onetrack

You wouldn't find 45° slopes all that often in Australia, and why would you want to follow the ground contours precisely?

I'd have to opine the Israeli startup Air One is possibly closest to a fully operational, relatively simple and stable design, with their EVTOL.

Their version utilises a simple wing - nothing on it folds, rotates or otherwise needs complex, troublesome mechanisms - and the wing provides stability in flight.

The company is leveraging knowledge they have gained from making UAV's. They have a 60% scale working model, and it appears to be meeting all the necessary aims and projections.

Their rig uses 8 electric motors with counter-rotating propellers, and it has inbuilt redundancy - if one motor fails, it lands itself. It holds 2 people and has a 250kg load capacity.

The U.S. Air Force is currently doing testing of this EVTOL, and it appears that certification and regulatory controls is about all that's holding it back from production.

https://www.airev.aero/

So ...... what's happened? We're into the second month of 2024 and I don't see these VTOL machines appearing everywhere as they claimed they would, in 2022 and 2023?

Once again, the marketing hype exceeds the ability to deliver something that works. I'll wager they've all stalled at regulatory and safety hurdles.

The information from pax is that 2 go-arounds were carried out, and the 3rd time they landed. But on the 2nd go-around there was a hard touchdown, a "severe bang, harder than any rough landing I've experienced", reported one passenger. The pax were warned to prepare for an emergency landing prior to the final touchdown, therefore the crew apparently expected major problems.

So, it's entirely possible the hard touchdown while the 2nd go-around was being carried out, caused damage to the landing gear or sensors that prevented proper braking, or even thrust reversor actuation. The pax reported they felt no deceleration in the seats, and the engines noise level did not increase, as one expects when reverse thrusters are deployed. 

I bet that was some ride, before all the banging and jerking and bouncing stopped!! It says a lot for modern aircraft design that all got out virtually unscathed, and there was no fire.

It also speaks volumes for airport design to have a relatively unobstructed overrun area, so that airframes can survive overruns relatively intact - unlike many airports where huge ditches, a vast amount of urban infrastructure - and even ravines - are where aircraft end up, after overruns.

Back about 1975, when I lived in the W.A. wheatbelt, a farmer friend got his PPL and bought a Piper Dakota.

He offered to fly me to Perth any time I needed parts urgently, and so he could increase his hours and piloting skills. One day I had need to call on him to take up his offer.

We flew straight into Perth airport, and I grabbed my urgent parts, and we loaded up and taxied out to take off again.

As we were lining up for the runway, he called the tower to advise he was ready for takeoff. I heard the tower call, "Take off without delay!"

As he firewalled the throttle, I looked around to see a "heavy" on descent, probably less than 2 NM behind us! My mate certainly took off without any delay whatsoever!

In those days, Perth air traffic wasn't anything like what it is today, and I understand the landing fees were pretty reasonable, too. Can't recall what they were, it was too long ago.

There's a good story on the ABC where QANTAS have only recently discovered a can containing a short 9 minute film from 1939, about the QANTAS Empire Flying Boat service from Australia to Singapore.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-15/qantas-celebrates-centenary-with-bygone-era-flying-boat-film/12881604

What is unusual about the film is, it's in colour, but it's silent. Colour film was very rare and expensive in the period before WW2 - it was WW2 that finally made colour film less expensive - but even then, it's only in the last couple of years of WW2 that colour film (of the War) started to appear.

Here's another good site with a comprehensive story about the Qantas Empire Flying Boats. You'd have had to be wealthy to afford a seat on one of these luxurious aircraft.

The detailed ad showing the fine points of the Empire Flying Boat is fascinating. They even had a separate smoking room! 

https://www.executivetraveller.com/the-way-it-was-sydney-to-singapore-in-4-days-by-qantas-flying-boat