A single-seat flying machine that takes off straight up, no runway. The trick: instead of pushing a wing
through the air, it holds two wings still and blows air along them to make lift. Electric, solar-skinned, and
quiet enough for a driveway. This was the Bachelor of Engineering thesis: a full concept worked
out on paper, from the airflow to the crash safety. It went on to win the IMechE Best Project
award and the Robert W Flux Award for its technical presentation.
Reverse the wing
A normal wing makes lift by moving through the air. Flip that idea: keep the wing perfectly still and push
the air along it instead. Lift with no forward motion means the craft can rise straight off a small
platform, the way nothing with a fixed wing usually can.
That reversal, moving the air instead of the wing, set the shape of the whole machine: two
stationary wings fed by a stream of fast air from below.
Drag to rotate
The first sketch
Before any CAD, the whole craft lived on lined paper. These are the original 2016 concept drawings, with every
part numbered. They are where the idea first took shape.
Top body Covers and shields the inner components.
Bottom body The base that holds everything together.
Windshield Shields the driver from the wind.
Air ducts Wide channels that feed air to the fans.
Fan blades Counter-rotating, cancel the gyroscopic effects, draw air in at high pressure.
Air nozzles Throw the air along the aerofoils at high speed.
Aerofoils Make the lift.
Air blades Steer the leftover air to manoeuvre.
Follow the air
The whole craft is really one air path, in seven stages:
Inlet. A rain-hooded opening slows the incoming air to kill vortices.
Squeeze. A narrowing duct speeds the air back up.
Compress. Two counter-rotating ducted fans, twenty-two blades each, pack the air tighter.
Straighten. A cone-shaped base and a set of diffusers take the spin out of the flow.
Hold. A constant-width duct keeps the speed up to the wings.
Lift. The air hits the two wings at an eleven-degree angle and makes lift.
Steer. Movable air blades point the exit flow to turn the craft.
A craft for the driveway
The point was clean, short-range personal transport. Zero emissions, electric, with
monocrystalline solar cells skinning the shell. It lifts off vertically from a
five-by-five-metre platform, so no airport and no runway.
And it is quiet. The electric motor sits far below a car or an aircraft on noise, which is what makes it a fit
for residential streets.
An AI-generated image: the craft's own design dropped onto a driveway to picture how it might sit in a real one.
Engineering it light
Every gram fights gravity, so material choice was the whole battle:
Body, ducts, casing: dry carbon fibre, stiff and conductive, so a lightning strike runs around the shell like a Faraday cage, not through the driver.
Fan hubs: titanium Ti-6Al-4V.
Wings: an aluminium-honeycomb-and-carbon-fibre sandwich, stiff for almost no weight.
Windshield: laminated Plexiglas.
The target was to stay under one tonne. The concept came in just over, near 1,003 kg.
Built to survive a bad day
The design starts from what happens when something fails:
Autopilot + GPS. Flies itself on GPS, with a manual override for the driver.
Conductive shell. The carbon shell routes a lightning strike around the cockpit.
Dual parachutes. Two parachutes deploy sideways under pressure, so they cannot tangle.
Crash protection. Formula-1-style crash zones and cockpit airbags.
Domed windshield. A hemispherical windshield spreads impact load across the whole dome.
Self-cooling. The same air that lifts the craft cools the motors and batteries, so no radiator.
Gyro turbines. The counter-rotating turbines double as a gyro-stabiliser.
A fault-tree analysis tied it together: the craft only goes down if the parachute fails and
another system fails at the same moment.
The top-level tree, exploded into its four branches below.
By the numbers
1,003Total vehicle mass, kg
10,145Lift required, N
47.77Lift-off airspeed, m/sover the wings, vs ~73 for aircraft
11°Wing angle of attack
Recognition
2017
IMechE Best Project
Best Project Certificate from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, awarded for this thesis at the University of Exeter.
2017
The Robert W Flux Award
Given to the final-year engineering undergraduate with the highest standard in an oral technical presentation, for this dissertation.
Want the full depth: the airflow math, the material selection, the fault-tree analysis?
