US Army’s hoverbike takes flight

What started as crazy DIY project in an Australian backyard six years ago has now blossomed into a cutting-edge aircraft for the US Army. We’ve tracked the various iterations of the Malloy Hoverbike since inventor Chris Malloy first showed off a prototype in 2011, and now after teaming up the US Department of Defense the mechanical engineer has seen a military version of his little baby take flight, with officials hoping to use it for resupply missions to create an “Amazon on the battlefield.”

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Current capacity is 300 lb (136 kg), they hope to increase it to 800 lb (362 kg)

A flying bike makes a huge amount of sense, much more sense than a flying car. A flying car has far too much weight. This thing is light enough for George Jetson to carry.

The four rotor with automatic stabilisation makes it a better transport vehicle than a helicopter.

I also like the way that the rotors overlap. Drones so far have been made with non-overlapping rotors, but the overlap allows the rotors to be larger and therefore more efficient, without greatly compromising power.

Not so good is the rims around the rotors. These add safety without significant performance improvement (you can do the same thing with a winglet. So reduce the size to just the minimum needed for safety -eg. remove it in the blade overlap region.

Even bigger rotors would be better. Take the rotor size up and the angular speed down, keeping the tip speed constant.

Take real care of the noise generation. Take note of the CSIRO + Monash University work on reducing noise generation by rotors. or hire me.

Youtube video: https://youtu.be/NirDyboEZUg

Link to Original image 4984*3331

Would you fly on this? I would.

Looks like they’ve designed it for horizontal speed rather than stability. In the video it wobbles around much worse than a normal drone, and to get stability one of the rotor has to even fly backwards. Could be that it’s more stable if loaded – unlikely. More likely is that the rotor speed controller isn’t up to scratch – too slow to react and speed intervals too big.

In the full scale image you can see what I mean about the weight of the rims around the rotors.