Australian-Built Hoverbike Prepares For Takeoff 200
Zothecula writes "Adventurous motorcyclists might be familiar with the thrill of getting airborne at the top of a rise, but the Hoverbike is set to take catching some air to a whole new level. With a 1170 cc 4-stroke engine delivering 80 kW driving two ducted propellers, the inventor of the Hoverbike, Chris Malloy, says with its high thrust to weight ratio, the Hoverbike should be able to reach an estimated height of more than 10,000 feet and reach an indicated airspeed of 150 knots (278 km/h or 173 mph). At the moment these are only theoretical figures as the Hoverbike hasn't been put through its paces yet, but Malloy has constructed a prototype Hoverbike and plans to conduct real world flight tests in a couple of months."
Re:to clarify (Score:2, Informative)
Meta rate garbage stories down next time. You're part of the community too ya know.
Re:PLEASE KEEP ME STABLE AND HORIZONTAL! (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation_(helicopter) [wikipedia.org]
"Cannot autorotate" is a polite way of saying this thing falls like a rock.
*yawn* (Score:4, Informative)
Re:to clarify (Score:5, Informative)
anyone with even the most remote fucking grasp of physics and flight should be comfortable debunking his claims as a complete lie.
From your comments below, I take it you aren't one of those people. Here goes:
most commercial helicopters stall out at anything greater than 8000ft; most of the ones flying around my city stick to around 600-800 ft ceilings..
Those two statements have little, if anything, to do with each other. Helicopters generally stick to low (sub 1,000 ft) altitudes for a couple of reasons -- namely, there's usually little reason to fly higher since it takes more fuel to climb and the jobs for which they are often used tend to require low altitude flight -- not because they are incapable of flying higher. Also, the ceiling for a helicopter is dependent upon its forward velocity through the air. The faster the helicopter flies -- to a point -- the more lift the rotor blades create, and therefore, the higher it can fly, so be careful not to confuse the hovering ceiling with the service ceiling in cruise flight. They are not the same thing.
The CH-47 Chinook twin rotor helicopter is used by the USAF to rescue climbers on Mount Denali (McKinley) in AK.
Uhhh...no, it's not. The Air National Guard based at Kulis in Anchorage flies Sikorsky Pavehawks (militarized S-70s) and the Army at Ft. Rich flies the Blackhawk -- basically the same airframe as the Pavehawk, but outfitted differently. In Talkeetna, AK (where most climbers fly out of to reach Denali), there is a highly modified helicopter nicknamed the "Denali Lama". IIRC, it's an Aerospatiale -- but it's definitely NOT a CH-47. In fact, I'm not aware of anyone regularly flying a CH-47 in Alaska; at least I don't see them in Anchorage very often.
the highest altitude helicopter currently in existence is the AS350. A pilot named Didier Delsalle of France landed it on the summit of Mount Everest (8,850 meters) in 2005...and the record is entirely speculative/disputed.
...which is 29,035 feet [google.com] -- three times the altitude this guy claims for his hover bike. While it may be a disputed record, there are plenty of verified accounts of helicopters landing and taking off well above 10,000 feet in mountain rescues (including Air Force Rescue 470, in which my brother-in-law was the PIC and for which, he won the MacKay Trophy [gpo.gov]).
finally, A blackhawk military helicopter with a 1700 horsepower engine still only goes ~190 kias.
And your point is? A Cessna 206 does 140 knots [cbp.gov] (the article doesn't say on what engine, but 206s typically have either a Continental O-470 at ~235 h.p. or a Lycoming O-520 at ~300 h.p.), but the amateur-built AR-5 will do [ar-5.com] 180 kts [google.com] on 65 h.p. Let's see...the AR-5 has 1/5 the power and roughly 1.5 times the speed. Clearly you can't correlate h.p. to max speed on different airframes. In fact, there's a lot that determines how fast a given amount of power will propel an aircraft, for example, the drag from the rotor disk and how much of that engine power goes into lifting the aircraft. Your 1700 h.p. Blackhawk has a max take-off weight of 23,500 pounds [wikipedia.org], giving a power to weight ratio of 0.07 hp/pound. Since the designer of the hover bike is shooting to classify this aircraft as an ultralight in the U.S., that means he's limited to an empty weight of 254 pounds. [usua.org]