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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
[+] [-] looping__lui|5 years ago|reply
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”...
[+] [-] lisper|5 years ago|reply
It's not installed in the plane I fly, but Garmin's auto-landing system was recently certified for emergency use.
https://generalaviationnews.com/2020/05/19/garmin-autoland-c...
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] aphextron|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Aeolun|5 years ago|reply
All of the aircraft in existence have been certified in what is (for a very old person) one lifetime. I think we’ll be fine.
Their schedule seems to have 5 years for development, and 5 more for certification.
That seems reasonable.
[+] [-] giosalinas|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] steffan|5 years ago|reply
At the current standards, apparently the only hard requirement is a pulse.
[+] [-] RobRivera|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] looping__lui|5 years ago|reply
(It is in German though).
A big German magazine did a rather intensive “how much sense does it make” story: https://www.aerokurier.de/elektroflug/flugtaxis-kein-markt-f...
[+] [-] IAmEveryone|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rklaehn|5 years ago|reply
Just like most 3rd world countries these days have better 4G coverage than supposedly 1st world countries like Germany, or rural US.
[+] [-] JAlexoid|5 years ago|reply
Don't look at fighter jets, as they are basically jet engines with guns and little control surfaces added.
As for airworthiness - there's a good reason for that - these things literally fly over your head.
[+] [-] mattigames|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ordinaryradical|5 years ago|reply
The world of atoms is harder than software, but it's awaiting disruptions like these.
[+] [-] tmh79|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legitster|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] divbzero|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wffurr|5 years ago|reply
By contrast, getting approval to build a small footprint vertiport and use some unused or underutilized air rights seems easy.
[+] [-] pdelbarba|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dheera|5 years ago|reply
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?)
[+] [-] barbegal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] epicureanideal|5 years ago|reply
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
Ok, so this isn't going to cause me to move.
[+] [-] mjlee|5 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] Aeolun|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_va|5 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] scarier|5 years ago|reply
>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?
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ogre_codes|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abraxas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 years ago|reply
That said, it is so light that maybe it would be in range of consumer cost.
[+] [-] ceejayoz|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kraig911|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] viburnum|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voska|5 years ago|reply
It took UCSF 5 years to get their helipad. They had to spend tens of thousands of dollars on noise studies.... for exclusively emergency flights
[+] [-] gorpomon|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tschwimmer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techsupporter|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pdelbarba|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] qppo|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Jabbles|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] krm01|5 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] peter303|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Tables_of_energ...
[+] [-] baybal2|5 years ago|reply
Hilly terrain makes it hard to make straight roads. Quite a lot of big cities don't have direct road connections.
In a relatively flat USA, you don't have a lot of similar spaces.
[+] [-] 0_____0|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] toohotatopic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benhurmarcel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bfuclusion|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricardobeat|5 years ago|reply