Viceroy Seaglider - The "largest-ever electric flying machine" - video Dailymotion

The Scotsman

Viceroy Seaglider  The "largest-ever electric flying machine" can carry 12 passengers and travel at up to 180mph

Transcript

00:00I just want to get the audio of this.

00:12This is a pretty key step in our test campaign.

00:15Moving from the hull to the foil.

00:18Sea gliders float, foil, and fly.

00:21This hydrofoiling mode is the key differentiation

00:24between a sea glider and everything that's taken off

00:27from the water in the past.

00:30As we come up to speed here,

00:33you're going to see it coming out of the water

00:35on those hydrofoils.

00:36They're automatically controlled,

00:38monitoring the water and making minute adjustments

00:41to stay perfectly locked and stable

00:43as we're five feet in the air.

00:49Watching the sea glider foil,

00:51you get this amazing visceral sense

00:53of exactly how efficient it is.

00:55You can't really tell because we're on a boat now

00:58and our engine's pretty loud.

01:00But with the sea glider, you cannot hear it at all.

01:03We have these extremely efficient electric motors.

01:06You can also look at the sea glider and see behind it

01:08from those foils, there is no wake.

01:11The big challenge with sea planes or flying boats

01:18or even winging ground craft in the past

01:20is that they use normal hulls.

01:22See how hard our test boats are working.

01:25This is how conventional hulls work.

01:27They're pushing water out of the way,

01:29skipping over the surface.

01:30All of that means inefficiency.

01:32A sea glider is different.

01:35A sea glider uses its hydrofoils to get up to speed.

01:38So it's using this very efficient state

01:40to get that speed required for takeoff.

01:42And so a sea glider is really the definition

01:45of how to be an incredibly efficient vehicle.

01:48That means speed.

01:49That means range.

01:50That means payload.

01:52And very importantly,

01:53that means efficiency enough to use our battery systems.

01:57Safety is the name of the game in our test campaign,

02:04and we have to make sure each step moving up to flight

02:07is incredibly safe and well tested.

02:10So what we're doing right now in the hydrofoil campaign,

02:12we're starting off at these relatively slow speeds,

02:1520 miles an hour or so,

02:17and then we're building our way up to closer to 50 miles an hour

02:21when we'll take off later this summer.

02:27Watch as it comes down into the water exactly how smooth that is.

02:31You can see the waves coming up on the bow

02:33and being shed as it enters the water.

02:36That's how a sea glider will work as we're landing.

02:39That hull comes down, cuts through those waves,

02:42sheds that wave energy,

02:43and so on board it's extremely comfortable.

Viceroy Seaglider - The "largest-ever electric flying machine"

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended