Still Waiting for your Flying Car? Just build your own.
Its not as hard as you’d think…
You don’t need hundreds of thousands (or Billions, see: Zee.aero) of dollars, and/or a huge team of engineers. You don’t need 10+ years to develop the technology. You don’t need market validation, or investor interest.
With only off the shelf components and online resources, anyone can build a drone capable of carrying a human.
Granted the pioneers, like AmazingDIYprojects (shown in the video above), come from a place of expertise and probably had greater access to capital than the average person, but at their core, these things are just scaled-up hobbist level, recreational drones, and I don’t mean that in a bad way.
Can you think of another technology that started out with engineers using off the shelf components to build things in their garages for fun?
You probably can because now, just a few decades later, the work of those engineers has had such a massive impact that there are few places on earth where they aren’t known. However, when Woz was tinkering around with the Apple 1, few people, if anyone realized the potential of the personal computer.
At most they were seen as cool toys. Things you messed around with on the weekends, and if you were really into them you might even start your own company to supply some random part to your fellow hobbists. The same thing happened with racing and PoV drones, which has grown in to a pretty significant market and sprouted companies like eHang and DJI that sell drones, based on the same basic platforms, to consumers.
We have been able to build PAVs since the 1950’s, but until recently you needed a lot of money and engineering talent to do so. Thanks to the drone craze, you no longer have to custom fabricate the essential parts, nor do you have to start from scratch on the system design. Now, its possible for university teams, hobby clubs, and curious tinkerers all over the world to rapidly and cheaply build their own version of a PAV, to increment on or revolutionize its design until someone figures out a design that is fit for market.
I think this is where PAVs really get kicked into high gear. By grassroots, DIY, scrappy groups who are on the edge, outside the purview of billionaires and aerospace giants, doing it for their own reasons — people like AmazingDIYProjects, building stuff in their backyard.
Disclosure: My statements and opinions are my own, and do not represent those of any organization with which I am associated. Don’t sue me if you hurt yourself trying to fly around on a drone you made.
