Skip to main content

Flying Motorcycle

Woo Hoo.. Another thing on my that should be on my Wish List



PALV

The first flying motorcycle. Well, not really a motorcycle, it's more like a trike (or the Carver {link}). It's called the PALV, which stands for Personal Air and Land Vehicle.

The "motorcycle" is a slim, aerodynamic, 3 wheel unit, with the agility of a motorcycle. The rotor and propeller are folded away and can be unfolded to fly under 4,000 feet (1,500 meter).

The unit runs on conventional petrol and has the amazing speed of 200 kph, both on land and in the air. It does not take off vertically, since unlike a helicopter, this vehicle is a gyrocopter. This means it can take off and land on very short strips of land.

And if the engine fails, you can still 'glide' it using the auto-gyroscopic effect to safety. The engine itself generates 70 decibels of "noise", which is much more quieter than any other flying vehicle.

The vehicle is still in concept stage, but Spark Design are hopeful.... I for one am very interested in seeing something like this. But is it feasible ?? You will need to have a pilot's license, and those are not as easy to get as a motorcycle license.
[Bikes in the Fast Lane - Motorcycle News]

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Kindle in India

Please note: Amazon has released new versions of the Kindle. For prices and features, please go to Prices in India of New Kindles 3G+WiFi and WiFi editions Original Post: My wife decided that she needed to gift me a Kindle for our anniversary. I asked a colleague, if her husband (who was traveling to the US) could carry back one. He couldn't, because of an erratic travel schedule. So we decided to order one right here directly since Amazon was kind enough to open up direct shipping to India. So we ordered on a Tuesday evening (India Time) and Amazon being Amazon shipped the device straight away on the same day itself. I very eagerly tracked the package using the DHL sites (yes, I used three different DHL sites, US, UK and India. They give different info when the package is in that respective country) and in three days flat it was here across the seven seas at Delhi airport. Only I was in Noida which is an interstate delivery for DHL. Which meant that I had to fill out an ar...

What Did You Build This Week? Rethinking Education for the AI Age

My sixteen-year-old son spent a weekend fine-tuning an mBERT language model with labeled hate speech data, then benchmarked it against MuRIL, a publicly available model for Indian languages. No assignment. No tutorial. Just Google AI Studio, Google Colab, and curiosity. He'd essentially skipped to the end of a university summer school curriculum. Using mBERT and MuRIL is advanced deep learning. Most students start with if/else logic and work their way up to Transformers over years. He started with Transformers. When he got interested in AI/ML summer programs like NUS, we looked at the syllabi. He was already beyond where the program would end. That's when it crystallized for me: we're teaching kids to write code in an era when AI writes code. We're drilling them in syntax when they need judgment. We're preparing them for an education system that's already obsolete. The Assessment Crisis The real issue isn't learning. It's testing. We test memorisation be...

Prices in India of New Kindles 3G+WiFi and WiFi editions

Amazon has release two new Kindles, one with 3G and WiFi (3G is free for use everywhere in the world) for $189 and one model with only WiFi for $139. 3G + WiFi model is available in Graphite and White and the Wifi Model is available only in White Graphite. The landed cost of 3G+Wifi version is ~$284 which is approximately Rs. 13,300 The landed cost of just the Wifi version is ~$216 which is approximately Rs. 10,100 The New Kindle  has better contrast (50% better than the previous models) 21% smaller size (while keeping the same size screen) 15% lighter 20% faster page turns Storage has doubled one MONTH battery life As always the Kindle DX model is available in Graphite for $379, (landed cost $540 which is approximately Rs. 25,200)