Holger Willeke has a simple goal – to make drones more powerful while keeping them affordable. With his team at airstier Willeke is running a highly successful Kickstarter campaign for yeair! The novelty of yeair! comes from the combustion engines that power the four propellers.
Today’s quadcopters might be very well designed and manufactured but many don’t have enough power. Willeke believes that using batteries even the best drone tops out at a few minutes of flight time.
Images courtesy of the yeair! Kickstarter page
yeair! says that it can fly for sixty minutes, carry a payload of five kilograms, and reach a terrifying top speed of 100 kilometers per hour. A proprietary app allows users to control the drone currently, if 150,000 € funding level is reached the app will be Open Source for developers to augment its capabilities. Three servo slots exist for camera attachments and one additional slot is in place for future developer needs.
The manufacturer’s empty weight of yeair! is 4.9 kilograms, and a 55 kilometer range is expected. A 1.5 Liter fuel tank requires a 25:1 gas to oil ratio and has an acoustic signal that tells you when the tank is full.
Combustion engines are started by a 1250 milliamp hour battery, run up to 12,000 rpm, and are capable of 6.4 kiloWatt output at peak power. Electrically powered brushless dc motors are coupled to the combustors to add control, giving stability to the powerful craft.
yeair! is an incredible machine, with amazing detail designed and built into it from its collapsible landing legs to the beautifully thermoformed housing. Everything about the campaign looks polished and professional, and the prototypes shown in the campaign videos look ready for public consumption. There are definitely concerns about operating laws here in North America, and several comments on the campaign page talk about Austrian and German laws for classifying and flying the craft. The entire project is very ambitious and if early units meet the May 2016 timing targets they will be extremely interesting to watch.