Progress Report

Reflection on Progress Report

The most significant engineering problem currently found is trying to find comparable aircraft to compare the concept design with. Currently, there are no commercially available vertical take-off (VTOL) aircraft used for air taxis. This technology is currently in its infancy and difficult to research. Similarly, sizing the aircraft for the VTOL portion was also very difficult due to the nature of limited resources. Sizing the aircraft for VTOL was very difficult since the aircraft has extremely high disk loading since the propeller must be small enough to tilt. The aircraft must also be able to take off with a considerably heavier maximum take-off weight (MTOW) compared to similar capacity helicopters. Further research and maybe even fluid dynamic simulation would be required to properly size the aircraft for VTOL. The MTOW of the aircraft may also have to be decreased with increased power for better performance in VTOL. Lastly, the aircraft's amphibious design also proves to be difficult to work with especially during the consideration of the landing gear and passenger space. A large part of the bottom of the aircraft must be used up for buoyancy purposes and redundancy in the case of water penetration through the hull. This reduces the passenger cabin height and restricts the space for passengers. Similarly, the tilting wing and rotor also prove to be difficult to design a structure for especially considering the aircraft must also be capable of landing on water

Regarding the progress report, some improvements for the introduction could have been made that would've made the document more free-flowing. Similarly, more details regarding methods of the various analyses could also have been expanded to provide more useful information from the progress report.