Quote Originally Posted by skyfixer8 View Post
In reading all in this discussion, and watching a few videos with music to sleep by while a manned drone flies off with a beautiful model apparently at the controls, I have to ask a question. While building these toys, if certification happens, will the FAA look at engine out performance, glide ratio ( haven t seen one yet with anything to glide on), how about stall spin characteristics ? Is it gonna have a Cirrus type recovery chute ? Yes, new designs will come out, but when you are "killing clouds" and something goes wrong, what will happen ? Sorry, but as a pilot with experiences in the above, gotta ask the question.
*If* one of these doo-hickeys is ever certified, you can bet the FAA will require some sort of fallback to keep single-string powerplant failures from causing major injuries. If you've got a man-carrying quad-copter, and failure of one motor or rotor puts the thing into an uncontrollable tumble, the FAA isn't going to buy off on it.

It may be an auto-deployed ballistic chute, or it may be (as others have suggested) a degraded-operations mode that allows a safe landing. The latter, for instance, might cut the other side's motor in the case of a motor/rotor failure on a quad-copter, and an overspeed mode on the remaining two that deposits the vehicle on the ground at a reasonable descent rate.

If helicopters couldn't autorotate, the FAA never would have allowed their certification. However, pilots must usually keep to a specific profile to enable safe autorotation...

It would be assumed that these new powered-lift devices would hard-code such profiles so that their operators stay within them.

Ron Wanttaja