But the aviation market is one of the most heavily regulated - bureaucracy beyond comprehension.
Did you ever wonder why Piper or Cessna airplanes look EXACTLY what they did 50 years ago? And why the engines used in these planes (e.g., Lycoming) are referred to as “Lycosaurus”!?
If you go for a sightseeing flight with a local aeroclub - you will find the pilot spending 30min pre-checking the aircraft, checking the weather, reading NOTAMS etc. Not to mention the potentially pretty intensive communication with ATC et al. required to make sure everybody stays safe.
Getting a pilot license is magnitudes more work than getting a drivers license, proficiency has to be continuously demonstrated, maintaining airworthiness of an airplane isn’t exactly cheap either and pretty heavily regulated.
And all that should be “automated”, certified and approved?
Not saying things can’t be automated - but no shit, the spark plugs in a Cessna are like 50$ each for that “aviation certificate”...
Even if there ARE rules and guidelines how to certify autonomous vehicles like that - like how does anybody imagine that a novel aerial vehicle like this actually IS CERTIFIED within a lifetime?
Pilots still walk around a multi-million $ fighter jet or aircraft equipped with the most sophisticated avionics because “a bird nest in the engine intake is hard to detect and difficult to resolve mid flight”.
Investing in one of the most heavily regulated, difficult to scale and extremely expensive to operate industries is brave... Even more so when this industry is low margin and “kept dying every couple of years”...
Private pilot here. Yes, aviation innovates slowly, but it's not nearly as bad as you make it sound. Cirrus aircraft have been a game changer, as has the Garmin G1000 avionics. I can fly just about any instrument approach entirely on autopilot. The only thing I have to touch is the throttle and the flaps. I get real-time traffic information via ADS-B, real-time weather via Nexrad. I do my flight planning in five minutes using Foreflight on an iPad. It is all pretty awesomely cool actually.
It's not installed in the plane I fly, but Garmin's auto-landing system was recently certified for emergency use.
Lots of innovation has happened in aircraft electronics. The powerplant? Not so much. Most light aircraft engine designs are four or more decades old, and the only ones cheap enough for a moderately-priced aircraft have carburetors. I don't think you can even buy a car these days with a carburetor, but with airplanes they're still standard, even though fuel injection makes a lot more sense in an airplane than in a car. You can get airplanes with fuel-injected engines, but a fuel-injected Lycoming IO-390 engine (like you'd find in a Cirrus) will cost about $27,000. Used. Just for the engine. You can get a decent car for $27,000, and it will absolutely have a fuel-injected engine. Likely a turbocharger as well. And the car's engine will produce a lot more horsepower.
Oh and you'll have to fuel the airplane with avgas which costs $5/gallon and contains lead, and you have to wonder WTF??
There's no technical reason aircraft engines cannot be turbocharged, fuel-injected, fueled with regular unleaded gas, and cheap. Aircraft engines should have followed the innovation advancements that have happened in car engines, but they haven't. This is probably because of regulation, monopoly power, liability, and a host of other reasons, but as an engineer I find the situation ridiculous.
Wow, hearing that rich people are still allowed to dump lead into the atmosphere above our heads just ruined my morning. What things of non-entertainment value would we loose if we just banned leaded fuel overnight? Are crop dusters burning lead while spraying pesticides over our food crops?
You don't need to be rich to fly. You can buy a older used aircraft for the cost of a nice car. Sometimes cheaper. (Note: Not the Cirrus they're talking about upthread.)
They're working on replacing leaded fuel. The challenge is mostly regulatory, since they won't certify any of the replacements until they're sure it's 100% safe. It's still a work in progress.
As for what you'd lose: Search and rescue, medical transport (both commercial and volunteer), transport of blood samples for lab testing, high resolution aerial photography on your smartphone, powerline inspection to prevent forest fires, crop dusting. I could go on...
Search and rescue is almost soley helicopter traffic, and very rarely requires leaded fuel (a turbine doesn't need leaded, it can run on it, but it'll run just fine on unleaded too). The number of places still using non-turbine helicopters for anything other than training and very light sightseeing is very small, probably close to 0% worldwide.
Same is true of Medical Transport except possibly for Australia where light aircraft are used more frequently than turbine helicopters.
Same for powerline inspection, although there could be a couple of companies using Robinsons somewhere I guess.
A lot of "low altitude only" pilots try to fly on MOGAS (car fuel, unleaded) when possible due to high cost of AVGAS 100LL (the most common aviation fuel, 100 octane low lead).
The problem comes with flying in lower atmospheric pressure (high or hot environment) because the replacement chemical used in place of the lead-based additives makes fuel much quicker to evaporate.
BTW, the really rich don't use AVGAS 100LL except maybe for hobby flying - kerosene-based JET A-1 is used in all turbine engines, as well as the rare diesel.
The amount of lead pollution produced by GA is a tiny fraction of the amount that used to be produced by cars, but still I think it's time for it to go away.
Car horsepower and airplane horsepower are very different things.
A car engine has to be able to maintain peak power output for a few seconds while accelerating. maybe a few seconds, unless you're towing a load up a hill or something.
On level ground you're using a small but variable amount of your available power.
An airplane engine has to maintain peak power for the entire climb-out, and a substantial fraction of that for cruising for hours at a time.
unless you're towing a load up a hill or something
This reminds me of how a lot of people are surprised when they find out the engine of a typical semi-truck has "only" a few hundred HP but several times the displacement of a passenger car engine rated at almost the same power. The car engine will wear out quickly at continuous full load, whereas the semi engine is designed to run at full load continuously. Ditto for engines driving generators and pumps --- full load is normal load.
The problem with the 100LL phase-out is that you have over 70 years of engines and fuel systems designed to work with leaded fuel.
In order to complete the phase-out you either need to: force people to put a new $30K+ engine into a <$50K plane, totally replace the fuel system, and get a supplemental type certificate or: Require that the new fuel is a drop in replacement. One would have to show that the new fuel is 100% compatible with 100LL without modifications to the aircraft.
The FAA has been attempting the second route for some years, but to date has not been terribly successful. The first route has been done successfully in other regions such as the EU, but I would suspect there is far less legacy general aviation aircraft. I personally look forward to the mainstream introduction of diesel engines into the US market that are able to run on Jet-A
You have a sensible third option which is how automotive changed for the most part.
Grandfather in current planes and mandate new models to use new fuel only. Over time, perhaps lot longer than cars(planes do have longer life) you will have changed all of them.
Had they started it in 80's and 90's same time as auto-mobiles, most planes would have changed by now.
Every industry faces the same challenges to transform technology, they are able to move forward without as much difficulty as aviation ?
(Cirrus, mentioned above, produces about 300 aircraft a year - compare to the 100,000+ Ceessnas on GA fields, almost all of which are over 40 years old.
Well, one factor would be, that people are happy to fly old planes. If due to the environment regulations, you would have to buy more new planes, demand and consequently production would increase.
I was working on my Private Pilot license in the mid-90's. I quit just around 40 hours with my only remaining required training maneuver being a Night cross country.
I quit for pretty much the reasons you give: while I could have afforded to finish my license, I realized owning my own airplane would have been prohibitive. Sure, I could get a Cessna 152 for around $20k at the time, but then hangar fees, maintenance, insurance, etc. were far more than I could afford.
There's a reason the average small plane owners at my airport drove Toyota rustbuckets with the bumper sticker "My other car is an airplane."
Reminds me of Germany in (I guess) the 80s, where police was sometimes checking diesel cars on whether owners had used (lower taxed) heating oil for their cars (which is technically tax evasion). It might still be a thing.
In eastern Europe(Baltics) it is still a thing because people just bring over Diesel from Belarus or Russia by cars with big fuel tanks and low fuel consumption, so they simply cross the border and at the first fuel stop brim the tanks and go back to europe, In Belarus it is especially easy as the fuel price is mandated by government and is equal across the whole country.
And police sometimes checks the fuel tank for non taxed fuel, it is either Green(Agricultural, illegal for anything else), Normal taxed, and Russian(If you can prove that it was "imported" by you then its ok) non taxed.
There's no technical reason light aircraft engines can't be a heck of a lot better than turbocharged, fuel-injected pistons. They could all be cheap turbojets designed for low altitude flight burning regular diesel at 10gph going 300 Knots, with far higher reliability than any piston. Unfortunately for the reasons you mentioned, and the myth that turbines can't be efficient at low altitudes, nobody is going to develop that engine.
Private pilot, instrument rated here ;). I fly a G5 SR22 Turbo, which is state of the art for GA piston aviation, or as the rest of the calls it, state of the are for 1982.
No autothrottle, no FADEC, and that plane new costs close to $1 mil. Short of the turbine world, its the best you can get but its still ancient tech. Following a magenta line on autopilot is not a hard problem to solve.
You could hold the director of the FAA at gunpoint and they still wouldn't let personal planes fly close enough to each other to make this remotely scalable. Even if you pulled the nonexistent vehicles out of a hat like magic we missed the social acceptance window. Automobiles emerged at a time when nobody really cared about safety regulations and they've continuously gotten safer, so nobody has a problem with the current 1.5 fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles. These personal air vehicles could hit that value but it wouldn't be nearly good enough. We won't accept that in something new. We barely accept the airlines' current 0.2 deaths per ten billion passenger-miles safety record; they'll never accept a danger value 750 times as high.
I don't think that's the reason we accept the higher death rate of cars. In cars, you feel like you have direct influence on whether you die, or at least you know the person in control. This might not be the actual case, but it's enough to make people save.
Compare this to planes: You're flown in big machines you don't understand by people you don't know and, if something goes wrong, you can do nothing but protect your head and hope for the best. Also, you have no way out - if an engine fails, prepare for quite some time of horror. Compared to a car, where you might have some unpleasant deceleration, but safety is always very near.
I'm pretty sure these factors are the main reason we are so wary of aviation deaths compared to car deaths.
Still, I think the age has something to do with it. The death rate for motorcycles is 24 times higher than that for cars but we would never allow a car missing enough safety features to be comparably dangerous on the road. You couldn't get regulators and the public to accept, say, 80 mile per hour electric rollerblades even if you could demonstrate they were just as safe as motorcycles.
> Still, I think the age has something to do with it.
No, it's the externalities. When you fly you don't just put yourself at risk, you put others at risk as well. Roads are designed to isolate faster-moving vehicles from people and property so the people who die are mostly the occupants of the vehicles and there is not much collateral damage. But it's not possible to isolate air traffic this way. So it's not just the occupants of aircraft who die, it's people sitting in their living rooms watching TV when a plane suddenly comes crashing through their roof.
Also, the limiting factor on air travel is not technology, it's takeoff and landing space. Even VTOL aircraft need a lot more room to takeoff and land than a car does because there's a blast zone.
Yes, but let us not compare a 50k used Cessna to a 500k Cirrus?
They rely on a Continental that was developed in the 80s (so quite new) - but doN’t you still have to adjust the mixture manually (e.g., manually adjust the air to fuel ratio)?
I mean, the cool stuff you are describing can easily end up at 500k-2MM USD with a fully trained private pilot...
>let us not compare a 50k used Cessna to a 500k Cirrus?
why not? the original post was that innovation can't happen in aviation because of regulation. if we're shifting the argument to innovation doesn't happen because it's expensive, that's a much more solveable problem.
Let me rephrase:
The innovation you describe (which is cool and needs certification) bumped the price for a new airplane from about 50k in the 70s (I guess we may be talking 200k in today’s money) to close to 1MM USD.
And that innovation is “just” glass cockpit, and some more advanced avionics. Not changing the principles - you fly a bit faster, a bit safer but still need a license and do all the preparation and checks. But it’s a bit more fancy. From 200k to almost 1 MM.
So factor 10 for something “that was already unreasonably expensive”...
My argument was around “innovation has a horrible ROI” in the aviation industry.
Building a startup in that space has to take costs into consideration... I mean, Musk initially didn’t shoot people into space, there was an inefficient market and the margins were enormous... That’s a different story...
This may be so, but I don't think you've really substantiated it; you're just talking about part of the "I", without any reference to the dollars of "R". Sure, $1m puts a plane out of almost everybody's recreation budget. But for a piece of transportation infrastructure with high utilization, it might not be prohibitive. (I mean, a jumbo jet costs hundreds of millions to build, involves significant R&D budgets on each new model, and is still positive ROI, just.)
You said "you fly a bit faster, a bit safer" in a dismissive way, but how much is this actually worth? I could easily believe that making flights slightly safer is worth an extra $1m of capex; I think your original claim would be much stronger if you provided some more concrete numbers/analysis here.
What kind of analysis are you looking for? How much these features are worth is subjective and the general aviation market is super small and not exactly growing. Don’t get me wrong: everybody I know loves his SR20/22.
My comment was not dismissive of the innovation by Cirrus (which I think is great).
It’s about the costs getting it into the market and having it certified.
Imagine you buy a car for 50k USD. Now, you want an airbag and a better infotainment system. Not a problem. Price is now 250k. Is an airbag and a better Infotainment system worth that premium to you? I can’t answer that for you. But this is what we are dealing with in general aviation.
And it is not 1MM USD in Capex... It is 1 MM USD premium per PLANE.
And again: there is a reason why you have the B747 and 737 for like 40 years... Because exactly of that certification nightmare of new airplanes.
Now talk autonomous electric vehicles with passengers. How should the math ever add up?
Perhaps we're talking at cross purposes here; when talking about ROI, the numerator and denominator are usually both in dollars.
If I'm pitching Lilium to some VCs, I'd model out the cost of researching, developing, and building the fleet ("I"), and the revenue I hope to generate in a given timeframe ("R"). After adjusting for the risk of failure, if that ROI is higher than what you can get with other investments, the ROI is, in the relative sense "good". If it's worse than putting your dollars into treasury bonds, it's "bad".
Paraphrasing, your arguments earlier in this thread were that investing in aviation is brave, because the ROI on those investments is bad, because it's expensive to certify new inventions. I certainly agree that it's expensive to build a plane, or even add features to a plane, and even more expensive to build and certify a new plane. But that doesn't mean it's bad ROI. The return generated by building expensive things can be astronomical; see military and aerospace contractors taking in multi-billion dollar contracts with very healthy profits, for example. There should be clear numbers behind this; how many aviation startups succeeded in the last N years? How many folded? That would be the objective analysis I'm looking for when talking about ROI on investments in aviation companies.
Maybe that's not the point you were intending to make; perhaps you're just talking about the ROI for an individual buying a plane, rather than a business operating a fleet (like Lilium in the OP)? But if that's what you mean by ROI, then I don't think that is particularly relevant to investors; they are interested in ROI in the sense I outlined above.
If you are in the aviation industry and building planes - you compete with other means of transportation; e.g., cars, trains, Ubers etc. It is a competitive market with relatively clear revenue expectations per person-miles (e.g., private helicopters potentially being an upper boundary). So, the R side of the equation is pretty known... Helicopter taxi services didn’t quite take off and I guess it is because they were kind a above the per person-mile price people were willing to pay...
You will also be in one of the most heavily regulated industries and push for a product that doesn’t even yet know its regulations...
You can’t compare it to the military because - well, they don’t have to certify the same way civil aviation has to. They can essentially say “it’s good enough”. And they aren’t bearing the “R” side risk of the investment for being expose a free market. Military contractors aren’t “paid by the price of a bomb dropped” in a competitive market.
The R is limited and known. We know helicopter taxi services don’t work. The I is a complete unknown and potentially magnitudes higher than expected. Why would I invest in this market that has historically had a bad track record for innovation?
E.g., you want an airbag in your car and better infotainment? Price for the car goes up from 50k to 250k. In the aviation industry, a Tesla would probably be closer to 500k-750k given all the innovation it has (and would need aviation certification) compared to a 50k “regular car”.
If you think this would not “make you think twice” - ok.
> And that innovation is “just” glass cockpit, and some more advanced avionics. Not changing the principles - you fly a bit faster, a bit safer but still need a license and do all the preparation and checks. But it’s a bit more fancy. From 200k to almost 1 MM.
Nah. Avionics, etc, and what goes into a plane is cheap compared to the purchase price. Even when you talk about G1000, G3000, etc, they are not the primary cost drivers.
What's killed the price of general aviation aircraft is that very few units are purchased. In turn, prices go up; in turn more old planes are kept flying and fewer units are purchased.
Four seat aircraft without glass cockpits and without notable innovation are a few hundred K.
There's a lot of innovation now happening in the experimental/amateur-built category. Super-capable avionics, GPS everywhere, electronic ignitions and advanced engine intelligence/management. And for reasonable cost (relative to a new Cirrus and even a new Cessna). If you're willing to do the building yourself or trust another builder, you can get a very capable, modern airplane for under $100K that puts the certificated 1970s Cessna to shame in every measurable dimension.
I think what you are stating should be a top comment and shows what the certification and paperwork overhead do in terms of “purchasing costs”.
I doubt these planes are less safe (but I admittedly don’t have the numbers ready) - but they are a fraction of “certified planes”
You only pay the R&D costs once. All you're saying is that you have to put a lot into R&D, but that's all on the I side of ROI. It was the same with SpaceX, the I part was huge. The question is whether you can make the R part work. And if you have scale, then the R part moves differently.
It's the same with the first car you build. The first Tesla Roadster cost tens of millions to make. The second Tesla Roadster cost half that.
I think we have different mindsets here: !every! company in aviation, the automotive or transportation industry is worried about the “I” for the R&D.
If there is a factor 10 whatever uncertainty in this equation - you are essentially just gambling like an Options-Day-Trader on Reddit. I understand that investors see “the hockeystick” unlimited revenue upside and justify everything around that.
But I personally would not want to so business in the most over-regulated, slow-growing and low-margin industry with a “factor 10 investment uncertainty”; that uncertainty btw renders your investment null, void and lost if your plane doesn’t get certified. And you don’t even have certification guidelines.
Are you in the aviation industry? I am not. So know that what I'm saying is based on low-grade near-zero prior knowledge. Would love to know the certainty on your knowledge.
I think what matters more is the line of my argumentation. If I was a long-standing aviation industry veteran I would probably not be the source of great innovation and thus be blind for radical disruptions. Automotive and space disruptors had little to no prior knowledge but asked the right questions and had the right arguments...
My line or argumentation does not require much aviation expertise: a heavily regulated market with many uncertainties that put the chance of your investment succeeding at a low percentage, require ALL the investment be made before you can test it on the market is a big red flag; even more when the industry is known for very high costs in the innovation space and you are “disrupting” it; add to that that the return on investments have historically been horrible -e.g., google Cessna, Piper, Beechcraft and a dozen other big players that went bust or were very close to it...
Your arguments can be independently evaluated. Your claim to facts are questionable if they aren't from knowledge. I'll take it that you aren't in the industry and have priors similar to mine on your knowledge.
Well, the R side pops up when they optimistically tell you that your 20 min commute is going to cost 70 USD...
SpaceX is exactly the WORST example in this context: they just went ahead without all the bureaucratic overhead you find at NASA; they weren’t exactly transporting people at the beginning but cargo... And they had a pretty clear market with fat margins; those margins were fat due to the (unnecessary) overhead other agencies created.
You can’t do that in this case.
Put a bit differently: you can probably guess the magnitude of costs for a car to develop. In this case, I would be more than surprised if the get within a 10x magnitude in the end for their cost estimate and EVER get it certified. Again: there are currently NO guidelines how to certify that...
“Several technical problems delayed the engine's certification test program and pushed the entire A400M aircraft program into further scheduling adjustments. The engine delays were primarily due to problems with completing the full authority digital engine control (FADEC) software to the satisfaction of the civil authorities. More specifically, Europrop determined in mid-2008 that the engine worked correctly, but the FADEC software still did not meet EASA requirements.[27] Since the A400M was intended for humanitarian missions, the aircraft also needed to have a civil certification. Europrop did not realize that this meant the FADEC also had to show traceability and accessibility, so EASA denied civil certification of the software. Because of this problem, the first A400M test aircraft, which was flight-ready by September 2008, was not permitted to fly. Europrop had to triple the size of its workforce to fix the issue,[28] resulting in a FADEC system consisting of over 275,000 lines of code, which was four times more complex than the FADEC software for the largest civil jet engine.[29] Other problems included numerous plane subsystems providing insufficient logging to the main aircraft computer.[30]”
That's a $250 flight which is mostly labour turned into a $70 flight without the labour. That's a marginal cost thing. It goes in a different part of the book.
I'm not saying this is doable but those numbers show nothing.
Pilots essentially work for free... It has become “almost industry standards” that young pilots PAY to fly. If I threw a wild guess at 30k USD salaries for these kind of “pilot jobs” with 1000h of flying per year, that puts labor costs to 30-50 USD/h. Maintenance and gas will by far outweigh that.
I don’t want to “shame” anybody in particular, but look up your local charter airlines and what they offer...
This can of course vary if there are rather complex requirements (e.g., a certain type rating, experience level etc.) - but being a pilot isn’t cool financially anymore. A small fraction ends up with “the large airlines” - but if you don’t, you are not in for the big money...
A new Cessna 172 SP with a Garmin G1000 glass cockpit and 180HP engine is 230,000$ that’s a significant upgrade over the 1970’s model for similar costs. Or you can spend 1/2 that on a The Cessna 162 Skycatcher with a 100HP engine and Garmin G300 Avionics.
100+k is expensive, but even a 162 is likely to be flying for 40+ years.
Yes, you do have to manually adjust the mixture. I have to admit, for the newer turbo cirruses its insanely easy to do. just have to pull it until your fuel flow matches a blue indicator on the display.
Avionics have certainly changed a lot, but basic aircraft structures and controls have been almost stagnant for decades (and most of the places they aren't static are largely related to electronics--even if you're lucky enough to have a FADEC running your engine, it's still controlling hardware that largely dates to the '50s or so).
That is super cool! I always wonder why we don’t have something like this if we hear a story about a nonresponsive aircraft eventually running out of fuel and flying into a mountain.
Totally agree about the certification. It's so annoying having to do stuff like managing the mixture. There is absolutely no chance I'm going to be better at that than even the most basic FADEC system.
Every car since the early 90s has done away with the choke, but for some reason in a 2020-built C172 I still have to do this... :X
I would argue that this insistence on safety certification makes actual flights less safe. Because it results in it not being done, leaving something to the pilot who is more error-prone than an automatic system.
I haven't heard of accidents in GA aircraft that were due to poor mixture (though I haven't looked, and it could technically cause one if you set it too explosive) but when I still flew there were several incidents reported by our maintenance company who complained about cylinder scoring due to overheting.
It would be much better to have this automatically managed, and more environmentally friendly too, because there is no need for 'full rich' settings during takeoff/landing, it would just adjust it to ensure sufficient cooling. The full-rich is just a precaution to avoid the pilot miscalibrating it during this critical flight phase (and to avoid overheating on the ground of course).
Rotax (Austrian company) actually builds great engines. They are heavily used in ultra-light airplanes with much more “relaxed” certification.
And you are right: in the ultra-light market, we see a giant boom because of lower certification hurdles and actually much safer systems: automated engine control, constant speed propellers, ballistic parachutes, etc. But Maximum Take-Off-Weight (MTOW) is 650 kg (Germany) that leaves you with a skinny wife/husband, some gas and light baggage...
Airplane engines are operating in tougher environments than car engines - hence bigger tolerances and less sophistication in some parts. They also must not fail. I mean, the engine has to be ok with starting up at 100 degrees F on the ground, climbing at maximum power to 10’000 ft, with below freezing temperatures within 15/20 min and descending down again with an urgy pilot pushing down the cylinder heat temperatures from 400 to 200 degrees fahrenheit within minutes (due to power reduction and increased speed cooling the engine).
Rotax engines are in fact fully certified aircraft engines as I understand it.
I am training for a PPL(G) in the UK (G is for Gyrocopter). There two proper certified makes of Gyro in the UK (Magni and AutoGyro), and all of the engines are Rotax. The newest is the 915, which includes a FADEC and turbo.
The fact that there are businesses that specialize in engine data monitor analysis and training on mixture operation says a ton about where GA is on this topic. There has been very little movement from the manufacturers on this.
That said highly recommend any materials from Mike Busch on this topic. Super knowledgeable and has moved the needle in getting people to understand how engines operate.
Lycoming/clones with fuel injection, you typically only mess with mixture when starting and stoping them.
There is of course a minority religious sect within GA who follow lean-of-peak theory and mess with their mixture constantly for better mileage (and possibly better wear, but that can go either way).
I can recommend Mike Busch on that topic (like somebody did earlier).
Leaning is not only for better mileage. The engines usually do not like a fat mixture for prolonged periods of time... I can’t recall all the reasons, but I think a couple of mayor ones were: 1) lead in the avgas will foul the spark plugs for rich mixture settings which is a safety risk, 2) exhaust gas temperatures will be lower which can lead to a build-up at the exhaust valves which can lead to wear and failure and 3) you end up with more dirt in your oil which makes engine corrosion even a bigger possibility...
Lean if you love your engine. And read Mike Busch - because he has the facts better than I do...
Some argue that the US won the WW2 War in the Pacific by running LoP with the P-38 Lightning.
Charles Lindbergh demonstrated to US pilots how to do it, based on his Atlantic crossing testing, and the result was double the range. This allowed the US to surprise and "outrange" Japanese island installations, and to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto at great range.
(I would argue that the full story hasn't been told of the latter, since the planning was literally perfect. Something like radio navigation would have been needed, or incredible luck.)
Outrange was a Japanese strategy to attack US ships without expecting a return attack because of the Japanese planes having greater range initially. ie. LoP disrupted Japan.
AOPA: Technique: Lean-of-peak engine operations
Keeping your cool on less fuel
I did hear about one accident due to mixture. They forgot to lean it out on a long flight and ran out of gas over a heavily treed area because they hadn't planned to run rich the whole way. If I recall correctly they survived.
They are the only reason you can step into an aircraft with a reasonable expectation of making it safely to your destination. Disasters are generally not caused by obvious large issues, but a multitude of smaller compounding, seemingly benign causes that could otherwise be easily dismissed. The massive body of regulation around aviation is a direct result of this. Each one is almost always a direct response to a particular incident that killed people.
That regulations are motivated by avoiding deaths does not mean that they are effective at that, or even if they are effective that they are worth the costs. Regulations that specify specific safety equipment, rather than specifying target error rates or bonds/liability, are the worst because they get enacted and then stay on the books for decades unchanged.
They aren’t motivated by it. They’re a result of it. Practically every rule or standard in the book can be traced to a crash. Mode C veil? Aeromexico 498, 82 dead. Radio comms standardization? Tenerife, 583 dead. CRM: United 173, 10 dead. Altitude requirements while being vectored to an approach (91.175(i)): TWA 514, 92 dead.
I could go on.
The answer to “why can’t we just” in aviation is “because people died.” The FAA doesn’t make rules just to make them. They make them because aviation is unforgiving and it will kill you and your passengers if you screw it up.
The engine needs to be able to run without electrical power, or you need to convince the FAA that your backup will fail with an extremely small probability. This is one of the reasons magnetos + carburetors are common in general aviation
In planes it’s called the “primer” - and starting up the engines can be quiiiite tricky if you don’t know your plane. Especially in cold weather. I know plenty of people that ignited a carburetor fire on startup and the planes were almost write offs...
Carbs have an advantage when you're not going inverted: You can gravity feed them, with no fuel pump required.It would be interesting to run the numbers on fuel pump engine outs vs carb icing engine outs to decide which one was worse.
I'm not a pilot but I have a lot of experience with carburetors in cars and motorcycles.
Carburetors are fiddly analog devices that require tuning by way of changing port sizes, needle valve sizes, float levels, mixture adjusters, throttle position adjusters, and more. Most of these require disassembly, and they clog and distort as the carburetor ages. Carburetors are highly sensitive to temperature and altitude. Tuning them is "more art than science".
Modern fuel injection systems have digital control and feedback loops using a variety of sensors. They provide optimal fueling in pretty much any condition. They may be more complicated, but (at least in vehicles) they're rock solid reliable compared to carburetors. They also have more graceful failure modes - if the O2 sensor craps out, the computer defaults to running rich and puts a warning light on the dash.
I'm pretty sure that if the carburetor was invented today, it would never be allowed to carry human traffic.
Carburetors are mainly susceptible to icing in normal use. Your engine can just start losing power and rapidly quit.
I once had carb icing in Hawaii at 2000' near Wheeler due mostly to humidity, and it was only thorough training that allowed me to figure that out fast enough to apply carb heat and save the plane.
A lot of inexperienced pilots just ride it down into the ground.
Dual fuel injectors prevent the icing problem (usually, unless your fuel actually crystallizes or freezes), but they have other failure modes like dirt or wear. Or forgetting to turn them on.
Seems like you lack of understanding about aviation in general.
You know why Piper/Cessna airplanes look exactly the same and keep using 50 year old engines? because of safety.
You know why pilot spends 30min pre-checking the aircraft? safety
You know why getting a pilot license is magnitudes more work? safety
Everything in aviation works around safety. If you want to innovate, sure, go ahead. If you want to innovate and do it safety and reliable, oops, that's going to cost you a lot and that's the same reason why there are not many players in aviation, engineering an aircraft or new powerplant is a big up-front cost with probably little return.
I'd argue that some of the difference between a pilot license and a driver's license would diminish if the difficulty of a driver's license more accurately reflected the challenges of operating a heavy vehicle in close proximity to pedestrians and other vehicles.
At the current standards, apparently the only hard requirement is a pulse.
Here are a few ways to kill you and all your passengers under instrument flight rules. Most of these involve a single mistake and a "controlled flight into terrain"
- Turn too early/late past an arbitrary point in space
- Turn the wrong direction
- Descend too early past an arbitrary point in space
- Use the wrong altimeter setting
- Failing to recognize and troubleshoot a failed instrument
- Failing to recognize signs of hypoxia
Not to mention dealing with emergency procedures while you don't do any of the above
Here is an example from a few years ago where a 777 missed a mountain by a few seconds after some non-standard instructions by ATC
I don't think the comparison between a regular driver's license and Instrument / IMC flight is reasonable. Perhaps more accurate to compare to a Commercial Driver's License with a HazMat load
Or driving a bus
Even in the aviation world, an IFR rating is largely considered the most difficult to get.
I would also add that in aviation, most accidents / incidents do _not_ result from a single error, but rather the stacking up of errors, which granted, are almost all variations of 'pilot error'
In a car, if in doubt you can just press and hold the brake pedal and you reach a safe condition. With the exception of motorways where you first have to pull over to the hard shoulder you can always do that.
In a plane you don't have that single goto option. You have to know the correct response to every possible situation and it's different in each case.
Plus, many mechanical failures in an aircraft will kill you. Most things in a car won't. You need to learn how to look after a plane, and what to check for.
You paint it to in a overly negative light, in my opinion. Much of the processes and procedures in place are not just functional, but behavioral training and conditioning to enable the pilot to troubleshoot mid-flight problems. It's like a highly capable human runtime exception debugger that will save the lives of everyone on board.
Some FAA regs and procedures are written in blood, but most are written in a way to prevent blood in the future.
I also like to echo the products Garmin is incorporating to increase the UX in the cockpit. They address some of the things you outline.
Remember, aviators aren't engineers, they are operators. The license requirement is there to ensure that pilots can do basic things like triage, malfunction diagnostic, ad hoc solution generation, energy management, communicate, etc.
Safety, as measured in fatalities per person per mile per year, has increased by a factor of 100x since the 1960s: traffic increased 10-fold, while fatalities fell by the same factor.
So they do seem to be doing something right...
The lack of chaanges may just indicate that the current paradigm is a rather good one. If anvbody came up with a working scramjet, regulation would be a minor hassle.
It's really physics that are limiting here: supersonic travel is too inefficient both economically and environmentally. And personal autonomous local transport (i. e. "flying car") is impossible without some sort of breakthrough on noise.
If US and EU are so buerocratic that innovation is impossible, there will still be a big market for viable VTOL electric planes in the rest of the world.
Just like most 3rd world countries these days have better 4G coverage than supposedly 1st world countries like Germany, or rural US.
Well, they should just use some of that VC money into pocketing (AKA lobbying) politicians to relax rules for these specific kind of airplanes, it has worked pretty well for the health industry in the US.
But the point is: even if politicians DO push that and even if the rules and regulations are written down - doesn’t mean that they will be granted a certification.
I mean, funnily enough, they don’t yet even KNOW what they will have to adhere to and achieve and start burning through 300MM USD in investor money...
Boeing, Airbus, Cessna, Cirrus and Piper have dozens of years of experience and KNOW how to get planes certified - and yet they essentially “re-use older certifications”...
Fun times when they get told they need two ballistic parachutes or they need at least 30 min safety backup for hover flight (e.g., each Cessna pilot has to make sure he has 30+min fuel reserve). Your engineers will commit suicide when you surprise them with “oh there was this ask...”
And then the weather - I mean, seriously, there are super strict rules about visual minimas for flights in the US and Europe. If you go instrument rated things get even more complex and bureaucratic. Not to mention that instrument flight is PROHIBITED in Germany below 2000+ft in uncontrolled airspace...
Ah, and I want to see that flying electric lawn-mower make his way across the Alps with 50kts headwind, freezing temperatures at cruising altitude. Pilots landing in Innsbruck need special training for “Foehn” Approaches and when the heavy winds roll over the city and airport you can hear the pilots pushing full throttle in final to counter the 2000+ft/min downwash.
> e.g., each Cessna pilot has to make sure he has 30+min fuel reserve
Well, this is pretty much standard practice!
Edit: Ah I misunderstood your comment. So yes it is standard.
However I could see this not applying to these guys, because with vertical landing capability they should be able to support field landings with really minimal risk.
VTOL and several other major capability differences really should change the certification process. Current certifications a designed around certain engineering constraints.
Nearly all existing planes operate with the same basic parts, thanks to the fuel. This dictates the possible drivetrains.
Reduced complexity can lead to drastic reconsideration.
While I don't expect change to be super fast, regulation tends to move faster than normal when major disruption starts showing up in practice (drones, self-driving vehicles, ...)
There is already a certification process for helicopters and autogyros, so VTOL capability alone is no reason for a different certification process. Helicopters require a 20 minute fuel reserve in VFR conditions and 30 minutes in IFR conditions.
Yes but these are automated, so they could be programmed to stay within X minutes of backup landing sites at all times, and altitudes to reach them easily.
No there will be a human pilot in control. It's going to be many years before fully automated aircraft are allowed to carry human civilian passengers through regular airspace.
This to me is a true moonshot and venture-worthy idea. Some of these concepts may be technically or economically infeasible—it's a major risk—but the pay-off for human wellbeing is phenomenal. I wish we celebrated more companies like these, but it seems like most of them are met with (well-earned) skepticism rather than genuine curiosity.
The world of atoms is harder than software, but it's awaiting disruptions like these.
I dunno man, im getting kind of jaded as I get older. "True moonshot" to me seems more like cheap clean water for everyone, or a real way to sequester carbon, not a way for rich folks to get to their country cottages faster.
Isn't the original literal moonshot (i.e. flying to the moon) more in the category of "things that don't help the working people" than "things that solve poverty/suffering"?
I know the meaning may have shifted over the years, but i've always interpreted it as "audacious and unlikely to succeed", rather than any particular moral / altruistic content.
True. This kind of technology would be a game changer for poorer rural communities with limited infrastructure and vast distances. Places like Greenland or East Congo. But this article did not mention this benefit at all. All they seem to care about is getting rich people between places they already can.
This is just basic marketing. You sell to the guy who can buy.
The Tesla company was started in 2003 to productionize the AC tzero. In 2005, the Roadster was conceived as the product it became and Tesla and Lotus tied up.
The Secret Master Plan arrived in 2006. So yeah, that's just how it goes. Because there is an army of people who lament things targeted at rich people, but that army does not participate in progress, either in money or in sweat.
The intelligent futurist always ignores them because they contribute nothing.
That makes the current state of our humanity kind of sad, doesn’t it.
It is also not true. There are numerous innovations targeted for the betterment of us all. The three-point seat-belt is a quick one that comes to mind. The field of medicine has tax funded research innovating at a remarkable frequency, where the target beneficiaries is all humans who need it. Expensive infrastructures like roads, train networks, electric grids, and trash disposal systems are build around the world for everyone who needs, not just the once who can afford it.
But we do lament things that are target at rich people, because these rich people are literally destroying the world with their over-consumption. They certainly don’t deserve more nice things that the rest of the world is paying for.
It's always been the case. We linked the world via trade in search of making a rich man's food taste better. I don't think it's sad. I think it's wonderful. The rich 'subsidize' progress for everyone.
All of the things you mention (except the 3-point seatbelt, perhaps) have a story just like this one with some guy saying things just like this guy and a veritable shower of lament with no effort behind it.
This sounds like an HN version of trickle down theory which I thought had been thoroughly debunked by economists.
It’s funny but, I’ve always been under the impression that the opposite were true in standard economics, the poor—with their labour—are the once who subsidize the rich. I find it hard to believe that the economics of progress are any different. Let me draw up some napkin economics:
Scenario A: The poor pay disproportionaly higher taxes then the rich. Taxes pay for infrastructure, education, etc. The rich uses the infrastructure and the higher skilled workforce to work on a thing. The rich get richer on that thing. The rich give them self a higher percentage of the profit then the workers or the state. The rich just got richer because of subsidy from the poor.
Scenario B: The poor pay disproportionaly higher taxes then the rich. Taxes pay for infrastructure, education, etc. A team of PhD students (the poor) and their assistance (the poor) spend thousands of work-hours to figure out how a thing can be improved. A company uses their findings free of charge to deliver a better product. The company does not give the students and their assistance a fair share of the profits. The company pays their shareholders (the rich) the majority of the profits. The rich just got richer because of subsidy from the poor.
“Trickle down theory” has not been “debunked” by economists because it’s not an actual economic theory. It’s a pejorative used to criticize tax cuts.
Also the fact that technological progress/experiment typically (but not always) targets the top end of the market and works its way down is not controversial.
This phenomenon is also not what most people mean by “trickle down economics” as it relates to the pejorative against tax cuts which, again, isn’t a real theory peddled by credible economists.
I'm not sure about the medicine example. There are many cases of diseases being ignored because despite being widespread there isn't much money in treating them.
This is an effect of massive wealth inequality. In some cases, you could run a more profitable business with Jeff Bezos as your only customer than building products for an entire country's worth of people.
Sometimes I imagine if our collective minds were put together to figure out some of those basic - civilization wide problems like clean water for all, clean energy for all, or carbon sequestration. Imagine that world...
Who is going to feed these members of the collective mind while they are working? Who is going to pay for the water, electricity, compute power they use while solving the world problems?
Access to transportation is a stronger predictor of economic mobility than growing up in a two parent household, early test scores or the crime rate. So yes, it is in fact, extremely socially beneficial.
I’m not so sure. “A cheap and easy way to clean water” is probably the easiest Kickstarter scheme you can pull off. So naturally you will hear a lot of ideas, and none of them will work.
But lets say that your right on your first point, and a general solution exists. Then your second point is most definitely false. It is not the problem that nobody wants to pay for it. It is a problem that the people who need it can’t pay for it, and that nobody is willing to give it to them. See it’s a problem of distribution, not of demand.
That sounds like a "true green revolution". Moonshots are, to me, technology projects supercharged by heavy investing to bypass present market forces.
Sure, perhaps your age may indicate a preference for that kind of project but DDE was 70 when he started the moonshot so it's less likely to be age and more likely to be a predisposition to that sort of thing.
Helicopters and ambulances are already pretty good at that. This vehicle seems to have some added restrictions (like landing capabilities) which would make it less good.
Helicopters are really expensive to operate though, so perhaps this vehicle could fit in if frequent flights would have to be made to a place without a road connection, such as to provide an emergency relief after big disaster.
Where it could be a game-changer is transporting people and light cargo in rural communities with limited infrastructure, such as East Congo or Greenland.
We can easily do both those things already, the problem is nobody wants to pay for it, because the people most affected by bad water/hunger/climate change are the people with no money.
Moonshots afaik are risky ideas/ventures that have the potential to "moon" i.e. make a shit-ton of money. Solving a problem with no funding can't be a moonshot by that definition.
> With a range of up to 300km (186 miles), we’ll be able to focus on connecting entire regions with high-speed transport, rather than trying to persuade you that we’re quicker than a crosstown journey on an underground train or bike.
As an air-taxi skeptic, I have to say I am refreshed to see a startup actually spend more than five minutes figuring out the market fitness problem. Focusing on bypassing geographic barriers seems to be a much better use case.
I am still pretty skeptical on the idea overall. Everyone drools over the travel times and not enough on the confounding factors. Getting to and from the taxi. Dealing with regulations. We can't even make public transit in dense urban cores work - why would this much harder idea work?
I find it amusing that one of their examples of bypassing noise ordinance restrictions is to follow existing infrastructure routes. The irony seems lost on them.
> I find it amusing that one of their examples of bypassing noise ordinance restrictions is to follow existing infrastructure routes. The irony seems lost on them.
Yeah, I noticed this too in their depiction of a hypothetical Palo Alto vertiport. The caption “high-throughput vertiport with intermodal last-mile connectivity” made me think it would ideally be located by the Caltrain station, but the road in the illustration didn’t look like El Camino and there were no train tracks in sight. I later realized during their “low noise footprint” discussion that they were depicting a vertiport located towards East Palo Alto and using 101 as the flight corridor.
My guess is they recognize the irony but are trying to strike a judicious balance.
Public transit in urban cores is a much harder problem. The politics of it from funding to allocation of road space are seen as a zero sum game among the participants with a well funded automotive lobby sabotaging the process.
By contrast, getting approval to build a small footprint vertiport and use some unused or underutilized air rights seems easy.
This isn't going to be certified and allowed for part 135 operations inside at least a decade. Boeing can't keep their jets from crashing due to simple trim control software, what makes anyone think the FAA is going to go along with these flights over densely populated areas?
This feels a lot like when everyone was scrambling to start helicopter taxi services which promptly crashed and burned... Helicopters were a mature and well understood technology then, but the realities of operating in urban areas under a variety of weather conditions just doesn't allow for these services to be A) safe or B) economical.
I wonder what would happen if the car (or something similar had never been invented) and someone came out with a modern saloon today.
"It'll revolutionise personal transport but we estimate it'll kill 40,0000 people in a horrible way per year"
Like many things that are harmful in some way cars got grandfathered in (as did alcohol and tobacco) - if someone came out with an equivalent of alcohol with the same side effects it would be banned immediately as well.
In fact the UK did exactly that with the psychoactive substances laws - we didn't ban a particular drug we banned any drug with a set of side effects - largely because the chemists got really good at tweaking the underlying chemical structure enough to evade the law.
The word you are looking for is pleasure. The only types of drugs that are 100% illegal are drugs that have no purpose besides making you feel pleasurable sensations. Horrible side effects (e.g. chemo) and high chance of addiction (opioids, amphetamines, etc) and more are all allowed as long as the purpose of the effect of the drug is not (solely) pleasure.
Alcohol, and increasingly in some parts of the world Cannabis, are the exceptions (I understand both of these substances have real and potential uses in healthcare, but they are perceived as recreational). These are legal or quasi-legal only because they are both already in wide use and getting society on board to enforce a ban is difficult to impossible (depending on the society, a few do) . Tabacco is also on the list, but seems to be falling off somewhat.
You can throw around statistics but the reality is aircraft receive far more scrutiny. Nobody wants to sit helplessly as one of these things flies them into the side of a skyscraper or watch as one falls out of the sky onto them.
Is that fair? Maybe?
Is that reality? Yes.
This isn't like the invention of cars. We have had all manner of airplanes for over 100 years and know how they work. This is like the NYC helicopter taxi boom in the late 70s and 80s where a number of fiery and high profile crashes put an end to the industry.
One big difference is that these EVTOL aircraft are small enough that they can use ballistic parachutes for an extra degree of safety. They usually also have more redundancy due to distributing thrust between many small electric motors. There has been a lot more research into autonomous drone flight than autonomous helicopter flight as well, which is crucial for safety and keeping costs low. I could be totally wrong, but I feel like battery, motor, flight control, and composite material technologies are finally good enough for EVTOLs to start making sense. Just like the tech boom of the late 90s there will be a lot of investment, most of which will be lost, but the survivors will have a big impact on society.
Maybe. To me, the cost is a bigger factor. If you can show helicopters have the same fatality rate, but has the same price of an Uber, I'm sure a ton of people would use it.
It seems to me price is the larger barrier for most people when it comes to air travel.
Generally speaking, even if cars crash into buildings the building itself is not immediately unsafe; injured people and a broken storefront, but the building is not on fire or collapsing. Unless something has changed dramatically, planes crashing into buildings generally start fires, and generally cause concern about the structural integrity of said building in the immediate aftermath.
> On October 11, 2006, a Cirrus SR20 aircraft crashed into the Belaire Apartments in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City, at about 2:42 p.m. EDT (18:42 UTC). The aircraft struck the north side of the building causing a fire in several apartments,[2][3] which was extinguished within two hours.[4]
> Both people aboard the aircraft were killed in the accident: New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle[3] and his certificated flight instructor.[5][6] Twenty-one people were injured, including eleven firefighters. An apartment resident, Ilana Benhuri, who lived in the building with her husband, was hospitalized for a month with severe burns incurred when the post-impact fire engulfed her apartment.[7][8]
> On October 13, 2006, two days after the crash, the FAA banned all fixed-winged aircraft from the East River corridor unless in contact with local air traffic control. The new rule, which took effect immediately, required all small aircraft (with the exception of helicopters and certain seaplanes) to seek the approval of and stay in contact with air traffic control while in the corridor. The FAA cited safety concerns, especially unpredictable winds from between buildings, as the reason for the change.
Most car crashes do not result in 2 dead, 21 injured, and property damage to several residences.
It depends on society's tolerance for death honestly. You're not going to be VTOLing a 737s worth of people so you're probably talking about the number of fatalities in a mid size SUV. People would care a lot less if the routes didn't take them over dense urban areas and the chance of one coming down on their head is super low.
It really depends on what it falls on or smashes into and if the VTOL has experienced lithium battery fire or not. If you use it to move between cities it could probably work just fine.
Ok - maybe those hating me for the comment: FAA validation for my German license took a day and I got a plastic card license after 6 weeks with a preliminary one right away.
Changing ownership of a plane took me 6! weeks with the LBA.
I guess that there are potentially 10+% of all planes in Germany operated with an American N-registration (owned by a trust) because the maintenance overhead and paperwork headache is so much lower.
Imagine registering your German car with a German license plate in the US and setting up a German entity so you could pull that off - how big would the difference in pain have to be?
Lots of things are in fairly close proximity to highways, this is not really a solution. Crashing into the tower block next to a highway is still pretty bad.
Lots of things in dense areas also are not necessarily on an easy route near a highway, so if that's the limitation you run into Concorde's old problem of "where can you actually fly this thing?"
I'm skeptical about the rest of it, but the article lightly covers using existing transport corridors (waterways, rail tracks, and to a lesser priority arterial roadways) as routes for these medium-range flights that explicitly avoid populated areas.
My issue with this is that most transport corridors are
1. not very wide in the first place. Any air vehicle could cross the width of your standard rail line or highway or river in seconds.
2. Surrounded by intensive land uses, because the transportation corridor itself provides valuable access. So vehicles don't have to go very far off the right of way to crash into something valuable where lots of people are.
> Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet, at a cost of around $250 at launch and less in the near future.
Therein lies the problem with public transportation in the US. What do you do after you get to Tahoe, Santa Cruz, or wherever? Most of these places are devoid of functional public transportation, and rental car companies have long lines and routinely screw people over and overbook.
And will the FAA allow you with your tent stakes, hiking poles, bear spray, and camping stove with fuel on the Lilium Jet? (What else are you supposed to do in Tahoe?)
You need to actually go from your house to the Lilium jet starting point (at least 30 minutes or more in these complex urban setups) and you need to be in advance for the take-off, eventual security checks and security briefing (like any plane).
After air turbulences, then you are at the Lake Tahoe stuck in the middle of nowhere.
You can take your Instagram picture and wait for the next plane to go back.
Was that really worth saving 1 hour in your life ?
The alternative is to gather with friends on the morning, go get your friends with your car on the way, have a lunch picnic, have a tour around in the nature, discover unexpected places. Come home for dinner.
No stress, no schedule, quality time with friends.
Also I don't know about Lilium but one of my biggest gripes about Amtrak and other train infrastructure in the US, besides the sheer slow speed, is the complete lack of basic human necessities at the endpoints of travel. You get off the train and get basically thrown into a dilipidated, desolate parking lot full of locked cars, next to a locked building with no food, often not even bathrooms, no rain shelter, no bus to downtown for an hour, no rental bicycles, and sometimes no signal.
That is a world of difference from Europe, China, or Japan, when you're usually thrown into a food court when you get off the train, and buses leaving every 10 minutes to everywhere you could possibly want to go. Planes replicate that drop-off experience in the US, and Lilium will need to as well in order for it to be a comfortable experience.
That goes for even for suburban trips. How do you get from wherever it drops you off in Palo Alto to say, Facebook or Google's offices? Or the thousand other companies that don't have company shuttles?
The point is, the food court and shops usually make the train companies money because they pay high rent. That only works when enough passengers come through, which I'd guess might be the problem in the US?
I guess. But what if they started with low rent, just enough to break even? Added comfort to passengers might increase the number of passengers to the train system itself to help get the cycle going.
They need to come up with an accompaning service which allows you to arrange for someone with a car to arrive and drive you to your desired final destination.
Or in the case of Lake Tahoe the area ski resort, hotel or casino might provide shuttle service.
Shuttle service is not adequate. Most people do more than just visit a hotel or ski resort. I think the "easy" US-side solution to this problem would be for there to exist a better, more competent car rental service that doesn't require lining up or saying "no" 10 times to humans trying to offer you add-ons, is available 24 hours, is guaranteed, and is located within a 10 minute walk of wherever the Lilian drops you off.
Kind of like ZipCar, but ZipCar has zero cars in Tahoe, 2 cars for the entirety of Fresno (wtf), and cost twice as much as Enterprise for a daily rental despite the fact that they don't have to hire as many humans, which is backwards. ZipCar should be costing half as much as a place with brick-and-mortar and human agents.
I don’t quite see how you can spend only $10 million in capex and get 1 million passengers per year. With 4 passengers per flight that’s about 700 flights per day or about 1 flight per minute. That’s a lot compared to existing heliports that handle 50 or so flights per day. Even with a 15 minute turnaround time you will need parking space for at least 15 aircraft.
I wish they showed estimated prices for each of the routes.
If it's $100/flight I might use it once per month to get to Santa Cruz or Lake Tahoe.
If it's $20/flight I might consider LIVING in one of those places and commuting to work.
Edit: Oops, didn't see that they did. Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet, at a cost of around $250 at launch
> If we imagine for a moment that you work in an office in Palo Alto, you could now choose to live in Hayward (5 min flight, $25), downtown San Francisco (10 min flight, $50), or even San Rafael (15 min flight, $70).
> Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet, at a cost of around $250 at launch and less in the near future. It might not be something you’d do every weekend, but saving you three hours each way might well make it worthwhile for an occasional trip.
> Even at tech salaries those are expensive commutes.
Are they really that expensive?
I was paying 40$ on Lyft one-way to office earlier this year, which was a huge part of my transportation costs (economically speaking, I should've driven, but this allowed me to take the bullet back in the evening, which beat driving by a lot).
50$ for SF -> PA isn't that much more expensive than Lyft in 2019.
I think we'll also have to see how things shake out in terms of office cultures post-covid, as I think there might be some attitude changes around partial work-from-home. I don't think my current employer would be likely to go all-remote, but I could maybe see them going to hot desks with less-than-100% seating capacity on the expectation that most people only come into the office a couple days a week, and the economics of this kind of pricing definitely shift if it's not a daily expense.
I mean, not really. I way paying over $500 commuting by train into NYC. That comes to $25/day assuming I work 5 days a week. So, I would say it's pretty reasonable.
Most people do not have the years to devote to becoming a good pilot, much less get a new category cert, so I find that these sorts of prototypes have a very limited audience.
"Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet"
... ah, mountain flying with batteries, what could possibly go wrong.
Also, I find the lack of a vertical stabilizer this plane to be an odd choice. It seems like they have a ballistic chute for backup when the power fails, but it might be hard to deploy that when you cannot do any spin recovery.
Yeah, I worry that a lot of the use cases are in the most complicated and dangerous flight environments (mountains, big cities), even before you consider things like weather, airspace management, power margin at altitude...
>Also, I find the lack of a vertical stabilizer this plane to be an odd choice.
Not to mention any form of traditional aerodynamic control surface: "With 36 single-stage electric motors providing near-instantaneous thrust in almost any direction, control surfaces, such as rudders, ailerons or a tail, aren't required."
They've really doubled down on their VTOL shindig. Seems like a pretty big gamble making an aircraft that's entirely dependent on its propulsion system for basic aerodynamic stability and control (I'm also curious if the wings would make noticeably less lift in a glide). "Intrinsically simple design," huh?
Given enough redundancy in the powertrain and power, I think it's probably going to be more reliable mechanically than the average piston-engined light aircraft.
Where I would really worry, of course, is the software driving all of that. It's very likely it will need some sophisticated control systems and may not even be inherently stable aerodynamically.
And a ballistic parachute is not super safe in mountainous areas where the ground is not flat. With the typical ballistic parachute there is zero control on where you land. And even in the best circumstances the landing is pretty rough, it's more like a last resort.
However engine failure can also occur on fuel-powered aircraft. And at least this thing has a whole lot of engines so it could afford the failure of a few. The batteries could be subdivided in sections.
Ignoring hard failures (like a battery case overheat+rupture)...
Running out of fuel is, unfortunately, not as uncommon as it should be. Most aircraft glide quite well (10:1 glide ratio). I really cannot tell with this plane, but the lack of control surfaces make it a meteor.
Looking at their proposed map and one of the destinations is the Yosemite Valley floor.
Not just no... fuck no. I absolutely do not want what is an already awesome place to be fucked up even more by someone installing an airport (vertical or not) in the middle of the valley floor.
If flying in this involves the all-cavity search like for all other passenger flights then forgetaboutit. I'll take a train ride 3x as long just to avoid the hassle of the airport experience.
Or by the time it becomes reality, certainly highway self-driving will be a thing and you can take 2x the time but sleep/surf/work/whatever over 95% of the distance.
That said, it is so light that maybe it would be in range of consumer cost.
> If flying in this involves the all-cavity search like for all other passenger flights then forgetaboutit.
It shouldn't need that; you can already forgo all that for a private jet/helicopter flight today. You're not going to take down a skyscraper and a few thousand people with one of these; it's more like crashing a car.
I work in aviation. Maintenance FAA regulation tracking. Aside from all the great points about safety some things to note A lot of people here seem to forget that for the miles and hours in flight versus the costs of AC/upkeep are VERY different from that of a car.
You spend hours and hours in a car you buy. Most small AC have a TTAF of 300 hours or less. And they are YEARS old. Literally nothing is wrong with a carb engine. The planes get fairly good efficiency compared. People also seem to think that planes are being bought at sold in the volumes of cars. Most AC are fairly older. This is why innovations like avionics are up while airframe and engines are low.
I get it that it feels like there's less innovation but I would gather to say there's more. Especially when you get out of the turboprop market. It's essentially the motorcycle industry versus the cars in the road.
Electric motors should be a lot easier to maintain.
The Lilium jets also have a lot of small engines, allowing for multiple failures in flight.
A lot of commenters are also missing the fact that Lilium plans to use pilots initially, until regulations allow for autonomous operations. (it's not mentioned in the article)
I'm sure there will be plenty of problems, but it will be interesting to see if the idea is viable.
I think one of the biggest deal-breakers will actually be noise. Those things are loud.
This is bad because it doesn’t scale up the way mass transit does. Only a few people will be able to use it, and those will be the people with the most resources and power. As long as the people in charge can avoid the problems that the little people have, they don’t pay much attention to them. What we need is solidarity. We need systems that work for everyone, not one excellent system for the few and half-hearted make-do for the rest.
I love this idea. I don't envy the work ahead of them at all though.
In my career I've worked in both mechanical and software engineering and IMO the mechanical engineering involved here is daunting. Caveat: when I was in that industry 3D printing was just around the corner and you could print a part per day and the machine cost $80k, so probably creating and testing prototypes is far more pleasant now.
This looks like a truly fun project to work on that's full of frustration, waiting, scrapped parts, broken CAD models, regulatory bs, good regulations that save lives, tons of changes in direction, mercurial investors, endless naysayers, and all done while considering that chances of success are small. Honestly it looks fun as hell.
To me this marketing just looks like a slightly less expensive helicopter. It's great that we can travel to our ski trips or vacations a bit faster but it's not going impact the mobility needs of 95% of people. Why isn't anyone working on improving commutes through dense cityscapes? It's obviously a much harder problem but it's also a more important one.
> Why isn't anyone working on improving commutes through dense cityscapes?
As someone who's been on and off involved in moving-people-technology, it's two-fold: it's "in the physical world" so you have all of the attendant problems (objections from people around the proposed construction, overlapping government bodies, cost, and that "the real world" isn't "sexy" for investment).
And second, if you make something that's very efficient but looks too much like public transport, there's a whole market of people, at least in North America, who simply won't ride it. Where I live, I had several coworkers who lived next to a bus route or train line that went directly to our offices and they'd still pay for a daily Uber.
Integrated light rail/subways that are well designed and well run are pretty much the best mass transport solution we've come up with.
The tricky part is the well designed and well run part and as you alluded to they run into a lot of real world issues during construction.
They also really need to be state run at break-even or even subsidized since the benefit is the general increase in economic productivity across the whole region rather than an opportunity to make a lot of money.
I absolutely guarantee this will be anything but less expensive.
You can get an R44 with better range and payload for a couple hundred thousand. This will be an electronic nightmare requiring extensive certification and maintenance efforts. Cessna can't even sell ridiculously old designs for reasonable prices due to certification overhead.
The operating cost per hour of an r44, according to some quick googling, is $190. The cost after ownership is too high, and probably the reason that everyone still has cars instead of helicopters in their garage. Reliability and maintenance will be the most important thing here and will determine their success. And that's notoriously tough in the aviation market.
It might be less expensive due to the electrical powerplant. It will take a while before there is enough of a track record to know for sure. But, for example, electric cars are much lower maintenance than gas cars, as Tesloop as shown.
Disregarding that they have a lot of free "Goodwill" replacements - their post-warranty maintenance costs are about $0.17/km - my ICE Ford is at $0.09/km over the past seven years post-warranty. (And I think I've included more items in my spreadsheet, since I've got the cost of things like windshield wipers and fob batteries, which they omit.)
edit: I thought looking at entire lifespan of the Tesla might be unfair since that includes a much longer period when it's significantly higher mileage than my car, but taking only an equivalent post-warranty period is even worse, it's about $0.24/km in maintenance over that time frame.
Yeah, what I'm not clear on is: what's the cost to fly from SF to Lake Tahoe in a helicopter? If it's a lot more than the $250 that Lilium is promising, what is it that makes Lilium cheaper? Is it just the up-front investment in scale and the route network?
For an owner operator, an R22 and maybe an R44 would be able to do SF to Lake Tahoe for well under $250. For a charter service you could probably get a commercial operator to do it for maybe around ~$500 and there are definitely some inefficiencies you could remove there. Lilium is on crack if they actually think $250 is going to be the all in cost for a private flight though. You don't just spin up a new air frame and 135 operation and make money at those numbers...unless you pull an Uber on steroids and open the VC floodgates...
Unrealistic business plan estimations not factoring in the true costs of operating an aerial vehicle...
It’s a bit like “soon to be plane owners” that don’t quite pay attention when they are told the spark plug for their Cessna is 50USD, they need 8 for 4 cylinders and replace them rather frequently ;-)
Changes when they realize that those companies chartering out planes for less than 200 USD/h probably don’t make loads of cash but just keep track of actual expenses, have a high utilization and capable maintenance staff...
> It’s a bit like “soon to be plane owners” that don’t quite pay attention when they are told the spark plug for their Cessna is 50USD, they need 8 for 4 cylinders and replace them rather frequently ;-)
That's supposed to be the promise of electric aircraft: almost all serviceable parts go out the window, just as with electric cars. Construction and maintenance costs are reduced to a fraction of what they are for mechanical systems. And because these are VTOL, ground expenses are likewise reduced.
Batteries are still rather expensive, though, and energy density sucks. The advantages may not be able to compensate, at least not sufficiently to hit a price point that appeals to a wider, non-millionaire market.
Ok, the only certified batteries you can install in a Cessna is like 500 USD and it literally dies after 2 years of (not heavy) usage. It’s worse and less sophisticated that your 50 USD car battery.
I don’t want to sound like an aviation cynic, but for pilots (even in the non-commercial sector) spending 50 USD for a spark plug or 500 USD for a battery is “normal”.
Tiny bit of innovation and disruption = very very expensive in aviation.
Some israeli startup is doing replaceable aluminum air batteries. Also there are probably low-cycle solid state lithium designs that can start to approach the needed density, it would take a really good recycling loop though.
A medium helicopter charter might be $1200/hour, SF to Tahoe is ~130 nm, so ~1.5 hours each way.
Of that $1200/hr, $150/hr is fuel, $50/hr is engine maintenance, and maybe $100/hr airframe maintenance. These scale linearly with time. For fixed costs, a new helicopter is ~$3 million, so figure $300k per year in depreciation, taxes, insurance, and finance costs. Add another $150k/year for pilot salary and training. If you find lots of customers and keep the helicopter busy, say 1000 hours a year, there's $450 an hour for fixed costs.
The real key to reducing costs is increasing utilization, this keeps the fixed costs reasonable. Batteries and motor will likely improve fuel+engine cost, but also hurt utilization because charging takes more time than refueling. A large network improves utilization. But building a network, with various types of demand (leisure on weekends, business commute during weekdays, cargo during off-peak periods?), is the real challenge.
> Why isn't anyone working on improving commutes through dense cityscapes?
Uber, Lyft, Musk's Boring Company, and all their variants... there are tons of people working on improving commutes.
But IMO there isn't a technical problem to solve. It's social and political. We shouldn't be asking about improving commuting, but reducing its necessity and distance.
I would have thought any new transport technology would be heavily automated - from a brief look these require 1 pilot per 4 passengers.
Not that it would be easy, I'm just surprised something so ambitious doesn't also include automation.
At first glance I would have thought automating a small plane would be easier than automating a car - for one thing there are fewer things to crash into.
Does that kind of regulation inhibit progress in some domains, sure - is the cost of the loss of that progress worth it against the likely outcome of de-regulating it absolutely.
Safety regulations are written in blood and when organisations like the FCC, FDA etc fall down on the job people die.
I want my cyberpunk aircar as much as the next geek but not at the price of having them fall out the sky because some programmer made an error at the end of a 70hr work week to make a deadline for shipping.
This seems very absolutist. If we assume the technology exists to make this safe, there are a number of factors that would make this obviously less risky:
4 people per aircraft reduce the number of lives at risk from any particular issue. That doesn't mean the FAA can be 100x as cavalier as they are with an A380, but it does mean the worst possible likely outcome is not as bad.
Short flights - easily predictable weather patterns.
Elimination of pilot error - obviously replaced with computer error, but still.
And as I said elsewhere, the ability to test to destruction.
I'm sure it would be a decade-long task. But I'm not sure it's monumentally harder than either the process for piloted aircraft, or the task of automating the aircraft in the first place.
And you can much more easily demonstrate the limits of an automated aircraft. Simulated bird-strikes, thunderstorms, power-outages, emergency landing in fields, blinding by laser-pointers, stray bullets or whatever scenario the FAA throws at you can be done without the risk to the (non-existent) human pilots, just the cost to VCs.
Whether that argument would work on them is a different matter, but I find it quite convincing.
This sounds like they found an entry way into the market. Having traveled in Switzerland, hopping on this between offices Geneva - Zurich would be a no brainer.
If anyone at lilium is reading. Please contact our firm. Would love to contribute to this moonshot and allocate some of ouwr UI/UX firm’s resources to contribute and help simplify the software side of things. (See bio)
A kilogram of gasoline has over 5 times the energy density of a kilogram lithium-air battery. Fuel weight will control air travel range for the forseeable future.
Only place in the US I can think of that matches that is rural Alaska. Lots of little islands and communities where bushplanes are a primary transportation mode.
I remember seeing a row of houses built along a grassy strip that operated as a runway. Like their combined backyards were literally the airstrip.
I feel these plans are ignoring a big component of why we don't have tons of heliports in urban areas. Noise. Even with electric pushing enough air to move is going to make a fair amount.
They certainly didn't ignore that aspect - right there, in the middle of the article, they mention that the aircraft has been designed for low noise, the equivalent of a truck passing by.
Flying a single person or two, with VTOL? That's an incredibly high expenditure of energy per person-meter traveled. Much higher than regular aviation, which itself requires a lot of energy.
Considering the prospects for decreasing availability of fossil fuel, and questions of climate impact, it seems to me that this is not sustainable on a mass scale, at all. I would guess this initiative will either become an alternative for the very-rich to using helicopters, or not get off the ground.
(... ok, that pun was a little underhanded, I admit.)
I can't remember who said it or on which podcast, but they basically said that VTOL is the real game changer, not autonomous driving. Sure autonomous driving might be able to shave some time off of your commute, but you are still in a car and still driving on roads. VTOL is what really allows you to experience what the ultra wealthy with access to private jets and helicopters have experienced. Getting out of the city to a 'vacation' spot in no time at all.
Until you invent anti-gravity, VTOL will always be (i) very energy intensive, and (ii) and very disruptive to the surrounding environment. This is both in terms of noise and air turbulence.
Self driving is something that may be solved and can become practical for popular use with current and near-term foreseeable technology. Everyday mass use VTOL is not. Sorry, the Jetsons lied to you.
Lilium boasts:
"As well as a customized electric motor, it contains innovative liner technology which means the aircraft will be inaudible from the ground when flying above 400m and will only be as loud as a passing truck while taking off."
https://lilium.com/the-jet
>Everyday mass use VTOL is not. Sorry, the Jetsons lied to you.
Many companies are working on this problem currently. I would say consumer accessible, piloted electric VTOL is closer than fully self driving vehicles.
The problem is a landing spot in the city and noise. Most buildings no longer have helicopter pads and neighbors are not going to appreciate the amount of dirt your VTOL kicks up whenever you leave for vacation.
> The Lilium Jet engine has been fully developed in our in-house sound lab where we have used proprietary acoustic modelling software, simulated on high-performance computing clusters, to optimize its design. As well as a customized electric motor, it contains innovative liner technology which means the aircraft will be inaudible from the ground when flying above 400m and will only be as loud as a passing truck while taking off. On the ground, the aircraft will move to and from parking bays using separate electric motors, allowing it to be as quiet as a typical electric car.
The usage of future tense (will be) makes me somewhat skeptical
They are investing a billion dollar to develop a plane from scratch in order to launch a taxi service.
This strikes as quite an odd thing to do and my bet is that either one of the big guys (Airbus, Boeing, etc) will launch a competing aircraft and kill them, or they will be acquired. Even if they continue as an aircraft manufacturer I am doubtful about the mix with being a taxi company.
It also seems an awful lot of money to develop one small plane.
There's one area where I'd love a shorter trip: travelling to the international airport.
I live in South East London and it can easily take over an hour to get to Heathrow, which really eats into a weekend if travelling for work. I'd love to be able to go to a more local vertigo, check my luggage and just have to clear international security at the main airport.
Its already been mentioned here how regulated this industry is, and they aren't going to be able to pull the Uber model of asking for forgiveness instead of permission.
Hate to be the naysayer, but last mile is going to be tricky. 10 mins from Palo Alto to SF sounds fantastic. But if it takes you 15 mins to get from home to the flight, and 15 mins from flight to wherever you need to be in SF, then the total of 40 mins doesn't sound so great when you factor in the price.
Why Gyrocopter is not more popular today than ever is beyond me. It's probably the most efficient and effective way to air travel for short distances.
The ultralight Gyrocopter can fly with unleaded 95 Octane and with strong wind of more than 40 knots (see circumnavigation of of Iceland) and its wonderful technology [1],[2].
The thing that concerns me (and probably any regulatory body as well): a conventional helicopter can make a controlled landing without power. This plane will rely on a ballistic chute? So flying over urban areas at low altitudes, after a power failure it will just fall down wherever the wind takes it?
> If we imagine for a moment that you work in an office in Palo Alto, you could now choose to live in Hayward (5 min flight, $25), downtown San Francisco (10 min flight, $50), or even San Rafael (15 min flight, $70).
This is a strange example to include in here – that's a pretty expensive (one-way?) commute.
yeah, looking at the size of their aircraft and their proposed "vertiports", they're not suggesting that hundreds of thousands of people can move to san rafael and commute to sf, they're talking about more like 12 people. and tbh they could probably find a dozen people in the bay area with a $36k/year commuting budget
Right? Because SF isn't already expensive enough without having to compensate employees for $700/week ($36,000/yr) in commuting expenses. (Or for employees to be able to justify that on their own dime...)
It wouldn't have to be every day; it'd save 1hr+ over driving or train; many people in the Bay Area market for this have an effective rate of compensation over $100/hour.
With sufficiently-enlightened regulation (for which I wouldn't hold my breath), these could run, for example, from the rooftops of Google buildings in Mountain View to the rooftops of their Embarcadero-SF building. Or downtown Palo Alto to a downtown SF pier. Etc.
Here's hoping they refine their proposed Bay Area network before launch... seems crazy to have a station in San Gregorio (vs. Halfmoon bay) and none in the Oakland/Emeryville area nor in the area around SJC airport
I'm curious if there will be a market for this--plenty of current production aircraft can work perfectly well as air taxis, but the service has only caught on in niche markets (island-hopping float planes, some helicopter services, arguably a lot of bush flying). Decreasing the cost by an order of magnitude might go some distance to open the market up--I can't see this succeeding without a drastic advantage in operating costs over traditional aircraft (I think the jury's still out on whether electric propulsion is a significant advantage here, and VTOL requirements are a big disadvantage).
The case for VTOL in particular becomes a lot less convincing when you're primarily looking at the kind of regional travel Lilium mentions here--why not just electrify an existing FW aircraft and operate out of existing infrastructure (https://www.harbourair.com/harbour-air-and-magnix-announce-s...)? Small airports are pretty ubiquitous, and going through an FBO largely eliminates long waits for security and boarding (not to mention alleviating some of the last-mile transportation issues).
I can't stress enough that nothing is simple about VTOL--even if this aircraft lacks complex hydraulic, fuel, and oil systems, any failure in the (electromechanical?) control actuation systems will likely prevent transition to/from hovering flight. It looks like the control surfaces may be designed to have multiple, independent segments (hopefully with redundant actuators) to mitigate these kinds of failures (aside: it's fascinating to see a GA aircraft designed to be dependent on TVC for basic stability and control), but a loss of even one of these segments might not allow a safe power margin for a vertical landing near max gross weight, and it doesn't look like the wheels were designed at all with roll-on landings in mind.
All that said, I wish the engineers working on this thing the best. The current demonstrator is a great-looking machine, and it'd be awesome to see this kind of thing succeed.
VTOL seems like a difficult thing to get right, the military still has issues w the osprey although the design here is quite removed from that. wishing them the best.
It's all well and good to talk about how great it would be to launch and land right from San Francisco, but they conveniently step around mentioning that it is currently explicitly illegal. The challenge isn't to come up with a great idea, but rather to get San Francisco to change its laws.
There are helipads all over the city and none of them can be used with the specific exception of flight-for-life helicopters landing in Mission Bay.
Bad traffic in Jakarta or Mumbai or Sao Paolo or Mexico City or Moscow? And those places don't lack a few super wealthy that wouldn't mind zipping around in a cool new aircraft.
Or maybe transit from one airport to another within a city.
VTOL from a space the size of 6 car parking slots; never start a trip without energy reserves for an additional landing/takeoff/landing cycle; have higher reliability/safety than any other form of transport ever.
For regions where the geography makes the roads dangerous or extremely slow or border regions where road traffic delays due to customs or immigration checks are common.
I this is a solvable problem and moving from current propulsion methods to a whole bunch of very small individually controllable BLDC motors with one moving part and low inertia is definitely a step in the right direction toward increasing the stability of low mass aircraft.
Most of the "uncomfotrable-ness" of smaller aircraft is how easily they are blown around in the wind, which is not insignificant at safe operating altitudes.
This aircraft proposal will not be able to negate the effect. Think small boat on a lake - even with azimuth thrusters, still bobs up and down back and forth with the waves. Larger boats don't experience the effect as much, due to mass - same with large airliners.
No. You're effectively in a liquid, and that liquid is moving very quickly up and down, left and right. You can see in the video you linked to, it's not all that effective, even while stationary in a boat. Plus, the drag penalty related to some extra appendage like this would be severe.
It would take a LOT to keep you precisely in the same 6-axis position - and there's no way a system could react quick enough because it would first need to detect the movement, accounting for normal wind-speed, etc. Any solution here would be heavy, induce drag, eat through batteries/fuel, and introduce a lot of new failure modes that don't exist with traditional aircraft and could be unrecoverable in the event of a failure (stuck appendage or azimuth thruster-like propeller in wrong direction, destroying lift).
Things are quite different just 1,000 feet off the ground, and even worse 5,000 ft or 10,000 feet. The wind speed can get extreme, averaging 100mph at 10,000 ft[1].
For people accustomed to flying in these small aircraft, you get used to it. But for people already nervous about flying, or not familiar with small aircraft, the sudden movement can be very disorienting and scary.
People often underestimate the aviation industry. It's incredibly safe, and very stable. A lot of innovations were paid for with blood during the early days of aviation, which led to it's maturity. Innovation, at this point in aviation's history, is very challenging and requires very deep understandings - even mature organizations like Boeing struggle with this from time-to-time, and they have a ton of experience in developing extremely reliable aircraft for not just transport, but combat and more.
Unfortunately, far too often, things like this startup's solution are dreamt up by people that don't understand the problem domain and don't have a lot of experience in the field. They look from afar, and confidently state they know a solution no one else has thought of or tried, and the entire industry is simply doing things so obviously wrong. Fortunately, they often find out why things are the way they are within a reasonable time frame and don't blow all of their investor's money or get people killed. Time will tell here.
To be clear I don't think that a bunch of motors with low latency control solve the problem of flying straight in turbulence. I think that it will allow for exploration of a new space of clever approaches to mitigate turbulence for craft with low inertia.
But, I'm highly skeptical for a lot of reasons. This design in particular introduces a lot of turbulent flow over the lift surfaces, and is going to require a lot of fancy logic to ensure the aircraft can remain stable with one or more of it's motors failing. It ads a lot of complexity, to a vehicle where simplicity keeps you safe, particularly at low altitudes where seconds matter when there's a problem.
Can an American please explain how a 3h41 minute car journey to Tahoe turns into an 8h49(!) train journey? Are your trains pulled by horses or something?
We don't have separate high speed rail tracks like Europe does; we have a single rail system used for slow cargo trains that take priority over passenger trains. Imagine driving everywhere with giant cargo trucks driving 80 km / hr in every lane with no way to pass them and you'll get the picture.
> slow cargo trains that take priority over passenger trains.
This is only half true. Legally, Amtrak has priority, and railroads are required to cede right-of-way to passenger trains. In practice, the railroads don't cede priority nearly as much as they should. This is an ongoing fight. Amtrak has a whole site about it here: https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance
One other important thing is that in many places railroads used to have more features like more tracks and electrification.
The interesting thing about American railroads is that unlike all other forms of transportation in the US, railroads pay property tax. Therefore, to reduce tax bills and improve their books for mergers, many railroads tore up their improvements.
The railroad is centered around cargo. And the American freight rail industry is in fact pretty healthy and profitable, unlike passenger rail.
Now consider viewpoints like this Economist article: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2010/07/22/high-speed-rai... "America’s system of rail freight is the world’s best. High-speed passenger trains could ruin it" and you get why passenger rail is discouraged.
Much of California is single-track[1] and the freight trains have right-of-way, meaning you spend a decent amount of time sitting on a siding track waiting for a mile-long freight train to go by.
1: As in a single track for both directions, meaning there are limited places where a north-bound and south-bound train can pass each other.
Yeah, so so the drive from Emeryville to Roseville is about 2 hrs via train or car, the car generally being a bit faster, the vast majority of the difference in time takes place from Roseville to Truckee, where the modern Freeway has had significant earthworks to provide a drive that can take place in about an hour, wheras the train takes a much older route that is both longer and ends up having a max speed much closer to 30 mph.
Additionally Amtrak doesn't have right-of-way on those rails, so delays due to freight trains are super common on that section of track.
The rail tracks in much of the western states are owned by the freight industry, and Amtrak leases time on them. As a result, the tracks and schedules are freight-oriented, not passenger-oriented.
This means the tracks are not graded for high-speed relative lightweight passenger rolling stock. Also, the passenger trains need to fit into the schedules dictated by the freight traffic.
Which is really a shame. The track from SF through Lake Tahoe runs just past Sugar Bowl and into Truckee, and is about 180 miles. A ski train would be really easy.
I was actually surprised you could do it by train at all. I wouldn't even know how to begin to attempt a train journey in the US. (other than hitting up Amtrak's website and hoping for the best).
I was also surprised at train travel in Norway on my recent visit; I hoped to book a ticket from Oslo to Bergen but it was basically impossible. Only a couple of trains a day, all sold out. I drove instead, which was also a shock, since I spent virtually my entire drive at or below 80kph. The train would have been roughly the same speed -- so, not as bad as your Tahoe example, but not great by continental European standards either :)
There are several reasons, terrain being one of them.
Also the commuter/long distance tracks are all owned by the freight liners, so passanger trains have to yield for them. There are also hour+ stops at some stations.
Amtraks stop for 20 minutes every 30 minutes to let passengers on and off at each stop. A car journey only stops if you need gas (15 minutes) or if you need to use personal facilities (10 minutes).
Furthermore, an amtrak will only hit a top speed of 79mph, and only a few times during the journey, while a car can stay at 75mph for most the journey.
This discrepancy is much higher from the other destinations they mention, so I would imagine there is either no station nearby the lake so you have to take another mode for the last leg, or you have to get some complicated multiple-train route with long layovers :)
Keep in mind the scale here... see that small-looking gap between Flagstaff and Tucson? That's 400km... you could fit most European countries in there.
Good point, I was speaking of European experience.
But still, here with a really fine train grid, the train is much less efficient due to the many stops and many changes you have to make to get somewhere :( It can take up to 2-3 times as much time to get somewhere by train than by car.
No, it travels on the main East Coast line that runs from Miami up to DC. What it doesn't do is STOP at any of the intermediate stations. It leaves the DC suburbs in late afternoon, and drops off just outside Orlando, Florida in the early morning of the next day.
American capitalists, especially the car industry, lobbied heavily to make this the case, and also allowed privately-owned public transport services to deteriorate.
The roads are really good (though the official speed limits are lower than they should be), and nobody wanted the trains since they became obsolete for a lot of North American geography, which in turn reduced the overall interest and investment in trains. The U.S. also has very high standards for the structural integrity of railcars, which precludes many international trainset vendors.
The costs of acquiring land for rail projects are also higher, because of very strong property rights.
Basically there are a lot of reasons, some of them are not mere political disagreements.
Is there no push for this to be stimulated again? In the EU there is a lot of talk about stimulating high-speed rail. Currently it's a total mess though, with each country still having their own standards, high-speed tracks having non-highspeed portions through cities, and simply not having sufficient capacity to support anywhere near the amount of passengers that are carried by air.
But I really hope some day the EU will standardise this too, and get more tracks built. I'd love to take a train between Barcelona and Amsterdam. But right now it is 2 hours by plane or 14 by train with 2 changes. And the price has a similar ratio in favour of the plane, which makes the train simply nonviable.
There is talk. But the cost to build rail is so stupid in the US. You spend billions... connect two cities.. and then what? You can't get around in many cities without a car, so you are still stuck.
Kind of a lot of problems on top of each other from construction costs to land ownership to right of way to city layouts that make trains rough to work in the US. (which stinks, I LOVE trains. had a nice train commute in Chicago, but those are rare in the US)
California is building a high speed rail line. But there is an enormous amount of reflexive opposition from NIMBY's, Conservatives, and Libertarians. To tell you how bad it is there are 100 year old train tunnels between New York and New Jersey that must be replaced and Republicans have killed the projects to replace them _twice_ simply because they are rail projects and passenger rail is 'bad'
> But there is an enormous amount of reflexive opposition from NIMBYs, Conservatives, and Libertarians.
The greatest obstacles to California's high speed rail project are vote-buying politicians and the voters who do not pay attention or understand what they are doing.
Conservatives and libertarians may have a lot to say about it, I gather that's because it has been such a colossal money pit boondoggle affair; but you may have noticed that conservatives and libertarians don't exactly hold a political majority in California, so I doubt that their objections are a major obstacle to its completion.
The plans they actually began to build with won't even produce much of a service, the target speeds are disappointing and there are so many detours from any meaningful corridor; and we haven't even seen the reality of it yet, which will probably be even more disappointing than the low expectations.
> ...Republicans have killed the projects to replace them _twice_ simply because they are rail projects and passenger rail is 'bad'
Well, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that was probably not why they excluded that project from the budget.
> > California is building a high speed rail line.
> Allegedly.
Not allegedly, it's actually being built right now. 119 miles of it in fact. It's not the whole system, but it's the IOS that they promised that they would build.
> the target speeds are disappointing and there are so many detours from any meaningful corridor...
The target speed is 220 mph between Gilroy and Burbank which is in line with the current highest speed HSR systems in the world. The route actually makes a fair amount of sense given that the cities in the central valley are not that small, especially since the stations in those cities are designed for trains to express through them. Rather, it makes more sense compared to the I-5 corridor which would have required branch lines to be built, not to mention the other fundamental issues that proposal had.
The constant hammering about using the HWY99 corridor vs I5 is kinda telling. It's obvious they aren't even looking at a map. If you did look at a map you'd see that the I5 route only saves 70 miles out of 470. And you need to drive the rail line up and over the grapevine and and through Tejon Pass. If you keep the route though Palmdale and Acton then you save less than 30 miles.
But the aviation market is one of the most heavily regulated - bureaucracy beyond comprehension.
Did you ever wonder why Piper or Cessna airplanes look EXACTLY what they did 50 years ago? And why the engines used in these planes (e.g., Lycoming) are referred to as “Lycosaurus”!?
If you go for a sightseeing flight with a local aeroclub - you will find the pilot spending 30min pre-checking the aircraft, checking the weather, reading NOTAMS etc. Not to mention the potentially pretty intensive communication with ATC et al. required to make sure everybody stays safe.
Getting a pilot license is magnitudes more work than getting a drivers license, proficiency has to be continuously demonstrated, maintaining airworthiness of an airplane isn’t exactly cheap either and pretty heavily regulated.
And all that should be “automated”, certified and approved?
Not saying things can’t be automated - but no shit, the spark plugs in a Cessna are like 50$ each for that “aviation certificate”...
Even if there ARE rules and guidelines how to certify autonomous vehicles like that - like how does anybody imagine that a novel aerial vehicle like this actually IS CERTIFIED within a lifetime?
Pilots still walk around a multi-million $ fighter jet or aircraft equipped with the most sophisticated avionics because “a bird nest in the engine intake is hard to detect and difficult to resolve mid flight”.
Investing in one of the most heavily regulated, difficult to scale and extremely expensive to operate industries is brave... Even more so when this industry is low margin and “kept dying every couple of years”...