[nurple]

Digitalization of aircraft is a really interesting space right now! Even local legislatures are talking to media about "vertiports" (ostensibly to justify the CEOs flying to the office, we promise it's coming to you), though I really wonder how they'll drop an R44/66/Bell505 sized aircraft into a business park because of the noise.

I'm watching two companies in this space(I guess 3 now!):

Hill Helicopters[0] is working on a ground-up build of an aircraft, turboshaft engine, and an avionics suite that you can "drive like a car". It's an enormous undertaking, and I'm not sure if they'll pull it off or not.

The second one is Skyryse[1] and their SkyOS. They're focusing on the avionics like you guys, and putting it in an R66 initially, though they plan fixed-wing versions as well. It is also intended to be a single-stick input which can handle emergency situations automatically; they've already demonstrated their first automatic manned autorotation.

I do think that one of the bigger problems in aviation is cost. Most people can't afford an aircraft whether it flew itself or not. This leads to people not flying enough to become excellent and safe pilots. I've been working on my rotorwing addon and the R44 time is $750/hr!?! If you look at the cost of aviation indexed against median income, it has increased over 5x since the cessna 172 era. In cities, another big problem is hangarage, these have waiting lists currently in the decades and costs in the range of a new home.

Another area I'd really like to see more innovation in is aircraft design. Besides Mr Ruttan, everyone just builds tried and true designs and rarely explore the edges of what is possible.

I will also say, while I think that the range you're targetting is smart, and the mass of mostly unused airfields is staggeringly sad to me, there are a lot more issues than just getting there that need to have infrastructure that I'm not sure will be easy to scale.

I think the reason we see gov talking about vertiports now is because in medium-to-large cities they are completely lost on how to solve the traffic issues (hence rich powerful people asking for them). One area that I don't think aviation looks at enough is relatively short-range travel. If you think of a time-topography map of a city, you could make a much larger city, by area, if you can shrink the time it takes to travel (i.e. same QoL if I can go 50mi in 15min vs 10).

0. https://www.hillhelicopters.com/

1. https://www.skyryse.com/

[n_ermosh]

You're totally right the cost is the driver right now. Our goal is to get the market of people who don't fly planes right now into it so that with economies of scale, we can drive prices down. On our roadmap is an airplane that costs <$100k.

> Another area I'd really like to see more innovation in is aircraft design. Besides Mr Ruttan, everyone just builds tried and true designs and rarely explore the edges of what is possible.

Just wait till you see what we've been sketching up :) Having control systems like ours unlocks a whole new world of possibilities for aerodynamic design.