I’ve been reading a book called Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. Beyond its amusing title, it’s but an extended essay on the notion that the U.S. is the ideal place to breed and encourage cranks because the entire country was founded on imaginative ideas that challenged the old European wisdom. That means the U.S. is also fertile ground for conspiracy theories that prove absolutely impervious to reason or fact of any kind and that require not just casual suspension of disbelief, but active conviction that the laws of physics, chemistry and gravity don’t exist. In other words, lunacy.
This makes Las Vegas and the CES—Consumer Electronics Show—a marriage made in heaven and the ideal petri dish to introduce something like the Ehang 184, an eight-rotor, manned drone capable of carrying a single person and envisioned as part of a transportation network of such aircraft. The Ehang got a lot of attention, some of which labeled it among the top five craziest things to appear at CES.
But is it really so crazy? Yes, it really is, but not for the reasons so many reporters stated. Or at least none of the reports I saw bored into the real problem with the Ehang concept: economics. As you probably read,the Ehang 184 is envisioned to be a single-person dual-quad copter that’s entirely autonomous. You hop inside, punch up an app on an iPad and off you go, entirely autonomously, for up to 10 miles in a claimed endurance of 23 minutes. First of all, I doubt that endurance claim; I’d accept that it’s aspirational. It’s not technically insurmountable to get there, but I’m skeptical that Ehang has.
The autonomous flight part is also not a deal breaker. It’s being done routinely with unmanned drones and it’s technically feasible to apply it to larger vehicles. But the Ehang has no manual reversion—there are no controls for the occupant at all—the theory being that backup will be managed by an oversight network similar to that in place for automated mass transit all over the globe. That’s doable too, probably, but this is where I think the Ehang concept runs off the rails, to sneak in a mass transit metaphor.
If this is envisioned as a public transit device—and it seems to be—such a network would be vastly expensive to design, maintain and, above all, certify to aviation public transport standards. Economy of scale works for subway systems with 75 trains carrying 1000 people each, but I think it crumbles for vehicles carrying a single person, even if there are thousands of them, which is a delusional leap at a unit cost of $200,000 or more. In a public system, what kind of fare would that require? A lot, I’d think. Don’t forget, even at doubled or tripled endurance, you’ll need a lot of labor to handle and charge batteries. High unit cost and low volume are proven constants in aviation and quad-rotors and lithium-ion aren’t likely to change that for the foreseeable future. They might eventually.
I think the Ehang would be less crazy if it included controls for the occupant and if it were pitched not as a transportation system, but as a personal transportation device with a sport flying tilt. That would diminish the certification cost load, which will still be considerable for any electric vehicle, especially in the U.S. where certification of electric aircraft doesn’t even exist yet. And yes, that also suggests pilot training of some kind, which we all seem to think substantially reduces market potential. So pick your poison. Plot a path to bankruptcy through a vast investment in developing and certifying public transit, or a slower path by taking a smaller bite on a personally flown machine with at least a slim chance at profitable success. Still, the Ehang may be less dingbat than the Terrafugia TF-X, which has to both fly and be drivable on public roads. In a way, the Ehang reminds me of the original Eclipse jet concept that embodied great technological thinking but proved to be an economic bridge too far. The problem here is not the technology, but the underlying business plan that will allow the company to stay in business long enough to develop sustainable market penetration and actual profits. Eyes bigger than stomach is a common affliction in aviation startups, as it definitely was for Eclipse. It might even be a project requirement to embark upon such moonshots.
For an example of the less crazy, I’d point to the E-Volo VC200, which is conceived as a personal flying device, although with a 20-minute endurance and a similar $200,000-plus price tag, it’s none too practical, either. But it gets more practical and more realistic when you envision it with a hybrid generation system, which company principal Stephan Wolf told me last week that the company is considering. More important, the regulatory approvals are in place in Europe to do this, even as the U.S. lags. (What else is new?) I’ll have more on that later.
Worth noting is that an industrial giant no less than Intel has bought E-Volo’s principle partner, Ascending Technologies. It appears that Intel is more interested in making chips for unmanned systems than it is manned multi-rotor flight, but it clearly sees a market. E-Volo, however, will push the manned side and I can see a niche market for such a thing, especially if the endurance bumps up to an hour or the hybrid concept materializes. Wisely, unlike Ehang, E-Volo isn’t mapping a business plan to commercial transport certification and thus avoids the crushing costs of entering that market.
Drone Registration Challenge
Also at CES, the FAA announced that as of last week, 181,061 drones—people, really—had been registered and the agency was thus far pleased with the results. This is despite the fact that this number represents only a small fraction of the total drones believed to be in the wild, which some estimate as many as 1 million. But it’s still progress.
But progress not without resistance from the regulated. John Taylor, a Silver Spring, Maryland, attorney and multi-rotor builder, has filed a suit in the D.C. Court of Appeals challenging the FAA’s authority to require registration. The basis in law, argues Taylor, is that Section 336 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 specifically prohibits the FAA from promulgating new rules regulating model aircraft if they’re flown for hobby purposes. The FAA may argue that required registration isn’t regulation, but we’ll see what the court says.
Despite opposing registration, the Academy of Model Aeronautics has not pursued its own suit, at least not yet. AMA had fought to have its members use their membership numbers in lieu of registration but the FAA demurred on that idea, missing an opportunity to build a sound relationship with modelers in exchange for antagonizing them in the name of one-size-fits-all regulation. To pour salt into that wound, some 30 RC clubs around the capitol area have been shut down from flying while the FAA figures out a special exemption. You can well understand why the modeling community is pissed; I sure do. They’re being asked to shoulder the burden of regulation that won’t solve problems they didn’t create, if even there are real problems with this technology.
