Two eVTOLs You Can Buy and Fly Now

Dean Sigler Announcements, Batteries, Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Two eVTOLs (electric Vertical Take Off and Landing) aircraft are available for purchase right now, presenting owners with potential thrills 20 minutes at a time.  One delivers wind between the toes (if you’re wearing sandals) and the other keeps you dry and even allows water landings.  In airplane economics, they offer “affordable” flying. Though different in appearance and aerodynamics, both machines have triple-redundant flight controls and intrinsic safety features that enable the manufacturers to offer them with relatively few restrictions and fairly easy training sessions. Both qualify as hover bikes/personal flying devices in the eVTOL.com listings of the over 600 aerial electric vehicles.  Both have eight motors and a battery pack that allows about 20 minutes of flight. We’ve turned to the eVTOL News from the Vertical Flight Society for many of the details on each machine. Jetson One An early video of a Jetson One dashing over a desert so enraptured Stephen Colbert two years ago he was begging …

Flying Machines in Your Two Car Garage

Dean Sigler Announcements, Electric Powerplants, Sky Taxis, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

A flying machine in your two-car garage was the promise heralded by Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines during the 1950s and 1960.  It was the era of Bob Cummings piloting his Aerocar on his popular TV show, and KISN radio watching over traffic with one in Portland, Oregon.  Expectations were high and often disappointed. High costs of establishing a network of two-ton, four-passenger eVTOL (electric Vertical Take Off and Landing) machines dissuaded even Uber from pursuing that goal.  Consider that skyports, vertiports, or whatever they ended up as are enormously expensive, and a network with charging stations and passenger accommodations would be a large investment.  Beyond that, each sky taxi would cost well into the high six figures, something that would require corporate ownership rather than the owner/driver model on which Uber’s land-based operations depend. At least four eVTOLs are now on the market or headed there.  None cost more than a claimed $150,000 base price, a plausible outlay …