There's a lot to be said for determination. Two years ago, a
contraption that looked a bit like a bouncy ball attached to a clothesline,
took flight in a pioneering experiment in the German countryside.
Regardless, the three German engineers behind the baffling
creation plowed ahead with their dream of making an electric helicopter. Last
week it paid off.
There wasn't a bouncy ball in sight as the slick white
"Volocopter" took to the air for the first time, quietly hovering 20
meters high, while its ecstatic creators cheered below.
Featuring 18 propellers on a lightweight carbon frame, the
futuristic copter -- which has been around €4 million ($5.4 million) in the
making -- could change the way we commute forever.
Read: SkyCall -- The drone that's your personal tour guide
"What we're looking at now, is in the future where
everyone is traveling not by car, but by some kind of aircraft," explained
Stephan Wolf, co-chief executive of e-volo, the company behind the remarkable
flying machine.
"Normal helicopters are very hard to fly. But we
thought 'what if you could have a helicopter that is easy for the pilot to fly,
and cheap compared to other aircraft?'"
Clever copter
Powered by a 100 kilogram battery, the two-passenger
Volocopter can travel at least 70 kilometers per hour, recently making its
first remote-controlled flight in a hanger in Karlsruhe, southwest Germany.
The chopper weighs just 300 kilograms in total. One
limitation is that it currently only has enough power to fly for 20 minutes --
though designers are looking at ways of increasing this, or introducing a
hybrid engine.
Many small rotors -- attached to a 10-meter wide circular
frame -- also help the eco-friendly machine hover more easily than other
helicopters.
"If you let the joystick go, the Volocopter will just
hover in the current position, so there's nothing the pilot has to do,"
said Wolf.
"But if you do that in another helicopter it will crash
immediately."
Read: GimBall -- The flying robot that likes to crash
Reimagining the city
Indeed, the Volocopter's simplicity sets it apart from other
helicopters, and its creators hope in the future commuters will be able to take
their electric aircraft to work, instead of languishing in gridlocked cars
below.
The European Union is already looking at ways personal
aerial vehicles (PAVs) could revolutionize urban spaces. It might sound like a
scene from the Jetsons, but a city where flying machines replace cars isn't as
far off as it seems.
"The most helicopters in the world are in Sao Paulo,
Brazil," explained Wolf. "They have several thousand movements per
day because the streets are congested and everyone who can afford it is taking
the helicopter to go from one building to the next.
"You can imagine this happening in a big city in
Germany. And already we've been approached by several companies who'd like to
do it, maybe with landing pads on buildings."
The team hopes to sell its first Volocopter by 2015, with
each machine setting you back €250,000 ($338,000). They're now on the lookout
for further funding to develop their unique design.
It's a long way from the first awkward-looking Multicopter
test flight in 2011.
Even more impressive, considering Wolf himself was a
computer software engineer for 25 years before turning his attention to
futuristic flying machines -- "I was dreaming of building a helicopter
since I was a child," he said.
Then there's the other e-volo founders -- Thomas Senkal, a
former physicist, and Alexander Zosel, who managed a disco for almost 10 years,
who also got on board the pioneering project.
"I think everyone wants to fly," said Wolf.
"Helicopters are very expensive and people think maybe this is a way to be
a pilot themselves.
"In 20 or 30 years from now there will be even more
cities with millions more people living in them and transportation will be a
big problem. Maybe you need to go up in the air to solve these problems."
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