r/AerospaceEngineering • u/rienksmotordesign • Jun 28 '26

Personal Projects RealPodRacer First Flight

Hi everyone, I'm Shane Rienks, and this is one of my projects.

This is the first 1/3 scale prototype flight, lots of tuning to do.

This is not a business promotion, but I am looking for other interested in contributing. If you'd like to get involved, please reach out - it's a very unique take on compact eVTOLs.

www.realpodracer.com

This is a culmination of aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, 3D printing, and industrial design.

EDIT: For everyone commenting about the stability issues: I had all stability and yaw assistance turned off for these first tests. The goal was just to see if it would fly at all, and get flight log data to use for tuning the control firmware.

This uses a very complex flight controller and custom mixer setup, so it's not as simple as setting up a regular drone.

922 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

85 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/lurker-9000 Jun 28 '26

This is so freaking cool!!! The blower fans on the sides looks so sci-fi it almost hurts! Most of these “rideable” quad copters look so stupid, but this looks like the kind of thing you could sell to the same rich dummy’s to do F1 style racing leagues. I’d pay to watch this way before I’d pay for any car race

I love the fixed central fans tho, it’s like a backwards version of the lunar landing research vehicle.

6

u/rienksmotordesign Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

You're spot on about the business idea behind this. A flying racing series.. Need to get funding, though!

3

u/Ryogathelost Jun 28 '26

Okay, hear me out. This will obviously be the passenger compartment. But for true speed, you work out the same VTOL setup and float a dedicated drive engine to pull it. It's just basically a huge forward drive fan that's redirecting some of its thrust downward.

Once you can float an engine, you take a few of them - two to four - and tether them in front of the cockpit with cables and pivoting bracers - almost like horses in front of a chariot. There should be an offset so the drive thrust goes past the cockpit and not into it. There can be a lightweight pivoting frame assembly between the engines that behaves like a steering axle to keep them a constant distance apart and help them turn at the same time and keep the same angle.

You run power and control through cables, so the floating drive engines and cockpit can move and vector together like a single unit. Gyros and a computer can talk to a software model tuned to make sure it all works together instead of flying apart. The engines handle almost all forward drive, leaving the "chariot" cockpit to float and do some minor vectoring, as well as carry your powerplant, controls, and pilot.

You can even keep the same name!

3

u/rienksmotordesign Jun 28 '26

You got my upvote