> on long pole masts that placed them some 2.65 m (8.69 ft) forward of the leading edges. At cruise speed, that's enough to give the system a tenth of a second's worth of advance warning before turbulence hits
2.65m */ 0.1 seconds = 60 mph.
Airliners fly about 500 mph, so something about this math is far off...
> The company says it'll have a system commercially available for light aircraft in 2024. It's looking into a version for eVTOL air taxis by 2026, and hoping to have a system relevant to commercial airliners by 2030. Godspeed, team, the world's airline passengers – not to mention cleaning crews – need you to succeed.
They are not targeting airliners for the current generation.
>They are not targeting airliners for the current generation.
Like someone else said in the comments, (if true) this tech seems to have already been used in military bombers for a long time now, so to me it's weird it hasn't made it to civilian aircrafts already from the civilian arms of military contractors, and instead needs to be reinvented by a start-up.
Maybe they meant the cruise speed of the test aircraft. Some quick googling reveals it as a Colomban MC-30 Luciole [1], which according to Wikipedia [2] has a cruise speed of 110 mph and a maximum speed of 120 mph. Mounting the long instrument arm to the tiny aircraft probably doesn't do it any favors (seriously, the aircraft looks tiny next to a Cessna), so cruising at 60mph sounds reasonable.
The pole is on the nose, the time available to react would be before reaching the leading edge of the wing. You'll need to include the length of the front of the plane in question. At least as I understand it.
There are real time industrial sorting systems that use sensors and air puffers to sort items off a conveyor belt 30 ms after they pass by the sensor array.
So the class of technology they need to make this works already exists in production. So the real problems will be how they’re sensing, and can they make them survive hundreds of thousands of air miles.
I’ve seen videos of those. It’s honestly mind bending.
A shower of something like nuts or cherries halls a few feed past a bright area and the bad ones just magically sort themselves out into a different stream away from the main flow.
The last one I saw was using X-rays to sort aluminum. Apparently there’s a lead alloy out there. You don’t want to make window frames out of those. But making more of that alloy is fine.
I would guess that it gives them enough advance notice to predict turbulence, based on the delta between forces on the plane and forces on the poles. If there's a sharp gradient in forces, that gradient seems likely to increase, in a partially predictable direction.
Yeah I'm guessing these poles just get out in front of the wing aerodynamics enough that they can sense whats going on with the air so that air pockets/turbulence can be predicted. Either that or we are missing a decimal place, maybe they mean 10 milliseconds?
One test aircraft used 2.65m poles extending off the front of the wing. One test aircraft used a boom extending off the nose. The model airplane used a big rig sticking out front and teeing off to the sides.
2.65m */ 0.1 seconds = 60 mph.
Airliners fly about 500 mph, so something about this math is far off...