Imagine something goes wrong and your wing fails irreversibly.
If you were able to detach the wing, and be left with only the motor assembly and seat - with 4 motors it should be possible to operate as a quadcopter, as long as motors are able to spin in the other direction. Combined with some gyro/multicopter controller board it should be possible to make this into an emergency landing system which is activated via some button and slowly lands you face down, saving your life, together with all the equipment.
Thats not how that works, 165lbs of thrust will NOT be anywhere near enough power to stop the free fall, let alone slow you down to a speed at which the bounce off the ground would be survivable.
As nice of a feature as it would be it just would not work. The pilot + all the gear would have to be 70lbs max. in order for there to be enough effective thrust for that to even work.
Oh, just when I thought it was so close to reality…
It’s actually a very interesting idea and it is feasible with the right design considerations - such as way more thrust, and aerodynamics to consider (your body blocking a lot of the airflow).
There are now quad copters that carry people, and this would be along those lines. Future thinking… I wouldn’t write it off. But certainly not here, not with this design as it is.
why even bother, we probably all (I do!!) carry rescue parachutes (in Germany it’s the law).
Surprisingly a lot of people don’t wear them because “The risk that something goes wrong is so small”.
Should be a law everywhere, Where I live it’s also a law that you must carryt reserve
I don’t fly yet, only hoping to start someday. But I’ve seen at least 1 video on youtube where a guy started rotating uncontrollably, and when he threw his reserve it just got tangled in the main wing. I guess he survived, but yeah, that’s my point. Anyways, looks like not possible with current design, I understand.
Also, a lot of the time it can actually cause more bad then good because they throw their reserve before letting to see if their wing recovers and then both are deployed which ends up causing more harm. But again if you have a good understanding you really shouldn’t have your main wing collapsing in an unrecoverable fashion.
I like the quad copter idea, but it it was stated before it would require about 2 - 3 times as much thrust as full payload weight of pilot, wing, and paramotor to do it. So I would guess you would be ok with around 800lbs of thrust to be safe. The motor in a paramotor really just pushes you around in the air and the big the engine doesn’t increase the speed as much as as it does help you to ascend faster.
For a quadcopter you might want 2-3 times as much thrust as the copter weighs, but for softening an emergency landing, you’d just want a combined thrust of around the same weight as pilot + paramotor. If the force upwards (the thrust) equals the force by gravity downwards (the weight), the paramotor and pilot will not change altitude at all. However, I think we can safely assume that if you’re cutting away your wing, you’ll have spent a bit of time falling as you do that and as you get your rotors to point downwards. In that case you’d want more thrust than your weight in order to slow your fall.
It would be weird though. It’d presumably have to flip you on your back, and for it to work your center of gravity would have to move to roughly above the center point of the rotors.
Just wear a rescue chute, and get proper training on how to use it.
You saw 1 (one) YouTube video, but literally hundreds of successful reserve deployments happens every year, saving many lives. Not fail proof, of course. But time proven.
As @Pdwhite said, the best is to never put yourself in a situation were you need it.
But I fly with a 1.3 kg rescue, just in case…
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@Kenwhite23 could you explain how you calculated the 165lbs of thrust into 70lbs lift (i.e. the payload) ?