10 ms·

Inside Larry Page’s Kitty Hawk: Returned Deposits, Battery Fires, Boeing Shakeup

csours 7y ago
Steve Jobs was famous for his "reality distortion zone" - simply not believing that something could not be done. Early on in a project you need vision and innovation, "fake it 'till you make it". Get a demo working, even if it only works 20% of the time or covers one use case poorly. But at some point, along comes actual reality.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Faking it is really a bad model - the number of Steve Jobs "prepared to use sleight of hand to hide loading times" is vastly out numbered by expensive failed replacements. The most defensible practice are at least inherently modular and could be stitched together - really the deception would be highly unnecessary
- ur-whale 7y ago
  Sounds exactly like the path Theranos took.
leoedin 7y ago
The anti-safety culture is kind of surprising. When they made previous announcements I thought that safety was what they were bringing to the table. Autonomous drones, even large scale ones, are pretty ubiquitous at this point. People are building human-scale drones using off the shelf equipment in their back gardens. The thing they're all lacking is properly safety certified electronics. I would have thought the thing a project with deep pockets like kitty hawk would bring would be the huge effort required to build a certifiably safe done. Having worked in other hardware startups though, I'm guessing what actually happened was a few years of reinventing the wheel and learning on the job. Safe systems don't look any different to non safe systems to an outsider, so unless there's a real buy in from management it's very hard to build them.
- crocal 7y ago
  Before talking about anti-safety culture, I observed that the real issue in a purely hardware/software-driven culture is that people focus on technology. For safety systems, this usually fails / overbudgets because there needs to be some systems thinking /before/ about why and how the proposed system can be declared safe. In the case of drones, I am afraid that the systems design to make these devices acceptably safe is yet to be formulated (Note: these are not planes, they fly close to the ground so they do not benefit from the safety of altitude to have time to react in case of failure)
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    Helicopters are certifiable for carrying passengers, and yet take offs and landings have no altitude nor speed benefits. In what way do multirotors / drones differ?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I know exactly nothing about aircraft safety, but since this is HN, I want to throw out a guess: in case of landing, could it be that helicopters make the blades spin very fast prior to beginning the landing maneuver, compensating for extra lift with pitch control, and then keep them spinning fast throughout the entire landing process, and brake them only after touchdown? This would, in my mind, let them do a soft touchdown via autorotation in case of sudden engine failure at any point of the landing maneuver (at least if the pilot has fast enough reflexes).
      - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        That does sound like a reasonable guess. Can anyone with more knowledge chime in? I’m off to bed, otherwise I’d try looking in to it.
      - Already__Taken 7y ago
        I'm going to go on a limb here, you'd need to put enough energy into the rotors of: helicopter weight * recovery time (so distance * descent rate) * gravity². that is a big number to get rotor mass * rpm to equal.
madengr 7y ago
“No person has ever been harmed or exposed due to undue risk in over 26,000 test flights with over 100 prototype vehicles,” Well that isn’t exactly difficult to achieve if no one was on it. I’d like to know the data if it was carrying a crash dummy.
- krisoft 7y ago
  Also that is such a contrieved way of saying “no person has ever been harmed in over 26,000 test flights”. There must be something the “due to undue risk” clarification hides.
  - geomark 7y ago
    I read that as there were injuries, but they were due to risks that had to be taken, not risks that were carelessly taken.
    - Jamwinner 7y ago
      What risks 'had to' be taken in this context?
    - FabHK 7y ago
      Good point. One could say that nobody has ever been injured or died in civil aviation due to undue risk (except maybe where the captain let his kid fly the jet for a bit, that might be considered "undue"...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593
grizzles 7y ago
I wouldn't have expected a Google related project to deathmarch like this. Energy density was always going to be the problem. The Lithium ion chemistries are just not there yet. These guys know what they are doing: https://skai.co/ https://skai.co/ Vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhMP5237dGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhMP5237dGA
- FabHK 7y ago
  Minor nitpick: Energy density is energy per volume. What's crucial here is specific energy, ie energy per mass.
  - grizzles 7y ago
    <3 Some days I love hacker news.
    - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
      The most impressive thing is he did it in a friendly manner! Sometimes I'm pretty bad at correcting people without sounding like an asshole.
jcims 7y ago
It boggles my mind how many of these human transporter designs have the props low to the ground. How the hell is a passenger supposed to egress in case of emergency when the blades are running?
- jessaustin 7y ago
  There are other reasons for rotors to be overhead, as well. Locating the center of mass below the center of thrust makes a more stable system. Viewing the ground, which is something that many passengers would desire, is much easier when there isn't a bunch of machinery in the way. The further rotors are from the ground, the less likely they are to strike debris when landing and taking off. I'm trying to think of reasons it would be good to have low rotors... maybe something about noise experienced by the passengers?
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    Getting them high enough up would require a larger super structure supporting them and would look pretty goofy to get them high enough up that a standing person wouldn't risk hitting them. These can also be stopped pretty quickly just by shorting all the motor leads together so stopping them in an emergency isn't very hard.
    - jcims 7y ago
      I'll go with goofy looking and keep my legs. :)
      - rtkwe 7y ago
        The other thing is these are meant for operation over water so if you have crashed it will be into water and the blades will stop very quickly due to the drag.
    - FabHK 7y ago
      I think there are extremely good reasons to keep the rotors on top, not below, with people around the craft or entering and exiting. One prop in front of single engine plane is enough of a safety hassle that one makes a big deal out of it in safety briefings, and yet people run into them again and again [1][2]. At any rate, the Volocopter [3] has the rotors on top, and while it might not look as sporty as the Kitty Hawk, I don't find it annoyingly goofy. [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lauren-scruggs-model-plane-propeller_n_1382613 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lauren-scruggs-model-plane-pr... [2] http://www.rightthisminute.com/video/graphic-man-hit-plane-propeller http://www.rightthisminute.com/video/graphic-man-hit-plane-p... [3] https://www.volocopter.com/en/ https://www.volocopter.com/en/
danbr 7y ago
I work at a company doing something very similar, owned by an aerospace giant as well. We are led to believe that safety is the most important aspect of any part of our work. At least that’s what we’re told at group meetings and company-wide meetings. But when push comes to shove and the (arbitrary) schedule demand a test, hacky code is produced, checks fall off the list, and errors do happen. Progress seems to be more important than safety. We are instructed to show some sort of significant return on investment within 6-12 months for the funding we’ve received. It’s pretty sad. Telling mangers that we need to take it low and slow at first makes them angry and ignore the engineers who do the good work in exchange for engineers who do it fast.
- mgrennan 7y ago
  "checks fall of the list" issue has always been a thing. There is a term in electronics call "Muntzing". Named after Earl Muntz who, after the engineers created a thing (TV) he would start pulling parts until it failed. Then call it good. This did two things. Made the product cheaper and caused service calls to fix (Put back parts). He made money both ways. The "Anti Safty" issue is management's form of Muntzing the code.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Scariest comment on HN in a long time. Also, you probably think you're anonymous and safe in setting this comment out here but you and your employer are trivially identifiable from this comment and a couple of others made on HN so you may want to petition the mods to kill this comment on the off chance that your employer gets wind of this, it might be a career limiting thing.
GhettoMaestro 7y ago
I hate Forbes.com articles with a burning hate in my heart. The ads. Oh my god - stop it!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Danieru 7y ago
> required to report safety-related issues to their managers, or through a confidential digital channel directly to the general counsel and human resources What. How is it appropriate fo HR to be involved in reports of safety issues. This reads like there was confidential channel to self selection layoffs.
OnlineGladiator 7y ago
> “It was a pattern — if you talked about safety you were done, so you just didn’t,” said one former employee. “That’s just how it had to be if you wanted to keep getting a paycheck.” Sounds like a problem with management, which isn't surprising. Sebastian Thrun is a brilliant researcher, but he has yet to turn any of his ideas into sustainable technologies or companies. Self-driving cars aren't real yet, and Udacity is going through some rough times. To the best of my knowledge Udacity has never been profitable (please correct me if I am wrong). https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/22/sebastian-thrun-initiates-aggressive-plan-to-transform-udacity/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/22/sebastian-thrun-initiates-... Maybe he'll turn around Udacity (I doubt it, although I really hope so). My point is this man chases after shiny things, and then leaves as soon as there's another shiny thing for him to pursue. He does the fun stuff with early development, and then loses interest when you get to the hard slog of making everything sustainable. Similar to self-driving cars, he was able to get his flying machines working well enough for some really awesome demos - but he can't commercialize the technology because it's still demoware. I want to compare this to Icarus because superficially it's so appealing, but in the end Sebastian is going to be incredibly wealthy and never having really lost anything. He will even likely continue to be heralded as a genius by many (and sometimes rightfully so).
- FabHK 7y ago
  That first quote is really a massive indictment for an aviation company - it's diametrically opposed to how it should be ("safety culture" and all).
Animats 7y ago
EHang is making short flights with people aboard.[1] The EHang 216, a one-person drone-like craft, has 16 props on 8 booms, so there's some redundancy. But not enough battery life to go very far. [1] https://youtu.be/7RjstNDRuCQ https://youtu.be/7RjstNDRuCQ
- FabHK 7y ago
  Volocopter has been making manned flights since 2016 (see links below). It has 18 rotors (at least 3 can fail while leaving it completely controllable) and 9 independent battery packs. And, in particular, it doesn't have the people-decapitating and knee-cap-smashing rotors below the passenger capsule, but above (like a conventional helicopter). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhNJUyT3HI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhNJUyT3HI8
batsy71 7y ago
The flyer has lot of anti-intuitive designs for example 6 massive fans whirring around the pilot. What if there is bird strike or the blades somehow dismantle from the fan and fly towards the pilot. Also this being made for non professional pilots/passengers what if a passenger tries to board/de-board while the fans are still spinning? At this point, I assume the aircraft keeps morphing into whatever the next iteration of managers/designers deem highest priority to keep the company afloat

Steve Jobs was famous for his "reality distortion zone" - simply not believing that something could not be done. Early on in a project you need vision and innovation, "fake it 'till you make it". Get a demo working, even if it only works 20% of the time or covers one use case poorly. But at some point, along comes actual reality.

Nasrudith 7y ago
Faking it is really a bad model - the number of Steve Jobs "prepared to use sleight of hand to hide loading times" is vastly out numbered by expensive failed replacements. The most defensible practice are at least inherently modular and could be stitched together - really the deception would be highly unnecessary
ur-whale 7y ago
Sounds exactly like the path Theranos took.

leoedin 7y ago

The anti-safety culture is kind of surprising. When they made previous announcements I thought that safety was what they were bringing to the table. Autonomous drones, even large scale ones, are pretty ubiquitous at this point. People are building human-scale drones using off the shelf equipment in their back gardens. The thing they're all lacking is properly safety certified electronics. I would have thought the thing a project with deep pockets like kitty hawk would bring would be the huge effort required to build a certifiably safe done. Having worked in other hardware startups though, I'm guessing what actually happened was a few years of reinventing the wheel and learning on the job. Safe systems don't look any different to non safe systems to an outsider, so unless there's a real buy in from management it's very hard to build them.

crocal 7y ago
Before talking about anti-safety culture, I observed that the real issue in a purely hardware/software-driven culture is that people focus on technology. For safety systems, this usually fails / overbudgets because there needs to be some systems thinking /before/ about why and how the proposed system can be declared safe. In the case of drones, I am afraid that the systems design to make these devices acceptably safe is yet to be formulated (Note: these are not planes, they fly close to the ground so they do not benefit from the safety of altitude to have time to react in case of failure)
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  Helicopters are certifiable for carrying passengers, and yet take offs and landings have no altitude nor speed benefits. In what way do multirotors / drones differ?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I know exactly nothing about aircraft safety, but since this is HN, I want to throw out a guess: in case of landing, could it be that helicopters make the blades spin very fast prior to beginning the landing maneuver, compensating for extra lift with pitch control, and then keep them spinning fast throughout the entire landing process, and brake them only after touchdown? This would, in my mind, let them do a soft touchdown via autorotation in case of sudden engine failure at any point of the landing maneuver (at least if the pilot has fast enough reflexes).
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      That does sound like a reasonable guess. Can anyone with more knowledge chime in? I’m off to bed, otherwise I’d try looking in to it.
    - Already__Taken 7y ago
      I'm going to go on a limb here, you'd need to put enough energy into the rotors of: helicopter weight * recovery time (so distance * descent rate) * gravity². that is a big number to get rotor mass * rpm to equal.

madengr 7y ago

“No person has ever been harmed or exposed due to undue risk in over 26,000 test flights with over 100 prototype vehicles,” Well that isn’t exactly difficult to achieve if no one was on it. I’d like to know the data if it was carrying a crash dummy.

krisoft 7y ago
Also that is such a contrieved way of saying “no person has ever been harmed in over 26,000 test flights”. There must be something the “due to undue risk” clarification hides.
- geomark 7y ago
  I read that as there were injuries, but they were due to risks that had to be taken, not risks that were carelessly taken.
  - Jamwinner 7y ago
    What risks 'had to' be taken in this context?
  - FabHK 7y ago
    Good point. One could say that nobody has ever been injured or died in civil aviation due to undue risk (except maybe where the captain let his kid fly the jet for a bit, that might be considered "undue"...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593

grizzles 7y ago

I wouldn't have expected a Google related project to deathmarch like this. Energy density was always going to be the problem. The Lithium ion chemistries are just not there yet. These guys know what they are doing: https://skai.co/ https://skai.co/ Vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhMP5237dGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhMP5237dGA

FabHK 7y ago
Minor nitpick: Energy density is energy per volume. What's crucial here is specific energy, ie energy per mass.
- grizzles 7y ago
  <3 Some days I love hacker news.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    The most impressive thing is he did it in a friendly manner! Sometimes I'm pretty bad at correcting people without sounding like an asshole.

jcims 7y ago

It boggles my mind how many of these human transporter designs have the props low to the ground. How the hell is a passenger supposed to egress in case of emergency when the blades are running?

jessaustin 7y ago
There are other reasons for rotors to be overhead, as well. Locating the center of mass below the center of thrust makes a more stable system. Viewing the ground, which is something that many passengers would desire, is much easier when there isn't a bunch of machinery in the way. The further rotors are from the ground, the less likely they are to strike debris when landing and taking off. I'm trying to think of reasons it would be good to have low rotors... maybe something about noise experienced by the passengers?
- rtkwe 7y ago
  Getting them high enough up would require a larger super structure supporting them and would look pretty goofy to get them high enough up that a standing person wouldn't risk hitting them. These can also be stopped pretty quickly just by shorting all the motor leads together so stopping them in an emergency isn't very hard.
  - jcims 7y ago
    I'll go with goofy looking and keep my legs. :)
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      The other thing is these are meant for operation over water so if you have crashed it will be into water and the blades will stop very quickly due to the drag.
  - FabHK 7y ago
    I think there are extremely good reasons to keep the rotors on top, not below, with people around the craft or entering and exiting. One prop in front of single engine plane is enough of a safety hassle that one makes a big deal out of it in safety briefings, and yet people run into them again and again [1][2]. At any rate, the Volocopter [3] has the rotors on top, and while it might not look as sporty as the Kitty Hawk, I don't find it annoyingly goofy. [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lauren-scruggs-model-plane-propeller_n_1382613 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lauren-scruggs-model-plane-pr... [2] http://www.rightthisminute.com/video/graphic-man-hit-plane-propeller http://www.rightthisminute.com/video/graphic-man-hit-plane-p... [3] https://www.volocopter.com/en/ https://www.volocopter.com/en/

danbr 7y ago

I work at a company doing something very similar, owned by an aerospace giant as well. We are led to believe that safety is the most important aspect of any part of our work. At least that’s what we’re told at group meetings and company-wide meetings. But when push comes to shove and the (arbitrary) schedule demand a test, hacky code is produced, checks fall off the list, and errors do happen. Progress seems to be more important than safety. We are instructed to show some sort of significant return on investment within 6-12 months for the funding we’ve received. It’s pretty sad. Telling mangers that we need to take it low and slow at first makes them angry and ignore the engineers who do the good work in exchange for engineers who do it fast.

mgrennan 7y ago
"checks fall of the list" issue has always been a thing. There is a term in electronics call "Muntzing". Named after Earl Muntz who, after the engineers created a thing (TV) he would start pulling parts until it failed. Then call it good. This did two things. Made the product cheaper and caused service calls to fix (Put back parts). He made money both ways. The "Anti Safty" issue is management's form of Muntzing the code.
jacquesm 7y ago
Scariest comment on HN in a long time. Also, you probably think you're anonymous and safe in setting this comment out here but you and your employer are trivially identifiable from this comment and a couple of others made on HN so you may want to petition the mods to kill this comment on the off chance that your employer gets wind of this, it might be a career limiting thing.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago

I hate Forbes.com articles with a burning hate in my heart. The ads. Oh my god - stop it!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Danieru 7y ago

> required to report safety-related issues to their managers, or through a confidential digital channel directly to the general counsel and human resources What. How is it appropriate fo HR to be involved in reports of safety issues. This reads like there was confidential channel to self selection layoffs.

OnlineGladiator 7y ago

> “It was a pattern — if you talked about safety you were done, so you just didn’t,” said one former employee. “That’s just how it had to be if you wanted to keep getting a paycheck.” Sounds like a problem with management, which isn't surprising. Sebastian Thrun is a brilliant researcher, but he has yet to turn any of his ideas into sustainable technologies or companies. Self-driving cars aren't real yet, and Udacity is going through some rough times. To the best of my knowledge Udacity has never been profitable (please correct me if I am wrong). https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/22/sebastian-thrun-initiates-aggressive-plan-to-transform-udacity/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/22/sebastian-thrun-initiates-... Maybe he'll turn around Udacity (I doubt it, although I really hope so). My point is this man chases after shiny things, and then leaves as soon as there's another shiny thing for him to pursue. He does the fun stuff with early development, and then loses interest when you get to the hard slog of making everything sustainable. Similar to self-driving cars, he was able to get his flying machines working well enough for some really awesome demos - but he can't commercialize the technology because it's still demoware. I want to compare this to Icarus because superficially it's so appealing, but in the end Sebastian is going to be incredibly wealthy and never having really lost anything. He will even likely continue to be heralded as a genius by many (and sometimes rightfully so).

FabHK 7y ago
That first quote is really a massive indictment for an aviation company - it's diametrically opposed to how it should be ("safety culture" and all).

Animats 7y ago

EHang is making short flights with people aboard.[1] The EHang 216, a one-person drone-like craft, has 16 props on 8 booms, so there's some redundancy. But not enough battery life to go very far. [1] https://youtu.be/7RjstNDRuCQ https://youtu.be/7RjstNDRuCQ

FabHK 7y ago
Volocopter has been making manned flights since 2016 (see links below). It has 18 rotors (at least 3 can fail while leaving it completely controllable) and 9 independent battery packs. And, in particular, it doesn't have the people-decapitating and knee-cap-smashing rotors below the passenger capsule, but above (like a conventional helicopter). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhNJUyT3HI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhNJUyT3HI8

batsy71 7y ago

The flyer has lot of anti-intuitive designs for example 6 massive fans whirring around the pilot. What if there is bird strike or the blades somehow dismantle from the fan and fly towards the pilot. Also this being made for non professional pilots/passengers what if a passenger tries to board/de-board while the fans are still spinning? At this point, I assume the aircraft keeps morphing into whatever the next iteration of managers/designers deem highest priority to keep the company afloat