This dream is coming to life faster than you think thanks to Jetson, and in a little part, to 3D printing.
Jetson One is a personal aircraft. The company is trying to democratize flights, by removing the huge boundary between being able to drive a car and being able to fly an airplane.
“Right now you look at the car and you instantly know: oh yes, I can drive that. We want people to feel the same when they look at an aeroplane” – says Alec Bialek, Head of Jetson’s R&D.
I believe I can fly
Do you believe you can touch the sky? Jetson’s goal is to make flying, and especially personal flight, accessible to everybody. The story of Jetson’s establishment is very similar to the history of many successful companies that start with those words: “there were two guys…” Those guys were Tomasz Patan and Peter Ternström, both interested in Star Wars, helicopters, and airplanes.
They have this crazy idea to make a flying vehicle, extremely lightweight so it doesn’t need to pass all of the certification requirements that are normally necessary for full-on airplanes. A huge amount of work has been done to make it as easy to fly as possible. Thanks to that, when you jump into Jetson One, you have only two sticks: the “height stick”, and the “go stick”. That’s all you need to fly it. It is easy, and unintimidating to be around.
With this in mind, there was a huge pressure to make Jetson One as light as possible. Any weight saved on the aircraft is the weight that can be carried by a passenger. It also affects the flying time. When you don’t have wings, lightweight propellers are everything that holds you in the air.
You can fly sooner thanks to 3D printing
Being extremely weight sensitive, Jetson One needed to be manufactured with lightweight methods. And this is where 3d printing jumps (or flies!) in. Additive manufacturing gave Jetson a pretty good leg up in terms of making hollow structures and very narrow lattice patterns, that will make parts stiff and strong enough, but also keep as much of the weight out as possible.
Before 3d printing become popular, aircraft manufacturers needed to produce a lot of molds to prototype every part of an aircraft. It was a long and expensive process. Engineers from Jetson could skip that process, at least to the moment that they were happy with a design made with 3D printing technology.
“We are using the printers for making prototypes, as we are trying different things. It is also nice to model something in CAD software, print it, and physically hold it in your hand and put it on the vehicle. It is how you can see if you like it as this thing works” – notes Alec Bialek. “When 3d printing is so cheap, so accessible and so quick, it is actually a really great tool to sanity check your own designs”. – concludes Bialec.
Prototyping is not the only use of additive manufacturing at Jetson. Some final parts are also 3D printed. If there are unique components, appearing only once per vehicle it would make it very expensive to make it by casting or molding. Even if there are more components on one vehicle and ultimately they should be serially produced, it is also better to start with 3d printed parts, and if the demand for Jetson One will be big enough then consider serial production.