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I would say this is more Alberto Santos-Dumont then Wright brothers.
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Dude! That is sooo RAD!!!
Want!
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But it’s made of drones. Hence, drone contraption.
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There’s a precedent for that, for that matter: a glider that was built (but ultimately not used) by the POWs at Colditz.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/naziprison/glid_building.html (won’t onebox)
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Could have just been my perspective, but I was like, “Watch the corner… Watch THE CORNER. Phew! Made it back down.”
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Pun intended, or not? I need to know.
Looks like she was wearing sunscreen though.
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Spawn of Drone coming to a theater near you.
Darwin Award, hmmmmm, he learned how to fly, stupid penguins haven’t.
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These guys didn’t even use gyro-stabilization!
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Drone rejects the Lord at 0:37
Or maybe it was the other way around.
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I wanna see the Flite Test guys on YouTube do this up as an r/c: A Barbie doll rigged up with teeny drones.
The video material is actually pre covid. Found some more footage, including some speed tests chAIR episode 32 -Maximum Practical Speed TEST! Manned drone quadcopter - YouTube
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This video gives you a much better sense of how controllable this craft is. Really a sweet piece of engineering. It’s a hell of a thing.
I’ve seen enough of these that kind of work that I have to assume we’re headed towards a future where flying a lawn chair is out there with jet skis and ATVs and skydiving as exotic but achievable hobbies.
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Completely agree. No matter how “cool” the contraption is (or isn’t), taking off from a small cluttered backyard in the middle of a neighborhood is simply asinine.
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Quadcopters have no redundancy. The quads I’ve flown that lost a rotor or motor flipped over and plunged straight to the ground. The auto-stabilization software cannot compensate and there is no time to react. A big enough failure in one of those circular multi-rotor frames will result in catastrophe.
The flight by the woman is safer, as long as she doesn’t fall off into the rotors. Not only is she over the water, she’s flying an octocopter. It has enough redundancy to make a controlled landing after losing a rotor/motor, maybe two.
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Maybe you didn’t see the thing in detail - it’s not a quad copter. I didn’t count the motors but it looks like something on the order of 40 or 80 motor and rotor combos, just arranged in a quadcopter layout.
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