News ESA hosted electric powered aircraft.

[MaverickSawyer]

For the first ten years or so, they're cheap insurance against a bad day at the office. Recertification, though is expensive. But again, still cheaper than having a bad day at the office.

 

[RisingFury]

All the "you can buy more expensive ESC" talk is just plain, reckless stupidity. Companies ALWAYS cut costs. This aircraft has a design fault built into it, where a failure of the engines, batteries, ESCs or lack of energy leads to an uncontrolled dive.

Airplane manufacturers go to extreme lengths to provide safety in their airplanes - even adding BRS to a plane, so it's beyond me why you would intentionally allow a design fault and not correct it with a canard or a front wing.

 

[Urwumpe]

All the "you can buy more expensive ESC" talk is just plain, reckless stupidity. Companies ALWAYS cut costs. This aircraft has a design fault built into it, where a failure of the engines, batteries, ESCs or lack of energy leads to an uncontrolled dive.

Airplane manufacturers go to extreme lengths to provide safety in their airplanes - even adding BRS to a plane, so it's beyond me why you would intentionally allow a design fault and not correct it with a canard or a front wing.

If companies could always cut costs, everything would cost a few cent and do nothing you expect - see Ford who nearly killed his company by that. The reality is different luckily. Companies don't just cut costs without limits, they have to carefully choose where to cut costs and where you need to invest a bit more to get the intented product.

That is called engineering, BTW.

Also, according to your logic, helicopters should be an impossibility. A single rotor? with a rotor head, that is more or less a complicated mechanism with many small parts that each can fail and each is necessary?

 

[RisingFury]

1.) Ford only changed AFTER it got caught! In this case, getting caught after an accident would mean someone already had an accident.

2.) Helicopters have a proven track record. This flight pod does not. The pod might prove safe eventually, but only after a few accidents.

 

[Urwumpe]

1.) Ford only changed AFTER it got caught! In this case, getting caught after an accident would mean someone already had an accident.

The old Ford was infamous for looking which parts had the least tear and wear and make those cheaper, instead of making the most worn down parts stronger.

Again, this strategy nearly killed his company.

 

[Andy44]

Also, according to your logic, helicopters should be an impossibility. A single rotor? with a rotor head, that is more or less a complicated mechanism with many small parts that each can fail and each is necessary?

A guy I used to know said you had to keep an eye on the "Jesus Nut" in a helicopter: the one fastener which, when it fails, cause the occupants to yell "Jesus!" as they descend rapidly.

This is what I call any part which is a single point of failure that could lead to catastrophe. The old O-rings on Shuttle SRBs, for instance, were "Jesus Gaskets".

 

[Urwumpe]

A guy I used to know said you had to keep an eye on the "Jesus Nut" in a helicopter: the one fastener which, when it fails, cause the occupants to yell "Jesus!" as they descend rapidly.

This is what I call any part which is a single point of failure that could lead to catastrophe. The old O-rings on Shuttle SRBs, for instance, were "Jesus Gaskets".

Sounds appropriate. You can't avoid single points of failure completely without paying a huge price. But then... nothing lasts forever anyway, it just has to last long enough.

 

[Ravenous]

...
Also, this is just a smaller prototype, the real version looks more like a Scaled Composites VariEze

Yes, looking at their web site, the glossy pics of the proposed final design show small front wings with six engine nacelles each. (Not claiming it would survive total power failure, but surely losing a few engines on the front would be tolerable.)

It's just the prototype with no front wing which is scary...