Electrifying
Helicopters are highly versatile machines able to take off and land in tiny areas. They’re perfect for landing on buildings in dense urban areas. But since they beat the air to death with thunderous rotors turned by noisy jet fuel turboshaft engines, they’ve been banned from many a city. What to do?
Let’s go electric.
Nine years since the first manned all-electric helicopter flew, https://lnkd.in/eXi3bV8, there’s a race to build versions that can take passengers. With battery energy densities tripling since 2010 and prices falling simultaneously, there’s a vast potential market. Several firms are in it.
Perhaps the one closest to putting an electric rotorcraft up for sale is newcomer Volocopter, with its 2X (in A). It uses 16 motors, one to a rotor, and carries a pilot and one passenger.
Longtime manufacturer Bell offers its Nexus 4EX (B). More capable, it transports four passengers and a pilot. An entirely different configuration, it has four ducted, rotating propellers mounted atop wings.
If flights in these new machines are substitutes for cab rides, given Yellow Cab data for NYC in January 2017 (C & D), which part of the market would you address first?
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