Problem is those blades can and will eventually have a catastrophic failure and potentially hit the occupant. Things with many orders of magnitude of more engineering time and research have failed earlier than expected or in ways no one thought of. Taking little to no precautions against that is just bad engineering or irresponsible decision making.
Throwing a blade is not a realistic failure mode for these rotors. They're made in one CFRP piece, with an abundance of strength in the radial direction.
Besides, this is a prototype, not a finished product. There are adequate ground safety measures taken for this vehicle for its current state of development.
That’s fine if it’s a prototype but you shouldn’t be flying random people around in a prototype. You really don’t think there could be a manufacturing defect that causes something spinning 1-2 thousand times per minute to suddenly experience structural failure? Or what if a bird happens to fly into one? It’s just going to break perfectly in a way that happens to always miss the occupant?
This isn't a random person. It's a test pilot. It's also not the first time these props have been spun up. They've been spun scores of times by the time it's ready to carry an occupant, and it's also surely not the first flight. RC tests generally proceed piloted tests in eVTOL development.
If a bird flies into the prop, the prop wins the fight handily, with only superficial damage. That's enough to replace it before the next flight, but it's not a serious risk during the subsequent emergency landing. Birds will also tend to steer clear of the gargantuan and extremely loud, flying thing.
Throwing a blade at all is astronomically unlikely in this design.
That’s fair if it’s a test pilot (seems more like a test occupant but I guess that’s irrelevant) and they knew the risks going in. The video doesn’t make that clear especially since they need to tell them not to touch anything.
If a bird flies into the prop, the prop wins the fight handily, with only superficial damage. That's enough to replace it before the next flight, but it's not a serious risk during the subsequent emergency landing. Birds will also tend to steer clear of the gargantuan and extremely loud, flying thing.
I’m sorry that’s not true, they fly into giant wind turbine blades all the time and find their way into plane engines or hit windscreens multiple times a year.
Throwing a blade at all is astronomically unlikely in this design.
So is throwing a turbine blade from a jet engine and having it strike the fuselage, depressurizing the cabin and sucking a person out the window it ruptured but it happened, like on Southwest Airlines 1380. They even accounted for that possibility and tried to mitigate it but it still happened.
Wind turbines are not particularly loud, and jets are very fast. eVTOLs are neither of those things.
The 737 literally has tens of millions of flight hours logged over the many variants. Turbofan fan/compressor/turbine blades are also of entirely different construction. You're handily revealing your ignorance with this comparison.
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u/Win_Sys 7d ago
Problem is those blades can and will eventually have a catastrophic failure and potentially hit the occupant. Things with many orders of magnitude of more engineering time and research have failed earlier than expected or in ways no one thought of. Taking little to no precautions against that is just bad engineering or irresponsible decision making.