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Larry Page’s Flying Taxis, Now Exiting Stealth Mode
- zitterbewegung 9y agoSmells like a publicity stunt to me. Feels like Amazon's announcement of drone delivery where the product is vaporware.
- mythz 9y agoHard to be a publicity stunt when they haven't gone public or announced anything yet.
- Alex3917 9y agoNormally that would be the case for something like this, but eVTOLs have been in the news a lot in the last 24 hours due to the helicopter crash in NYC. There are also about fifty different companies working on the tech, so there legitimately is a race to get it out the door.
- aidaman 9y agoUmm, duh? This is a press release.
- yeison 9y agoThat test aircraft looks very well developed. The article says it can fly 62 miles. I wonder how long it will take to recharge.
- BurningFrog 9y agoNote that 62 miles is 100 km.
- detritus 9y agoAh yes, that's much longer.
- wheresmyusern 9y agoim really excited about planes that have several smaller motors and props instead of one or two large ones. its a design that is only now becoming possible commercially because of EV popularity. really looking forward to seeing where it all goes.
- mirimir 9y agoYes. It seems to have 13 rotors, 12 on the wings and a larger one in back. It looks like each of the wing rotors can tilt on two axes. That should make the plane very maneuverable. Better perhaps than a quadcopter. And more tolerant of rotor failures. Also, the rotors are less likely to behead people.
- jingleheimer 9y agoMy guess is that the 12 wing rotors are at a fixed angles similar to a quadcopter V-tail. Unlike a v-tail, and to hazard another guess, I figure the inner 8 rotors point outwards to help provide stability so that a roll ends up with the lower side pointing straight down providing more lift and the higher side points out the side providing less lift. This pushes the craft back upright. There are times when you actually do want to roll so the 4 outer rotors point in. They're further out so there is more roll leverage. The mechanisms to tilt the rotors would add extra weight to a craft that's probably already low on margins. I'd say it's better to be a little less efficient for a short part of a flight than carry the extra weight for the duration.
- ttul 9y agoHow fun would it be to have billions to sprinkle on cool projects like this.
- chillax2 9y agoWhen I interviewed with Uber, I met an engineer who had worked for Page @ Kitty Hawk directly before joining Otto (which as we know got acquired immediately by Uber). I don't know that I really have a point, except I found it interesting to hear first-hand about another "Alphabet" (technically page's non-alphabet venture) crossover to Uber.
- adventured 9y agoThe Kitty Hawk Cora launch video from Monday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeFxjRMv5U8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeFxjRMv5U8
- njarboe 9y agoI think I am with Musk on this form of transportation. Much too loud for even a small number of people to use them without high noise pollution in any urban area. Helicopters and planes are bad enough and they are quite rare. Even existing freeways are quite noisy. Bring on the tunnels. Unless we can get some kind of anti-gravity or super noise cancellation, I hope these flying cars don't become popular.
- sarreph 9y agoWhat about electric propeller motors though? Aren’t they much quieter? If you could get the noise close to that of a glider then the only other pollution you’d have to worry about is visual. Then we’d need to start investing in active cloaking methods :)
- etrautmann 9y agoEven small drones are awful from 100’ away. Scaling that up will certainly be loud enough to be a problem in most urban areas
- dspillett 9y agoWhile this will be significantly louder than a drone it will also be much lower pitch so might be less irritating to the human ear. Less like a mosquito on steroids! Still far worse than silence of course but perhaps not much worse than road traffic noise unless you are directly under a common flight path?
- njarboe 9y agoI might be more sensitive to noise than most, but I've been in urban parks where I'm enjoying my time, relaxing, and a single small drone flies far (100ft) overhead. Its unnatural buzzing sound is quite annoying. Glider only action I would guess would be fine, but you have to get to altitude first to glide. And then altitude control near landing will have to be powered. I would love to see it in action and get to fly around myself. Fun times. But imagine a million of these in the air at the same time like you would have over LA or the Bay Area.
- tommoor 9y agoOnly 8 months ago they were showing just this little sit-on multi copter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54ASH0kMSCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54ASH0kMSCM I wonder how long they've been working on Cora
- rmason 9y agoNice to see a local East Lansing boy (Page) behind this project;<). I know the engineers would throw a fit but I'd find a way to add a parachute to this craft similar to Cirrus. As of 2016 the parachute has saved 131 lives. https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2016/july/24/how-cirrus-reduced-accidents https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2016/july/24/ho...
- jonnybgood 9y agoFor those who are curious about an actual parachute landing/crash like me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP8rjHtlYH0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP8rjHtlYH0
- base698 9y agoA friend of mine has been working for Page on this project and doing the rigging work for the parachute so pretty sure it has one.
- pc86 9y agoJust wanted to point out that the parachute has mixed reviews overall (from owners), due mainly to the costs associated with it. It requires a $15,000 repack every 10 years, which immediately adds $125/mo to the cost of ownership. Wouldn't be that bad, except you can't just choose to fly without it. The plane is not airworthy if the chute repack is due, and is illegal to fly. Not to mention the fact that if you use it, you're firing rockets out of the top of the plane and essentially destroying it. So yes the parachute is obviously a net positive but let's not just go slapping it on every new airframe that gets developed.
- nojvek 9y agoWhy not? If $125/month saves your life some day, isn’t that with it?
- jessriedel 9y agoThe vast majority of owners never deploy it.
- make3 9y agoI wonder how expansive it would have to be to be cost effective. Also, can it lands in the streets? is that safe ?
- Animats 9y agoThe transition to winged flight is interesting. There's a large drone which works like that. Takeoff and landing are on electrical quadrotor props, while for forward flight, a gasoline engine provides power. This give the drone six hour endurance.[1] So it's useful for search and patrolling. This new thing is a scale up of that. The successor to the Osprey will hopefully be something like this, not the mechanical nightmare of that tilt-rotor. Each engine on the Osprey can power the other rotor in an emergency. The mechanical linkage for that is a nightmare. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2kcyw99V2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2kcyw99V2E
- mpweiher 9y ago> Takeoff and landing are on electrical quadrotor props, while for forward flight, a gasoline engine provides power. There's a reason for that: takeoff (and landing for VTOL) require much more power than level flight, especially with a VTOL design where all of the lift comes from the engines, and gasoline engines get a lot heavier with power than electric motors. On a conventional plane, you are carrying that huge/heavy engine around for the entire flight, just for the power during takeoff. Electric motors are a lot lighter for a given power level, but on the other hand, the "fuel" for electric motors (i.e. batteries) is a lot heavier than gasoline, limiting endurance. So some sort of hybrid mechanism that blends the advantages and disadvantages can make a lot sense, despite the extra cost/weight of a hybrid powertrain.
- icebraining 9y agoThe Tron lasts 90m on fully electric, by rotating the props: https://www.quantum-systems.com/tron/ https://www.quantum-systems.com/tron/
- CaptainJustin 9y agoWould love to see them partner with Passerine Aircraft Corp. https://passerineaircraft.com/ https://passerineaircraft.com/
- guofangli 9y agoHow much does a ride cost? I'm very price sensitive.
- lnsru 9y agoHelicopter in Germany costs you 15-25€/minute. There is room for 3 passengers. You can negotiate if booking more time. The flying taxi should be less than that.
- grizzles 9y agoThe long term maintenance costs of the aircraft will drive the cost structure and those are unknown right now. I suspect the price at launch is going to way lower than what most consumers would think is possible.
- thomyorkie 9y agoWonder how this compares in size to Dubai's flying taxis. This one seems like it takes up more space.
- taurath 9y agoFeels like billionaires solving billionaires problems - this doesn’t scale.
- ipsum2 9y agoHow can you say that when you don't even know the price of the service?
- falcolas 9y agoWell, if you base the costs off of a traditional aircraft (around which this is based), they'll be in the $100+ an hour range, minimum. The cost to buy will be in the $2-300,000 range, minimum. They will require yearly maintenance, not counting any maintenance required on the electric props and batteries. This is based off a production aircraft, the Cirrus. I'm also not immediately seeing how this would not require a pilots license - more likely a helicopter license, though this is easily debatable. So perhaps not billionaires, but millionaires to be sure.
- maged 9y agoIt already costs me 100+ an hour to transport 4 people from San Jose to San Francisco. This would be cheaper and faster.
- falcolas 9y agoVia what method? Iirc, there are many economical methods of transportation between those two cities... Also, that $100 per hour is pure cost with no markups to provide for revenue or growth. I could easily be wrong, but the aircraft they were displaying looked like a 2 seater, not 4.
- VVyattPrentice 9y agoThrow in a couple jet ski style tow ropes and you're golden.
- sandos 9y agoThats a very large meat grinder!
- sandos 9y agoOh, now I see thay have both high and low-wing configurations. The high-winged one is obviously much safer from the grinding aspect.
- asteli 9y agoVery talented bunch. I've seen the tech and the engineering behind it, and I have no doubt that they can build the aircraft they're claiming here. What remains to be seen is how they interface with the existing aviation regulatory framework. They even hint at this in the video, with the "making this useful to society" line, and what looks to me like regulatory allowances from NZ. I'm fairly certain that they know powered lift isn't compatible with dense urban environments, so don't expect a Fifth Element situation in NYC anytime soon. :) I'm super curious to see what the use case ends up being. My money's on super short haul, like Mountain View to Oakland sort of distances, with numerous small, dedicated taxiports similar in scale to ferry terminals.
- aetherson 9y agoI think that the interesting use for air taxis isn't in going through cities, it's in traversing terrain that's difficult or impossible to build roads through. So going over water or rugged terrain like steep hills or ravines. In the SF area, there's not a ton of use for it, but perhaps a fast hop from Treasure Island to the Embarcadero (feeding into BART) would make the proposed redevelopment of Treasure/Yerba Buena island more attractive (as of right now, it's hard to imagine thinking it was a great idea to live some place where you had to take the Bay Bridge to get literally anywhere). Going mostly over unpopulated terrain would limit (not eliminate, just limit) both safety and noise concerns.
- asteli 9y agoThe use case is oddly specific- ideally you have a region that's geographically challenging, but not sparse enough that you can just wedge an airstrip somewhere and call it a day. It also can't be so developed that there's existing or imminent Real Infrastructure, like a metro rail link between Treasure Island and SF.
- notahacker 9y agoI think the main tricky bit about the commercial side of the use case is that you need your settlements to be either side of the geographically challenging bit but also quite close together due to range limitations, and probably in areas with usually benign weather conditions. Small archipelagos would be an obvious use case, but I wonder how it compares cost and convenience wise with using a boat.
- m12k 9y agoThis seems like the kind of thing that would be useful in specific situations, but won't be feasible for broad use until we come up with much cheaper electrical energy production (and probably storage too) than we have today, e.g. fusion power or much cheaper solar. At least I don't imagine it can be very energy efficient to expend power on moving up and staying up in the air instead of using the normal force from the ground 'for free' like a land-based vehicle does so it only needs to expend energy to move horizontally (for an intuition about this, think about how hard it is to jump half your body length upward, versus walking half your body length forward). So while it's cool that it's emissions free, it's not great if it ends up using e.g. 5-10x as much energy to make the same trip as an electric car, and it makes it that much more difficult to offset the environmental impact of its production and operation.
- asteli 9y agoYou're right that powered lift is inefficient, however the whole point of this configuration is that you transition to forward flight/aerodynamic lift once aloft.
- m12k 9y agoYeah, I assume the airfoil of the wings gets it closer (anyone know how close?) to a car in efficiency once it's gotten moving, but I also imagine the energy overhead of the VTOL part of the flight is quite a significant chunk of the total if the range is only 62 miles. Improvements in battery weight could help here, but then again, they'd improve the efficiency of electric cars too, so it'd still be an unfavorable comparison. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that this is being innovated on, but I don't see this being a feasible replacement for Lyft/Uber for most people until the energy math starts looking very different than it does today.
- asteli 9y agoI don't see it being a point to point transportation option for most of it's potential use cases either. One thing that often gets neglected when talking about aircraft range is the fuel requirements - you need to have enough fuel to get to your destination airport, decide not to land there, go to the next best airport, and potentially sit in a hold for a while before actually landing. This is especially hard on electric aircraft since they're already energy-strapped. I'm guessing that the 62 mile figure includes destination+alternate+reserve fuel.
- ipsum2 9y agoThis is a huge step up from last year, where they showed off a drone-esque machine with 20 minutes of battery life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_rDkVIhQeY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_rDkVIhQeY Edit: they're working on both concurrently, it seems: https://kittyhawk.aero/ https://kittyhawk.aero/
- asteli 9y agoThe drone-like vehicle hasn't been around as long as the concept from this release. You can see earlier versions in patent drawings from 2010 [1] [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130214086 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130214086
- mtgx 9y agoI prefer the term air-taxi. I think this is an industry worth growing, but hopefully it won't become too mainstream. Not sure we want thousands of these flying above our heads every day. I like Musk's underground transit plan a bit more. https://youtu.be/YqoyQ0NZs9I?t=29s https://youtu.be/YqoyQ0NZs9I?t=29s
- fergie 9y agoLiterally the vehicles described in Brave New World. Life imitating art.
- BerislavLopac 9y agoAm I the only one that finds these unprotected rotating blades unsettlingly dangerous?
- FabHK 9y agoNo. That's one reason why I much prefer the Volocopter (where the rotating blades are high above you, like in a conventional helicopter) to the eHang 184, where they seem to be aimed at your kneecaps.
- jlebrech 9y agoTo reduce noise you could shoot something with extremely noisy electric ducted fans out of a big tube (tower), and get it to land into another big tube elsewhere. By the time the vehicle has left the tube it's high enough where noise at ground level cannot be heard. Something with blades could also carry less juice (or none) and glide to its destination.
- stuaxo 9y agoHow is the energy use compared to ground transport ? Are we going to dump a massive amount of heat into the environment if flying vehicles become as popular as ordinary taxis ?
- Keyframe 9y agoI'm not much of an airplaneologist, but this looks like a deathtrap to me. I appreciate all of the efforts in new transportation modes though.
- dzhiurgis 9y agoHijacking the thread to ask others opinions how much such aircraft could be scaled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nbMrxJo64M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nbMrxJo64M Ekranoplans where around for a while. Uses ground effect to fly quite fast and efficiently. Imagine we made a solar wing, instead of propellers, use water propellers to push for extra efficiency. Anyone wanna do the math?
- ourmandave 9y agoArticle doesn't mention where they're going to build all the helipads for what are really battery powered autonomous helicopters. Do I have to take a normal taxi to the airport or an elevator to the top floor of the nearest high rise to get a ride?
- frenchman_in_ny 9y ago13 engines, electric. And clearly they have built multiple aircraft (I haven't found N-numbers for all of them yet). http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?NNumbertxt=301XZ http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?NN... http://www.aviationdb.com/Aviation/Aircraft/3/N301XZ.shtm http://www.aviationdb.com/Aviation/Aircraft/3/N301XZ.shtm
- frenchman_in_ny 9y agoLooks like they have a number of aircraft registered, some as rotorcraft, some as gliders. http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Name_Results.aspx?Nametxt=ZEE+AERO+INC&sort_option=1&PageNo=1 http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Name_Results.aspx?Na...
- sigi45 9y agoI don't get it. Musk (boring company) and Page (air-taxi) are pumping money in a few garbage projects. Why don't they even try to accelerate and bring relevant technology to the masses?
- syntaxing 9y agoCan anyone chime in how this aircraft is so energy efficient? It seems like the props on the wing will give a ridiculous amount of drag. Also, one of the key requirements for an energy efficient rear prop plane is super laminar air going to through the rear prop for efficient thrust. The wing design seems to remove this advantage.
- roman_savchuk 9y agoI'm not going to criticize that particular aircraft, no. I respect the effort it took to get it up in the air. But everyone is building an electric, pilotless vehicle for ride sharing, which also happens to be an oversized RC multicopter. Like trying to put Tesla, Uber and DJI products and business models into the blender and get guaranteed receipt for success. I'd love to see more thinking outside of context here.
- joncrane 9y agoDoesn't Dubai already have air taxis? Would that be a good pilot area?
- maxander 9y agoIf they can make a "flying taxi" airplane that isn't unsafe, isn't obnoxiously loud, isn't energy-guzzling, doesn't require undue landing/takeoff space, and is scalable beyond the ultra-elite, great! But how many of those criteria do you think that even Page could get, simultaneously? Two, maybe three? Flying cars are known for being a somewhat difficult engineering problem; that they've been hard enough to prevent partial solutions may turn out to have been a blessing. And it's not like there aren't other solutions to transportation issues, either.
- grizzles 9y agoAnyone have any idea on what percentage of the energy budget is spent on vertical takeoff? Just curious.