Star Simpson

If you don’t see what I see: imagine either item hanging from an awning, like a shop sign. Any breeze would cause a huge amount of blowing around. Now remove the awning. Those drones as shown are getting dragged around the sky by their payloads - at best.

The thing about aerodynamics is, like my other favorite engineering field (electrical), the way it works is extraordinarily difficult to just visualize, though it seems like it should be straightforward. It can be unintuitive.

Quadcopters - drones with 4 props like that - are popular in part because they can be easily flown with only a very basic feedback-control system that makes these much more tractable than the equivalent programming (to control an airplane or helicopter of the same scale, say)

A lot of what we are doing with drones uses the quadcopter as a jumping-off point, but ignores aerodynamics. There are a lot of 1-lb bumblebees out there, in aerodynamic terms.

(There are even a few 10-, 100- and 1000-lb bumblebee designs buzzing around.. with enough power, anything could get off the ground. But they will all fly for longer and further with just a little thought given to the wings.)

Consider for example, how hard it would be to make your car take to the air. You could floor it, drive it as fast as you wanted - and it would still fly quite poorly. But with wings added, this all changes. It’s aerodynamics, not power, that matter.