NASA Presents... The Puffin

NASA has come up with bat**** crazy ideas in their time, but their newest product, the Puffin, is certainly rating pretty high on that list. It's simply a rendering at this point, but the very idea of a personal VTOL aircraft for every house pretty much fills me with terror. I don't trust most people to ride a bike correctly (and I'm talking about the manual kind), let alone an aircraft. Hell, if it were up to me about 3/4ths of the car licenses in America would get revoked today.

Let's put that aside for a moment and look at the actual tech, though. NASA is promising a battery driven, propeller operated personal aircraft. The projected aircraft is about 12 feet tall with a 13 foot wingspan, but with a very slender fuselage design. The electric power is important since traditional airplane engines, whether they be jet or propeller, rely on air intake to work properly (the oxygen in the air acts an enriching agent allowing combustion within the engine) and an electric engine does not need that. We don't use batteries to fully power planes, though, because the technology for batteries that can put out the kind of power to keep an airplane in flight just doesn't exist... yet. There are a lot of prototype and proof-of-concept models out there for small, electrical aircraft, but nothing feasible has yet been produced.

The other major advantage to NASA's design is that it is ultra quiet, thanks to the lack of combustion. That combined with its projected 150 mph cruising speed (with a top speed said to be around 300 mph) actually makes this a really nice aircraft for travel. It is hindered by it's mere 50 mile range, but this is supposed to be a commuter aircraft that you would theoretically use to get to work or to run errands.

The viability of this comes down, ultimately, to the threshold of competence required to operate the Puffin. NASA will, of course, want to have a low threshold so it can push more units, but in the interest of public safety I really think it should be set somewhere around the level of sport pilot (the lowest pilot rating you can get, it still takes a good 20-25 hours to earn at the absolute least). But, given that you can fly an Ultra-Lite without any license, even a driver's license, I suspect it'll be on the low end. And that, quite honestly, scares me.

I am, however, amused that they would name it after a bird very closely related to penguins, a bird which cannot fly.