NASA’s Puffin Is Way Cooler Than a Jetpack: The engineers at NASA have combined every one of our geeky transportation dreams into a single little vehicle called the Puffin. It takes off like a helicopter and flies like a plane. It can cruise at 140 mph and, with a boost mode, hit about twice that. Oh — and it’s electric.
If that sounds too good to be true, it is — for the moment. But give it time. NASA unveiled the concept today at the American Helicopter Society meeting in San Francisco.
The tilt-rotor Puffin has a flight system similar to the V-22 Osprey, but instead of carrying a bunch of Marines and their gear, the Puffin carries one person in the prone position. The rotors are nearly 7.5 feet in diameter and the aircraft has a wingspan just over 13 feet. Thanks to carbon composite construction, the Puffin weighs in at less than 400 pounds including the lithium phosphate batteries.
The Puffin is designed to stand on its tail, which serves as the landing gear (check out the video). Once the Puffin transitions to horizontal flight, the pilot can cruise at more than 140 miles per hour. Hit the boost mode and this bird will do nearly 300 mph. The projected range is 50 miles on a charge. Yeah, that’s not much, but using electricity means the Puffin’s powerplant won’t be limited by air density. NASA says it should be able to climb under full power to around 30,000 feet before the battery pack would be depleted enough to require coming back down.
So why call it the Puffin?
“If you’ve ever seen a puffin on the ground, it looks very awkward, with wings too small to fly, and that’s exactly what our vehicle looks like,” Mark Moore, an aerospace engineer at NASA Langley Research Center, told Scientific American. “But it’s also apparently called the most environmentally friendly bird because it hides its poop, and we’re environmentally friendly because we have essentially no emissions. Also, puffins tend to live in solitude, only ever coming together on land to mate, and ours is a one-person vehicle.”
No word on when the Puffin will make its first manned flight, though NASA plans to finish a one-third size demonstrator by March and see how well it transitions from cruising to hovering. But it’s safe to say that if this bird flies — and that’s a very big if — we’ll no longer be dreaming of having our own jetpack.