Hey everyone. I found a single article that answers almost every question I had - basically outlines the entire journey that one would embark on (as it stands today) to achieve what I originally posted about.
Check this out:
https://www.verticalmag.com/news/evt...t-perspective/
Here is a summary as it relates to the conversation in this thread.
Aircraft points of interest:
- Configuration/type of experimental: A heavily modified Lancair with eVTOL ability. (horizontal flight, not simply a "manned drone")
- Not autonomous (so far wasn't the goal of this particular aircraft) - pilot required
- Not hype. 180+ manned flights, unlike most of the rest of the entire eVTOL industry to date, still doing unmanned testing.
- Unique aircraft design is optional. Lancair is a well-known well-loved kit aircraft for horizontal flight. Engineering efforts then focused around VTOL specifically.
- Redundancy - can have a motor out, or battery outage, and it still flies (still does NOT meet the requirement not to stall when unpowered)
- This was tested while manned! (whoa)
Pilot points of interest:
- Pilot is rotorcraft certified (was a pilot, but then got trained to fly heli)
- FAA granted Powered Lift rating to the pilot! (without military tiltlift training)
^ So far, this seems to be the pilot requirement for anything experimental VTOL that is not autonomous, and is NOT easy to arrange (must convince FAA) ^
Development points of interest:
- X-Plane creator Austin Meyers directly assisted development via add-ons for tests to run in the Simulator before actual flight tests (that's freakin awesome)
- Beta Technologies now has an approved, simulator-based training program that will allow it to sign off additional powered lift test pilots (also super freakin awesome)
That pretty much answers all sorts of curiosities on this topic. Granted, it's not at the level of low-budget home building, but we can see what it would take for any builder/entrepreneur to push the bleeding edge on the eVTOL front. And it doesn't yet answer how the aircraft itself will be classified when done. I'm a little bummed, as I definitely am not interested in heli training, so I guess I'll be waiting for the far distant future when a new pilot cert is perhaps created. In the meantime, that eVTOL X-Plane sim training would be AWESOME if they could make that available to us all.
Coolest quote, regarding the lack of rotor spinning due to the nature of electric instant on/off of the rotors:"...it also caused some confusion for a tower controller who was clearing Clark for a 10-minute hover test. “They kept asking me if I was ready to go because they didn’t see any rotors turning . . . I said, ‘Absolutely, I’m ready to go.’ And they’re like, ‘Advise when you are ready to go.'”"