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Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

(techcrunch.com)
171 points BrooklynRage | 1 comments | 03 Oct 19 17:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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heyflyguy ◴[06 Oct 19 00:52 UTC] No.21169039[source]▶
Every time I see a multirotor carrying people, I think of the many times while building them at the beginning of the drone renaissance that I saw 4/6/8 bladed multirotors have an AP failure, a blade break, a speed controller overheat, etc etc and it fell out of the sky, literally.

These do not have a glideslope!

Sure, a ballistic chute might prevent an onboard tragedy but I continue to wonder about what the flying car gets parachuted onto. What fires get started? Who gets crushed?

Super cool tech. Huge accomplishment for the engineers involved.

I want to know how this makes a safe unpowered descent.

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1. walrus01 ◴[06 Oct 19 06:58 UTC] No.21170304[source]▶
This is one of the reasons why this craft and the Airbus vahana craft have at least eight motors and propellers.

Serious camera carrying octocopters for filming are strongly preferred over quad and hexacopters. They often carry $60,000 RED or Arri camera+lens combos. In a quad, motor failure is a guaranteed crash. In a hex, it's extremely dicey. Octocopter design with eight separate ESCs is safer.

In many cases the battery system is still 1+0 non redundant, however. As is the flight controller.