon Valley eVTOL organization known as Opener back in 2018. And correct to the constantly-just-a-12 months-away mother nature of the traveling auto sport, at that time it envisioned to start off profits of its BlackFly plane in 2019, for the rate of an SUV. Effectively, it truly is 2021, and although there is not however a BlackFly parked in your garage, the one-seater is FAA-licensed, and it has been take a look at-flown far more than 4,300 moments for over 35,000 miles — racking up a stockpile of YouTube films in the process.
The organization now claims 25 BlackFly aircraft will be bought this tumble.
The craft is meant to be amphibious, landing on drinking water or grass, and its name is derived from the flight characteristics of, well, a black fly, alongside with the colour of its carbon-fiber fuselage. The key to its technological know-how is its Leading Edge Asynchronous Propeller Engineering (LEAPTech), a technique of eight redundant propellers designed on the NASA Ames X-Aircraft program. The technique enables every of the propellers to turn at distinct speeds, meaning the aircraft can hover, change on a dime or do just about everything a fastened-wing aircraft commonly are unable to.
And here’s a enjoyable simple fact: You do not want a pilot’s license to fly a BlackFly. (You do want to total Opener’s operator instruction, having said that.)
An additional fun truth, having back again to the could-you-do-it issue: The firm won’t allow you make a check flight. But here is the upcoming very best factor: looking at someone else with no encounter give it a try. CBS Sunday Morning correspondent John Blackstone lately went by BlackFly simulator education, and then enterprise founder Marcus Leng set him in the pilot seat. Check it out in the movie previously mentioned.
Nevertheless the landing appears to be like dicey, there was no hurt carried out — Blackstone bought BlackFly up and again down once more. So probably the rest of us could do the exact same?