The Hummingman Project

Mankind in its boldest dreams always had the wish to fly, like a bird. Icarus did not succeed with the technology of those days. It is the extreme sensation to move in 3 dimensions and hang in the air, that hangliders/parapenters, glider, autogiyo and chopper pilots make so excited about. Of course there have been many intents to create vertical lift and landing man crafts, and many are still being worked on, often  based in earlier times and therefore on older technologies like internal combustion technology.

This concept is a multicopter arrangement with a pilot in horizontal position with his back at the top, so that the feeling of a bird is maximized. The chopper is not arranged as a typical lifting platform with a central pay load but as a carpet. It is quite compact with a length and width of 3 by 2.4 meters.  The pilot rests on a bed like arrangement and in from of him he has a kind of canopy to reduce airflow. So we now have a craft that can lift a person of ca 80 kg! Alternative seating arrangements are possible like seating in a glider.

Next, we can imagine that same craft could lift cargo or packages and we would in fact have a service package drone.

The craft development is for us best an open sourcedevelopment, where one or more groups start to work on the idea simultaneously so that there is exchange in the teams on all the development issues. Important is that such groups can share their information, and try out different options and configurations. Eg on the motor propeller combinations, on some component tests, etc.. It would also be relevant to have tech specialists look into safety  solutions and flight duration. A group of experts could look into a smart safety system (eg. Airbag, Parachute, other) for such craft and work out the options, make and test some of these. Another team should look into battery issues, so to understand advances in eg nano technology (Steven Chu pointed recently on this potential, Tesla motors and BYD could be interesting parties). Non-tech specialists could also form groups with tech groups to discuss legal aspects like flight path (corridors) management, etc..

A lot of IT is needed with Intelligent software, and in this Google would be a natural partner. So let’s go for it! We plan that the team will put all the material on this site to start with, so that all have access at the same time.

http://www.thehummingmanproject.com/