That's why I like you Tom! You don't shy away from impossible projects!

niceeeeee, thanks for the shoutout tom, you'll def get it in the next video

Propellers smash into pieces * calmly continues to explain the physics behind why and carries on *

12:12 - The propellor on its own seemed to be doing fine :-) Great work, Tom. Enjoying the journey to air-pressured flight.

“hopefully we can put together some of these parts to make some thing that sort of does some thing“ that’s just all of engineering

Everyone is discussing the helicopter and I'm still here amazed that you just up and built a functional Schlieren imaging setup to look at your nozzle flows. Way cool!

I love how you always use data to back up your decisions. Even many professional engineers skip this too often. When I saw you even built the schlieren imager I was hella impressed!

I absolutely love how you aren't afraid to show your failures as well as your success. You tried a path and showed us the results and that's amazingly valuable!

I’ve been waiting patiently for this video. I was not disappointed! I’m excited for the next video in this series.

“Not only does everything look better in slow-mo, but it also makes the flight time seem longer” - love it!

Honestly I love seeing projects like this. I think so often creators want to have something that is totally functional and works perfectly to show instead of showing the design process. It is really helpful to follow your thinking and the process you go through to solve problems. Thanks for sharing this!

To counter the torque, without needing an additional rotor, you could attempt what the likes of the MD-902 helicopter uses; It still has the rear boom, but along one side it has a rib to reduce the airflow down that side, whilst allowing free-flow along the other side. This creates a difference in pressure, producing a moment; it might be worth a shot, but difficult to see if it'll produce enough of a difference

6:32 Toaster: "mate, it's only a matter of time before he tries to convert us into something" Blender: "I know I'm bloody terrified, I've got a motor & blades!"

@12:17 Its really amazing how the gyroscopic effect of the sway bar kept the propeller stable and producing lift even when it was completely detached from the helicopter.

I love this sort of stuff, splendid work! My immediate idea was the same, to reuse the exhaust from the turbo to counteract rotary action. Humble suggestions; 1. Place the bottle upright to maximise effective rotary thrust. 2. Shorten the turbo exhaust to a minimum and give it a tail. (The tail could be inverted). 3. Chill the bottle whilst pressurising to maximise available air mass over time. (Short launch time required, as the bottle warms from ambient air). 4. Upright launch mechanism would be simpler, in a number of good ways.

The way you showed the individual data points of the thrust to energy chart prior to fading to the trendline was brilliant! I will definitely start using that in my research!

It's gonna be a great day. Colinfurze & Tom Stanton uploaded video in the same day.

In Tom’s ideal society we wouldn’t use fossil fuels. The world would run on compressed air, truly the most glorious power source

Awesome experiment. Amazing stability of the rotor at the final section. I'm anxious to see this project succeed!

A successful engineer shows young people how one learns from and deals with failures in a productive and positive manner. I call this a pretty successful project! Keep up the excellent work!

Helicopters aren't easy, that's for sure. I'm currently working on a helicopter project...with counter rotating rotors about 1.3m in diameter and a square fuselage... and I'm giving it a 30% chance of success at this point. Was considering scrapping it but I love how you've presented your progress regardless of results. Thanks for the motivation!

Few years more and Tom will build an air powered spaceship 🚀 Great job Tom, thank you for your channel

Idea: build a kite with control surfaces moved by servos. No propellers, fly just on the wind. You attached it with a single string to the ground, and it should fly by itself (moving these control surfaces). After you can attached small propeller to generate electricity, and either send this power through cable to ground, or to use this power for servos. Btw, great video!!!

You need a convergent-divergent nozzle to have a fully hyper-sonic flow, otherwise it will be blockage at mach 1

That Schlieren set up looks awesome and... Holyyy cow, that’s me! Thanks for the shout out!

4:29 The tyrrany of the air bottle equation! :-P

The project is Awesome, most especially because of the Air pressure motor I think the stability can be achieved by adding some equally distributed weight to the bottle

I'd watch that slow-mo flight with relaxing music for hours.

I like also seeing projects that don't work as planned, because that's just how reality is sometimes. Only seeing the social-media survivorship bias can make one feel incompetent if any project fails, but seeing other people fail too is a nice balance.

What about dry Ice? - If you can get, 44g gives 22,4 litres of volume, N2 likes to expand as well. - Great Stuff, looking forward for next episodes!

These videos are fun. Thanks for sharing your wins and setbacks with us.

Ideas for improvement: - use some pliers-like printed arms to lock the whole heli around the bottle. You could avoid uneven upwards momentum. - insert a tiny valve to stop the rotors running (and vibrating) while pressurizing the air tank. Open the valve remotely with a line. - change the filling valve so that the levers presses the valve away from the heli. -> 1. Start up rotor 2. Stop pressurizing and drop the filling valve 3. Unlock heli

Formula 1 cars with tractor wheels is definitely a race I would watch.

You should try using those little CO2 canisters as a source of air, they have about 800 psi so if it’s regulated it could last a while as well as being light and small

I used to have a little helicopter that worked on air pressure. The thing is it had a small plastic capsule that was filled up to pretty high pressure using a hand pump. I feel like all you need is a bottle that can hold more pressure.

I had a VertyBird when I was a child and had so much fun with that toy ....Thanks for the entertainment and memories.

that blade flying on it's own was magnifiscent. high speed 3d arena beyblades?

"The clever folks over on Twitter" Words I never thought I'd hear in my life

Massive Tom! Great effort and really interesting to see your design and test process.

One thing to note is that you can create a helicopter setup like the CH-47. This was not the first heli with this setup, but it is one of the more successful ones. Why go to this setup. The first reason is that as opposed to having stacked coaxial rotors the dual rotors in this setup will allow you to increase your effective rotor disk area as well as canceling torque. Weight will go up, but you can also carry a larger volume of air. If the bottle size were increased to a 3L bottle, the volume will increase faster than the weight increase. I also have taken these bottles over 120psi over a few cycles and they have worked, so you may be able to increase the stored energy as well, though may need to change the fill method to accommodate the higher pressure. Just some thoughts. It was a really fantastic video to watch, and awesome to see the shock diamonds.

Although I don't personally know him, this person sounds so friendly in every video! Much love!♥️🇳🇵

I get to nerd out twice on theirs vid!! 1. I worked on the Mars Heli solar panel, and I have touched the panel that is currently powering it ON MARS!! 2. Now I work at a national lab and we use schlieren imaging all the time!

Takes guts to put up a "failed" project. This is what real science and engineering is all about. Not everything is an instant success. Thanks for keeping it real, Tom!

Excellent work. Probably anyone already tells you but perhaps tip jet propulsion works.

All of Tom's ideas: "Yo dawg, I heard you like air..."

This is one of those rare videos where I press the like button before watching the entire video. It's such a great thing to hear someone say something was hard and it didn't work. We're being shown so many success stories on the internet without seeing the failures, that it makes you feel worthless when you try something yourself. Showing a failure and then explaining why it failed teaches the same if not more than a success story. Thanks for sharing this and confirming why I subscribed to your channel.

You need to move the filling nozzle to directly underneath the center of thrust/mass. Right now, what's happening is, the moment you charge the system enough for thrust-to-weight ratio to exceed 1, you start pitching forward because point where you're holding it down is well forward of the center of thrust. The moment you release the air supply is the moment where you are generating the most thrust you will ever be generating, and because you have to release it when it starts pitching forward, your maximum TWR is only slightly over 1. The moment you release it, the air supply starts running back down and you go below 1 TWR pretty much instantly, which is why your flight ends up so short. Moving the filling nozzle to the center of thrust/mass, or alternatively, using a hold-down method that restrains it from pitching, means you can charge it up as much as you like and release with a TWR much higher than 1.

If you're here watching Tom and feeling inspired then keep going grinding away! We are all in the same boat here looking for ways to help all our channels. keep up the good work and Never Give Up!

I love how it's not about the end result, but about the journey.

12:15 when your car in BeamNG multiplayer near-misses something and the server desyncs at the same time so the other players see your car split in two but you're driving just fine on your screen

I think you need a separate release mechanism so that the bottle can get to a very high pressure before disconnecting. notice your last try was working before pressure and thus rotor speed and lift dropped again. maybe a mechanism that releases automatically once the bottle reaches full pressure.

The stability of the rotor+stabilizer weights alone really surprised me. It just hovered peacefully for a (milli)moment there.

LMAO, I'm just dying over here. My man Tom just made a bluetooth propeller at 12:15 hahaha

I would like you power some of your previous projects using liquid nitrogen as a fuel source. Pour it into a mini tank. The air flowing over the tank can boil the liquid or paint it super dark black using special paints.

Thrust efficiency from a propeller also depends on the pitch, not just the diameter. Pitch is usually given in inches, for model plane propellers - it's the distance the prop theoretically travels in one rotation, in a very idealised situation. As a rule of thumb, a propeller with a ptich of half its diameter (e.g. 8x4 or 6x3) gives the best static thrust. For a prop with more pitch (e.g. 8x6 or 6x5), you get a better top speed, but less static thrust. It's a lot like choosing a gear on a bike, or in a car, then driving in just that one gear.

The bottle in vertical and sharp edge to detach airstream from bottle surface? Make a wind tunel to test the bottle minimum drag and what could make it slippery and expose less surface. Golf ball dents etc.

1:19 hugely underrated shot

The Air Hogs Sky Commander was an air powered toy helicopter that claimed to get 50ft high, it just had a large fin on the tail to help keep it from rotating, maybe something like that would work for you, and maybe some of their other design features could help too. I love your work and it has been so much fun seeing you try and make things move and fly with air!

Turn the bottle vertical to reduce downwards drag, a cylinder is a surprisingly draggy shape. I reccon you could see much improved performance without loads more development.

Main rotor: "YEAH FREEDOM"

Tom: "As you can see it doesn't resemble anything in the title of the video" Air: >:-(

Yay!! You're back. We all missed you.

Completed project, partial projects, failed projects...post them all man. It is very enjoyable to watch the engineering process and be along for the ride. Great video

I will be trying this Schlieren setup today.

Good video Integza!

Thanks tom, this ones a banger

It needs a tail rotor, a slightly larger/thicker air container probably, and a full body clamping mechanism to hold it down while it builds air pressure. Then it will gain more RPM without tilting forward; and when it flies off into the sky on release, the body wont spin around in circles. Also i would experiment with a different main rotor that has higher mass and slightly lower thrust so it can store more energy and bleed it off over a longer period. Also probably needs a stronger air valve to handle the pressure being loaded into the bottle

I can say that this was never a failure. It's just a stepping stone to something great. Hats off to your attempt mate...

Perhaps a pressurized rubber balloon inside of the plastic bottle could be used as an air bladdler to give your nozzles a little longer high pressure output time. Rather than the fixed volume of the bottle just resulting in a steady pressure drop. Cool videos btw.

Legend is back again

Great video as per usual. Also great sponsor. As a father of a six-year-old I can tell you these boxes are amazing. Not cheap but well worth it.

Who else honestly wants to see tractor tires on a formula One car because that would be freaking awesome 😂🤣😂

I feel like we're about 2 years away from a "1:1 scale fully operational sherman tank powered by compressed air" video

Watching your videos keeps me reminding how amazing invention 3D printers are to hobbyists, can literally manufacturer on demand..!!

Waited 2 months for this... and even though it didn’t work... your vids always teach me something well done Tom!

The blades staying where they are when they snapped off had a looney tunes vibe to me.

12:20 that's awesome

I really respect you for telling not only the success stories, but stories of failure (and learning) as well.

always clear always fun and always so beautifully lacking in ´let´s make telly´ muzak.. nice work!

1:40 look how stable the camera is in mid flight.

If you don't fail sometimes, you're not trying trying hard enough!

Loved the video. keep up your learning; you will make a brake through at some point. Now, I am not an engineer by any stretch; I just have a passion for aviation (all forms of it) and have learned a lot in studying how different aircraft work to gain lift. My two cent's are to make your rotor bigger. If you look at piloted helicopters the rotors are always bigger then the body of the craft. I also think you have too much opposite thrust on your tail boom, so changing that nozzle should help it.

For a given rotor thrust will go up by power^(2/3). The momentum change of the air is mv. This equals force times time, so the force is equal to the mass of air you push per second times velocity. The kinetic energy added to the air you push is 1/2 m v^2. But doubling the velocity doubles the mass of air per second and the velocity, multiplying the energy owe second (power) by eight. So multiplying power by x multiplies airflow by x^(1/3). Multiplying airflow by x^(1/3) multiplies thrust by x^(2/3).

I just checked your channel 20 minutes ago wondering “I haven’t seen a video from here in awhile”.

I am simple man, I see Tom Stanton Video, I click on it

12:25, I love how the propeller keeps spinning as if the bottle is still attached lol

i would recommend a one-way valve, as soon as the air supply is disconnected it closes itself making the turbine spin longer and keeping its pressure for longer. making the overall more efficient

He finally took my suggestion, yessssssss!!!!!!! Thank you so much tom!!

Never be ashamed of your failures!! Engineering is hard, it's easy to find what you did wrong, but it's really hard to find what you're missing. Keep looking at the math!

higher pressure with a regulator i believe would be the only way. but your awesome this is awesome good work man. keep it up!

Oh my god the slow mo had me there watching as if we were landing on moon again. Well done!

Tom, I think I know how you could make a helicopter powered by a bottle of air. I won't tell you how and if it works I'll tell you 😉😉 In my head it all sounds great until I put it into practice. 🤣

If you were to hold down the entire helicopter under pressurization instead of just the front you could get it up to higher pressure before takeoff and then just integrate the release mechanism with the one located at the tip

Look up early helicopter designs. Very early models have two rotors rotating in opposite direction with an angle toward each other, (like a very shallow v) the steeper the angle the more stable is the helicopter. But it will have costs in efficiency. The reason is that if the machine tips to one side the rotor gains efficiency and the opposite loose it, pushing the machine back into a balanced position.

Hang the bottle vertically so it doesn't block the air flow off the prop and improves the tilting stability then two shorter booms to balance those arms with a fin to use downward air flow off the main rotor to counteract the torque, more torque more airflow etc.

I'd place a balloon inside of the plastic bottle to act as an air bellow. When filled with air, the balloon will take the shape of the bottle, but as it releases the air, the balloon's volume will decrease and hopefully maintain a stronger airflow and constant pressure. Play around with different air restrictor diameters to limit airflow while keeping overall weight to a minimum. As for the long tail boom, consider halving its length and using two smaller diameter tail booms in opposite directions to give a couple force instead of the current single lever force. This could help with reducing weight and improving balance. May not look aesthetically pleasing but should work. You could also use two helium filled balloons acting as ballast tanks to offset the total weight so that less thrust is required for liftoff. But then it'd be a blimpcopter.

I love the blades in slowmo flying toward the camera

Great job Tom, you have inspired many peoples from this project.

Dear Tom, This is one great project and your blow-by-blow account of how it progressed and ran to it's end is incredibly valuable. Educating people as to how the engineering and development process works, methodically and carefully, but still may end in failure, is not something you'll often get presented. If more people came to appreciate R&D from this perspective, maybe they'd be more keen to support government policy that benefitted education, R&D and exploration, as these are the key components of our success as a technological species and will ensure we survive in this vast, empty universe for as long as it will have us. Many thanks, Geordie.

I don't know, man. Looks like a success to me. Maybe not the result you wanted, but definitely the most amazing result I've seen in a long time. And a beautiful ending shot there. Everything aligned perfectly to give the most artistic catastrophic failure possible.