Myth: a STOL airplane only needs a few hundred feet of grass, so your back yard is good enough.

Reality: you’re looking at acres, not feet. eVTOLs flip that math on its head.

Photos like this Red Bull STOL stunt are very misleading.

See that grass runway. It's 325 ft x 30ft and is one of the shortest STOL runways in the world. The photos clearly shows how much more clearance is needed for the trees at the end of the runway. The owner wishes he had a bigger runway but this already cost him "several grand".

A more reasonably sized STOL runway is ~1000 ft x 60 ft wide — or about 1.4 acres. Add clearance zones for safe takeoff and landing all conditions and the property size needed quickly jumps to at least 5 acres or more.

Contrast that with personal use eVTOLs. True, precise vertical takeoff and landing for a two seat winged eVTOL that requires an ~80 ft diameter clearing with pad diameter of ~40 ft.

That 80 ft clearing is 12% of an acre, and could fit on properties as small as 1 to 2 acres.

Personal use eVTOLs can takeoff and land on plots 5x smaller than STOLs could.

I think STOLs are great. Watch a video of backcountry Alaskan STOL flying and runways literally next to town centers in small towns to see what I mean.

But I've spoken to people including very experienced aerospace engineers who ask "what about STOLs". This constraint, plus the skills need to takeoff/land on short runways, is why STOLs were never as practical as the myths wanted to believe for personal aviation.

#eVTOLs#STOLs