Cruise-capable eVTOL flying motorcycle rocks tilting thrusters

Czech company UDX is flying scale prototypes of a tandem 2-up eVTOL it calls Airwolf. With individually-tilting ducted fan propulsion, it's got enough wing surface for efficient cruise flight as well as agile movement from a hover.

8 comments

- That's hard to do when they don't have a actual working prototype. Best they can do so far is scale models lol
$320,000
25m (minutes) flight time (45m (miles) range)
"Scale model" stage - all life-size video/images are renders
The fan attachments are large enough, and are designed, to provide lift, which would be more impressive if it had a useful run time. It's great that people are thinking of ways to combine VTOL concepts in human-sized quadcopters, and maybe this will inspire some other, more practical, future product. This one, though, I doubt will ever come to market.
Edit to make the UoM more clear, because context is hard.
- 25 metres of flight time? what is this, the Millennium Falcon?
  45 metres of range? So it can fly from one end of the yard to the other before landing and needing to refuel? that doesn't seem useful.
  
  Yeah, sorry.
  25 minutes of flight time (m=minutes I thought was implied by "time"). 45 miles of range (again, I assumed the unit of measure was implied by "range.") I used imperial, because that's what the article used.
  I'll correct my post to be more clear.
Paging Colin Furze... Paging Colin Furze...
The concepts for this sort of thing that actually work still use fossil fuels, because the problem these guys are inevitably going to run into is that you still can't pack nearly as much energy into 3,785 cubic centimeters of batteries as you can in a gallon of gasoline.
At the moment, the cheapest way to fly still to get yourself a paramotor (the engines for which is what Colin used on his machine, above) and if you want to go green, electric options are now available. (Also, this.)
Each of its four shrouded fan units can move independently.
How long before someone blows up a reaver (or a random office). 'Here's something you can't do' (Firefly, Crazy Ivan), incidentally, excellent example of the Kzinti Lesson, which should definitely be kept in mind with these sorts of things.
That said, sounds like awesome fun. Just keep it away from Joe Public (or me if I'm being honest), perhaps one day, with enough AI overrides, not entirely sure which direction of overrides...