I Fly/Drive PAL-V - The World’s First Certified Production Flying Car ! | 4K

all right 100 already airspeed [Music] wow that's awesome that is just awesome it takes off so quickly hey guys um welcome to petrol pets I'm currently flying a gyrocopter because I'm here in the Netherlands the fly Drive the world's first flying car the power V but now though I'm going to concentrate on not killing a Spoke [Music] so welcome to the Netherlands and the headquarters of pal V in this video we're going to explore something that I still find completely Bonkers a flying car and the story of pal V starts way back in 2008 when two crazy Dutch guys decided that they were going to design a flying car and this is their first attempt their proof of concept vehicle based on something called a Carver you may well remember a few years ago on Top Gear Richard Hammond drove one of these it's a three-wheeled vehicle that tilts as it goes around corners they use that as the basis and then as a flying car they've used the concept of an auto gyro we'll talk much more about that as we get into the video so this vehicle was finished in 2011 took its first flight in 2012 but here we are 11 years later and we're just getting to the exciting point of a car that's very nearly ready for full production and customer delivery and this this is what the power V looks like today but in those 11 years it's not quite as easy as you would think making a flying car I mean how difficult can that be so how hard can it be to make a flying car well I guess there's the first thing there's the engineering of actually designing a car that can drive along the road and fly and there are lots of flying vehicles out there that do both of those things and I'm sure you'll have seen pictures on Instagram of things that look like gigantic drones with big rotors at either Corner the Big Challenge you've got though is in terms of practicality you know what's your drivetrain going to be what's your redundancy going to be how safe is it so I want to talk through a few of the challenges here if you were just going to design a new road car to get that through all of the very various sort of safety and Regulatory things is a real challenge so you design the road car and you make it compliant for the road the problem then when you want to make it Fly it's then got to be certified as an aircraft so in Europe there's the uh they're called ayasa the European aircraft safety Association they're the guys that are going to basically sign this off as a an air worthy vehicle and that that's when it starts to get really challenging let me give you an example so let's start with the windscreen so when the guys were designing the car they came up with this fantastic shape this isn't something you can go and buy from a a normal uh glass manufacturer they came up with this beautiful shape and they designed it from polycarbonate because that's as lightweight as they could be and that's fine for an aircraft as soon as they took it to be certified for the road if you go back in time to regulations written decades ago there's a regulation that says the front windscreen of a vehicle on the road has to be made of glass so the polycarbonate screen had to be scrapped and they had to replace it with a glass windscreen and the challenge with that is weight that glass windscreen weighs something like seven kilos more than the polycarbonate one another example now you need to put fuel in one of these and it goes in just here it's actually got a really big fuel tank 100 liters or 25 gallons now we'll get on to the Flying stats and the driving stats a bit later but that's good enough for 600 miles of driving and about three hours of flight time but you think a fuel tank how hard can that be well the only regulation for a fuel tank in a road car is inside the fuel tank there are baffles that stop the fuel sloshing around as you go around corners the problem is you design a fuel tank with baffles in it for the road car then you take it to the aircraft standards guys and say there's my fuel tank and they say ah yes but a fuel tank for an aircraft has to withstand a 30 meter drop test you've got to take that fuel tank and drop it 30 meters and it not fracture so that meant that they had to completely rethink how they were going to design the fuel tank so you've got effectively a fuel bag with a supporting framework around it but you've still got to drop that 30 meters and it survived before it can be certified and that's just the fuel tank so the fuel tank is providing fuel for the engine so what engine are we going to put in it so what about engine Choice then well remember the car aircraft thing so you could choose a car engine and that would be fine while this is being a car the problem is then you then put it into the aircraft world and you then have to certify that engine for being a flight engine and you could be looking at a process that might take a large number of years we're talking maybe as many as 10 years to get that engine certified to be in an aircraft so what the guys at pal V decided to do was to take an already certified well-known aircraft engine a 1.6 liter four-cylinder boxer engine a rotax engine that's been used in many different types of aircraft and used that for the power V but they didn't just use one there's actually two of those stacked just slightly one above the other when this is a car it's just using one of those it's about a hundred horsepower driving the rear wheels and then when you put it into flight mode there's then two of those providing about 200 horsepower and they power this large fan at the back that's basically going to push the car along now we'll talk more about how Auto Gyros work later on in the film when we get to actually fly one the problem is if I am going to use an aero engine for a road car then I need to certify it to be a road engine as well how do they do that so I've driven here today in my Porsche Boxster now in the back of this is a four-cylinder boxer engine two and a half liter but as we were saying inside if you're gonna use an aero engine in a road car it needs to be certified for Road use so the only way to do that is to put it into a road car so this is the test mule this is the world's only four-cylinder boxer Porsche 924 in the front of this is the rotax engine or one of them anyway that we're using in the pal V and this car's been used to do road miles it's done over 200 000 kilometers of testing to work out things like emissions and fuel economy and reliability but I just think that's cool complete accident I rock up in a four-cylinder box of Porsche and they've got a four-cylinder box of Porsche as a test mule now very briefly before we go back inside not only has this car got the rotax Aero engine in the front but it's also got all of the engine controls inside when was the last time you saw a Porsche 924 with a set of switch gear like that and you've even got the engine control unit just here I think that is very very cool Ultimate Upgrade for your Porsche so let's talk a little bit about the design because that I mean there's so much I could talk about this vehicle first up let's cover the fact it's only got three wheels for a road car I guess that's not ideal the challenge with having four wheels is for an aircraft a four-wheel undercarriage is a really big challenge especially when you're Landing because normally you would land the two rear wheels and then just drop the nose wheel on and if you've got two front wheels they can dig in and cause problems and instability on Landing so that's why it's got just three wheels next thing all of the rotors and you can see the rotors expanded on the development vehicle over there these ones will look a little bit different when they are open but they're all folded back in Road car configuration you can see on the rotors there's a lot of carbon fiber the mind-blowing number for me is this vehicle weighs just 670 kilos that's kind of less than a Formula One car it's less than even lightweight road cars like an Alpine A110 is way more than that it's catering weight and it's an aircraft it's got two engines in the back it's got massive big rotor blades I just find that fantastic now when it transitions into being an aircraft um there's there's a few things happen so first up you need to unpack all of these um the the top rotors the tail there's a big mass that goes up now that isn't just done at the touch of a button it's a more manual process because if you're flying an aircraft and you'll have seen this on a commercial airliner when you're flying on holidays or you know if you if you watch um Pilots at a local airfield like I do at Goodwood is it's up to the pilot to do checks on everything before they actually take off so you'd do that as a manual process but the Mast comes up the rotor blades um extend and then the whole body lifts up and the wheels drop down to provide a more kind of like a tricycle undercarriage but I just think it's really cool so the next thing we're going to do is jump inside and talk about inside the cockpit the flight controls and then we'll talk about driving and flying no I've sat in some pretty special cars in my time instantly this makes me think of a McLaren Center because you've got these glass um sections at the bottom of the door so a couple of things sadly I'm not going to be able to drive this car this is uh fully certified to drive on the road in fact it was not that long ago that this car was driving around London causing a stir but it's still in a final testing phase so technically to drive it on the road at the moment you have to be a test pilot and sadly I'm not one of those but let me talk you around the cockpit because it's really cool first off in car mode you've got a steering wheel you've got little flappy paddles behind for the gearbox and you've got traditional three pedal setup down there that you would find in any road car when it though transitions to being an aircraft the two outside pedals become your Rudder and then in between my legs here is a joystick and to control for flight controls you've got all of your flight controls on the dash and then the coolest thing I'm used to having my sport Chrono on my Porsche but right at the front of the dash there is an aviation um compass with a little outline of an aircraft I think that's absolutely Wicked and then you've got lots and lots of visibility glass roof here so you can see above you so you can see the rotors rotating you've got Wing mirrors so you can see behind you lots of carbon fiber it's just absolutely cool in here so next thing we're going to head over to Powell these Flight Drive Academy where I'm going to be able to fly and drive one of these in a simulator and then then we're going fly so it's now the next day I want you to imagine that I've driven the power V here now we don't have a driving simulator and as I've already mentioned in the video we're not allowed to drive the car on the road because it's still in that testing phase and sadly I'm not a test pilot just briefly talking about what the cars like to drive it's got a six-speed sequential gearbox it'll do 100 miles an hour it does not to 60 in under 10 seconds and it's got a range of around about 600 miles so I can't wait to actually get to be able to drive it one day but when you get to your Airfield you then transition it into an aircraft a couple of really cool things I mentioned about the body lifting up and then you unwrap or unfold the um the blades at the top but the really cool thing is as the body lifts up the two drive shafts that go from that rotax engine into the gearbox decouple from the drive driven wheels and then you bring in line the other rotax engine and the gearbox then transitions into the rear propeller that pushes the vehicle forward so that gearbox it's a single gearbox that has one speed when it's an aircraft driving the rear propeller and a six-speed sequential gearbox when you're driving along as a car and I just think that's absolutely amazing so I'm now sat in a flight simulator it's the same cockpit the difference now you can see the joystick in between my legs the challenge is I haven't got a clue what I'm doing so I'm here at the fly drive academy so if you were to purchase a power V or they do experiences as well you can come here and you can go through flight school now in order to be able to fly one of these you need your private pilot's license and then do a conversion onto a gyro plane so we're here today to get a sample of that and I've got a professional pilot to help me understand how to fly one of these and then we can't actually fly a pal V because it's a bit like the driving thing we're not allowed to fly because it's still in the test phase but what we can do is go up in a gyro plane but before we can do that I need to learn how to fly one now as I have no idea what I'm doing I'm sat in the passenger seat and I have my instructor Robert who's going to teach me how to fly this autojaro autocopter gyro plane any of those will do should we agree on driver plane yeah but it's a it's a simulation of the battlefield of course yeah yeah of course yeah yeah right so I think what we're going to do is he's going to take off show me the basics and then we might cut to me having to go a bit later right yeah good okay are you ready for the right turn yeah okay left is clear ahead and right is clear turn right I landed it I didn't kill us went a bit wrong once we got on the ground because I wasn't sure about the brakes on the rudder but just light all seems so immersive and you kind of really get a feel for it and I've only done a little bit of flying in the past and that was a long time ago so it was really really good is it time to go up in here properly now yeah definitely let's do that because it's a beautiful sunny day but that was really good fun we're at the airside at an active Airfield that little Robinson's just landed for this this is a magni M25 it's the Gyra plane that we're going to be flying in but I wanted to just talk a little bit about why pal Vito's a Gyra plane as opposed to a helicopter or you may well have seen some um flying cars that look like big drones with four or more fans on them the challenge with those some of those are electric flight time is a big challenge for those maybe as little as 20 or 30 minutes the other thing is if one of the fans fails although you can have redundancy your emergency landing procedure is probably a parachute next thing you could have is a plane we've got some planes over there the big challenge with the planes is you've got big wings so for a car one you've got to fold the wings out but then you've got to fold them back in again when you're driving as a car that's quite challenging and also you need quite a big runway for takeoff and Landing next option is you could go like a full-blown helicopter and you look at this and go well surely this looks like a helicopter it's got rotors on the top but the big difference between this and that helicopter over there is these rotors aren't powered I'm going to do a very simple explanation of how you fly a helicopter by the way so the controls of a helicopter you've got two hook controls in your hand you've got What's called the collective in your hand which looks like a car handbrake with a Twist throttle on it you twist the throttle to make the rotor blades go faster and you pull it up to change the pitch or the angle of attack on the rotor blades and that gives you lift so in one hand you're doing the rotor blades you then can control the the disc at the top by basically using the joystick and then the final thing is is you increase power on a helicopter you'll see that there's a tail rotor at the back of that helicopter and what that's doing is you increase the power the torque or the twisting force in the helicopter makes it want to move so you use Rudders to use that back um back propeller to basically counteract the torque so when you're flying a helicopter we've just seen this guy land his arms and Collective were all over the place it's a very very complicated thing to do you know you do your PPL on a fixed-wing aircraft and then to transition to Rotary is another thing altogether so what's a a gyro plane well this is a far far simpler thing firstly that isn't powered at all the only time that's powered as we've mentioned already is it just starts at the very beginning you just get the thing rotating by connecting it to the engine and then it doesn't get power while you're flying but the whole vehicle's pushed Along by this propeller at the back and it's a really simple thing to fly I've been flying it in the simulator and basically it's like a big Frisbee the the joystick controls that you have in your hand just change the the way if you want to go forwards you pitch the joystick forward you want to go right you pitch it right or left it's a really straightforward thing to learn to fly you've got throttle controls for the engine and you do have a Rudder which controls this at the back here you've got a a traditional kind of Rudder and they're your basic control so converting to a gyroplane is far far simpler and then the beauty of it in pal V is you take that big Rotor at the top and it folds down and packs away on top of the vehicle really really quickly and then you can get going and drive it on the road so that's why they've gone for a gyro plane and then the final thing is these things take off in a really really short space of of Runway you don't need a big long Runway like we've got today you could take off in a field but if you do have an engine failure and I don't forget pal V has two engines so you'd have to have a double failure the really cool thing about these and actually helicopter does do it to some extent as well is they can do what's called auto rotation so you can actually switch the engine off completely and then they come back down to ground a bit like a sycamore seed falling from a tree but you have full control of the aircraft and we've just done an auto rotation um or if you like no engine flying at all and it's really easy to control so you can come in if you do have an engine failure you've got plenty of time to look for a safe landing spot a field somewhere where there's no obstacles and you can bring the plane down safely without having a massive panic and that that's why pal V went for a gyro plane now we're going to get in this little thing this this by the way it weighs well it's ridiculous like 350 kilos even with us and it's under 500 kilos it's tiny so uh yeah let's go and do some flying beautiful day for it though [Music] okay nose Wheels lined up and power is set I would need your stick yep engaging the pre-rotator now I've got the rotors going around quicker and quicker one two zero yes and then stickers Center and fully offs [Music] okay go to 200 are you okay yeah I'm good I'm okay aircraft is okay better and with their perfect width from a heads and roma is clear flight path is almost clear and with plenty space so we're gonna go One release free rotator two stick fully back three release the brake and fourth power the 30. steering with the battles RPM is increasing no power and um how quickly does that get in there that's unreal 100 already wow [Music] that's awesome that is just awesome it takes off so quickly all thanks to the wind also oh man that's unreal okay we passed 300 feet are you okay I'm good I'm good absolutely amazing what a view from up here wow yeah that's quite something okay do you have control of the stick and then you can mention I have control of the stick I have control it's it's so sensitive but the difference between this and the simulator you can feel the aircraft moving underneath you as well as your visual reference yes makes it much much easier done much much easier feel the wind as well which we didn't have in the SIM okay you've control yeah I have control you could have the throttle as well for a bit just look ahead yeah a bit of left pedal yeah and right pedal oh wow they're super sensitive aren't they yeah but don't worry you could just yeah okay left okay right backing right yeah you can make it sharp now I'm here all the way to the rummy straight away yeah coming up to a thousand feet there so actually we need to do the parachute mode yet so we'll do it now okay yeah so uh yeah you can continue the steering I'll be here we're just gonna position ourselves uh close to the runway and then we'll then bye Jericho it's a position to hide finals or six for the simulates First Landing uh with the foosball okay it looks so quiet this is like the same as you would quit the engine that we've got no prop at the back we're just Auto rotating yeah probably just turning uh stationery and a bit like in the Sim because we're into wind not really falling that quickly Alice so I will point the nose down uh when we're at 300 yeah and then we'll just make a short dive and then out of that it's so and we're done oh wow [Music] okay we look left no traffic and right pull all finals clear we'll do a uh the flyby which we call a low pass yep turn right okay let me see we're now good but we need maybe a little bit more power yeah and soon we're gonna reduce the power again position yourself on the extended Center Line so a bit more to the right it's a dash line in the middle of the runway that we want to aim for and our aiming point would be the beginning of the of the tarmac yeah okay slightly reduce the throttle a little bit okay stand bye Jackal purposes final their six for level s okay I'll be taking over I have control you have control wow oh wow the speed is now one through zero I'll keep on the speeds because we have a strong headwind okay are you ready yeah here we go [Music] full power wow [Music] oh I am kind of disappointed you didn't request the towel for a flyby I did mention him wow well guys I'm gonna finish the video here because that's just an unbelievable experience I'm hoping to do a few more things with pal B going forward but massive thank you to all the team here in the Netherlands for making me feel so welcome massive thank you to my mate Eric who's helped me with filming we met a Wim Hof last year and he saw a Instagram story yesterday and he lives only half an hour away and offered to come and help me film and honestly I couldn't have made this film without him he's been amazing so thank you thank you thank you so much today for teaching me out the professor wow but I'm gonna carry on and enjoy the rest of this flight if you enjoyed that give me a thumbs up comments below are always welcome if you haven't done so already please subscribe to Petra pet for plenty more content to come up all of the details of Palvin in the description below check out their website and keep an eye on things coming forward because it's not that long off and we'll start to see these things actually flying with customers in them Wicked anyway you take care guys drive and fly safe oh wow so that we just landed in like about 10 feet yeah that's cool wow this is one of the coolest Aviation experiences I've ever had ha ha ha [Music]

Channel: Petrol Ped

Views: 918,162

Keywords: petrol ped, ped petrol, petrol head, petrol ped youtube, youtube petrol ped, vlogger, youtuber, cars, supercars, performance cars, car review, launch events, press drive, automotive, sports cars, flying car, pal v flying car, flying car pal v, how to build a flying car, building a flying car, how to make a flying car, flying the pal v, driving a flying car, easa, pal v netherlands, gyroplane, gyroplane flying, gyroplane takeoff, gyroplane how it works, gyroplane vs gyrocopter

Id: DXMvf5ip3UE

Length: 28min 43sec (1723 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023