‘Personal helicopter’ can skip over traffic
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LOS ANGELES – Rick Perkins said he spends up to two hours commuting in bumper-to-bumper traffic. But if he could zip to his destination by air at rush hour, he figures the same trip would last only nine minutes.
All it would take is his own helicopter.
As cities become more congested, futurists, designers and entrepreneurs are looking to the skies for relief.
In Perkins’ case, that means putting down a $1,000 reservation to buy a “personal helicopter” – a small, relatively inexpensive, partially electric- powered craft designed for two people taking short hops. The one that caught Perkins’ eye is the SureFly, from a company called Workhorse Group.
Cincinnati-based Workhorse believes it’s on the forefront of electric vertical takeoff and landing technology, or eVTOL. Working with the Federal Aviation Administration, the company hopes to have its first model to customers by 2021.
Workhorse, which also makes electric trucks, may have plenty of competition when it comes to Jetsons-style transportation.
The Japanese government recently
launched a campaign to bring together companies and public agencies in a push to have vehicles aloft next decade. In the USA, ride-hailing service Uber announced an initiative last year to create flying vehicles.
Like self-driving cars, personal helicopters no longer appears to be a case of if, but when.
The key to their success is making lighter batteries and developing regulations governing the copters’ flight paths. “How quickly we respond to take advantage of the new technology will largely be a question of how quick we can define the new rules of the road, so to speak,” said James Moore, director of the University of Southern Cailfornia’s Transportation Engineering Program.
The SureFly is being designed as unique among helicopters. It would be able to cruise at up to 70 mph for more than two hours using battery power combined with a small engine. It would cost about $200,000, cheaper than many helicopters.
Where it differs most dramatically is in its appearance, looking more like an oversized drone. SureFly has no tail boom, which makes it about the size of a sedan and compact enough to fit on a residential landing pad. It levitates with eight rotors mounted on four pods.
As a commuter craft, the helicopter will sport two important safety features. One is the ability for electric power to kick in if the craft needs to make an emergency landing, whirling it to earth. Second, there will be a “ballistic parachute” intended to work at altitudes above 100 feet.
The company is doing flight tests. SureFly is being designed to be simpler to fly than a regular helicopter, with a computerized fly-by-wire system and no foot pedals. “It’s easy and safe to fly and opens the market to skip over traffic,” said lead test engineer Justin Jantzen.
That’s a potent combination in Los Angeles, which was ranked top for congestion in the 2017 traffic scorecard by INRIX, a company that specializes in transportation analytics and connected-car services. Los Angelenos spent an average of 102 hours stuck in traffic last year, followed by motorists in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Miami.
As great as zipping through the skies sounds, there are a lot of issues around eVTOL aircraft that need to be resolved.
Besides air-traffic-control complications, there’s noise. Though they are partially powered by electricity, personal helicopters like the SureFly still could be loud enough to bother the neighbors. And while an owner may have a landing pad at home, there aren’t a lot of other places that helicopters can legally touch down.
Karl Brauer, executive publisher for Cox Automotive, sees the move toward personal helicopters going one of two ways. One possibility is they remain playthings of the rich, meaning their numbers remain small and they have no real impact on traffic congestion. The other is that they catch on with large numbers of people, creating airtraffic control and storage headaches.
“The personal helicopter is a powerful concept for people living in Los Angeles,” he said, “even if it’s not realistic for most residents.”
Perkins, 44, who lives in Burbank, California, is such a big believer that he equipped the hillside house he built to sell in a swanky neighborhood on Los Angeles’ west side with an optional helipad. In showing the six-bedroom,
71⁄ 2- bathroom house last week, the copter was perched next to the pool. The house is listed for $12 million.
“With the home of the future, why not integrate that?” Perkins said. “In
2020, everyone is going to move in that direction.”