44 ms·

Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km

304 points by kayza 6y ago

guidoism 6y ago
SF to Palo Alto by car in 35m is ummm, optimistic. It’s usually more like 2h.
- tschwimmer 6y ago
  It's about 35 minutes in zero traffic. During rush out it can be a few minutes on either side of an hour.
rvnx 6y ago
Small planes and helicopters are so unstable that I wouldn't enjoy riding this vehicle at all. High-speed train is so much more comfortable. Most people taking the plane everyday hate it. It's a so-so idea.
- errantspark 6y ago
  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.
  - tick_tock_tick 6y ago
    Wonder if the mass is low enough for a parachute to be used as a final failsafe.
    - jmercouris 6y ago
      It absolutely is!
  - Alupis 6y ago
    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.
    - yread 6y ago
      Couldn't you come up with some smart way of changing the throttle of the engines to keep you stable. Bit like these fins www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rCWnI8r_EQ
      - Alupis 6y ago
        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. [1] http://www.kitegen.com/en/technology/wind-data/ http://www.kitegen.com/en/technology/wind-data/
giarc 6y ago
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.
- aeternum 6y ago
  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.
  - qppo 6y ago
    This is what they say: > 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
- hristov 6y ago
  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.
  - wefarrell 6y ago
    Black hawks are quiet enough for specops teams to use them in urban raids like the Bin Laden one.
ordinaryradical 6y ago
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.
- tmh79 6y ago
  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.
  - mishftw 6y ago
    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...
    - nine_k 6y ago
      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? Serious question.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    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.
    - bhupy 6y ago
      To be fair, this is how most technology proliferates. In the mid-20th century, airline travel was an endeavor strictly for the rich. Today it is also accessible to those in the middle class.
k__ 6y ago
What would make a "flying car" worthwhile for under 20km flights?
- radicaldreamer 6y ago
  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.
- ethanbond 6y ago
  Basically a failing state. No public transit, bad roads, or safety issues between wealthy enclaves. Yet the market always has solutions up its sleeve! Short range flight!
- dsr_ 6y ago
  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. And then be economically justifiable.
- FabHK 6y ago
  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.
dheera 6y ago
> 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?)
- strig 6y ago
  Obviously you have your personal driver pick you up and bring you to your 10k sqft "cottage" /s
- rvnx 6y ago
  Also, the website underestimates one point. The air taxi is not on top of your house. 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.
  - dheera 6y ago
    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?
bananabreakfast 6y ago
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.
pdelbarba 6y ago
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.
- CalChris 6y ago
  Part 135 is FAA. Lilium is German/EU.
  - pdelbarba 6y ago
    If they're operating in the US (given all the pictures of US cities) then they will absolutely be flying part 121 or 135.
  - looping__lui 6y ago
    Trust me - Germans wish they had FAA because it is magnitudes more customer focused and actually “reasonable”. The German LBA is literally Prussian Bureaucracy stuck in the 19th century...
    - looping__lui 6y ago
      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?
- 6y ago
tschwimmer 6y ago
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.
- pdelbarba 6y ago
  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.
  - kart23 6y ago
    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. https://www.aneclecticmind.com/2010/12/28/the-real-cost-of-helicopter-ownership/ https://www.aneclecticmind.com/2010/12/28/the-real-cost-of-h...
  - nlawalker 6y ago
    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?
    - looping__lui 6y ago
      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...
epicureanideal 6y ago
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 Ok, so this isn't going to cause me to move.
- mjlee 6y ago
  From the article: > 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 $250 at launch and less in the near future. It might not be something you’d do every weekend, but saving you three hours each way might well make it worthwhile for an occasional trip.
  - burlesona 6y ago
    Even at tech salaries those are expensive commutes. But for a ski weekend in Tahoe? Seems legit, assuming these aircraft have a great safety record.
    - gopalv 6y ago
      > Even at tech salaries those are expensive commutes. Are they really that expensive? I was paying 40$ 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.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        You could do a line or pool in 2019 for as little as $17 even slightly off-hours, fwiw. Your point remains well taken.
krm01 6y ago
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)
Jabbles 6y ago
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.
- praveen9920 6y ago
  One word: compliance. FAA has lot of restrictions to allow a planes to fly with pilot in it. Imagine convincing them that without pilot.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    Honestly that is as it should be. 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.
    - Jabbles 6y ago
      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.
    - praveen9920 6y ago
      As grim as it may seem, our air safety is built on deaths of thousands of people died in airplane crashes. some may call it cost of progress.
LouisSayers 6y ago
I can’t see this taking off. If people truly wanted to travel between these places faster they’d already be doing it in Helicopters.
looping__lui 6y ago
I love innovation and stuff. Radical ideas. 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”...
- mattigames 6y ago
  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.
  - looping__lui 6y ago
    I mean, they probably do that. 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.
legitster 6y ago
> 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.
- divbzero 6y ago
  > 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.
- wffurr 6y ago
  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.
mrwnmonm 6y ago
Haven't humanity learned that celebrating and running after their 'abilities' is not a wise move?
mangecoeur 6y ago
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?
- microcolonel 6y ago
  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.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    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.
    - brianwawok 6y ago
      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)
abraxas 6y ago
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.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  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.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > 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.
chris_va 6y ago
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.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  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.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    >However engine failure can also occur on fuel-powered aircraft This. Why would a battery powered aircraft be more susceptible to failure than another engine type?
    - joosters 6y ago
      Because we have decades of experience with the existing engine & fuel types, but very little experience of battery powered aircraft?
      - Aeolun 6y ago
        Not with battery powered aircraft, but quite a lot with battery powered anything.
    - chris_va 6y ago
gorpomon 6y ago
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.
baybal2 6y ago
Switzerland is one of few countries where "air taxi" services turned to profit. 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 6y ago
  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.
  - FabHK 6y ago
    Distances are much larger in Alaska though, I'd think, which means that electric aircraft will struggle. Switzerland has 8.5m people on 41k km^2, while Alaska has 0.7m people on 1500k km^2.
- toohotatopic 6y ago
  Hilly terrain with ice and snow. How do you get to work in a snow-storm? Possible in a car, but something else in an "air taxi".
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  Also, Switzerland is crucially a very wealthy country.
pengaru 6y ago
The last thing I expected was EDF (Electric Ducted Fan) propulsion on something described as a jet.
therockspush 6y ago
There's a bunch of these companies getting more traction right now. Joby Aviation, Kitty Hawk Aero, Wisk, Terrafugia, Opener, Lillium, probably more. 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. Guessing some consolidation is coming up.
- nradov 6y ago
  Investments and prototypes are not traction. Paying customers are traction.
alexchamberlain 6y ago
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.
Hovertruck 6y ago
> 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.
- looping__lui 6y ago
  I guess they address the pressing problems of their investors? Like people with too much money to spend and a bit detached from reality? ;-)
  - notatoad 6y ago
    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
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  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...)
  - gojomo 6y ago
    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. If physically possible, safe, & available for the prices they're claiming, this would have a big market. And, competitors, like the Larry Page-backed 'Kitty Hawk': https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/06/04/larry-pages-flying-car-project-shifts-its-focus.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/06/04/larry-pa...
ogre_codes 6y ago
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.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
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.
einpoklum 6y ago
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.)
viburnum 6y ago
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.
barbegal 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
scarier 6y ago
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-successful-flight-of-worlds-first-commercial-electric-airplane/ 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.
djohnston 6y ago
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.
monomyth 6y ago
great solution for some with noise pollution increase for everyone.
annaaix 6y ago
hi guys. my hot photos are here... https://mub.me/xxxxi https://mub.me/xxxxi my nickname anna1
bfuclusion 6y ago
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.
- ricardobeat 6y ago
  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.
  - trynewideas 6y ago
    Now you can have the relative noise level of a nearby industry road wherever your house might be!
peter303 6y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Tables_of_energy_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Tables_of_energ...
raz32dust 6y ago
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.
kraig911 6y ago
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.
- the_duke 6y ago
  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.
opportune 6y ago
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
voska 6y ago
If you think building apartments in SF is hard, you should try getting a heliport approved! Their plan for SF based routes will be near impossible. 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
projektfu 6y ago
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?
teleforce 6y ago
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]. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmwEbjzLtDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmwEbjzLtDo [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8IB-5PbL9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8IB-5PbL9U
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
I've read about "Uber for jets" or "AirBnB for jets" startups for a while, but most of them are out of business. What's the hardest thing for them? Regulation? Else?

304 points by kayza 6y ago

guidoism 6y ago

SF to Palo Alto by car in 35m is ummm, optimistic. It’s usually more like 2h.

tschwimmer 6y ago
It's about 35 minutes in zero traffic. During rush out it can be a few minutes on either side of an hour.

rvnx 6y ago

Small planes and helicopters are so unstable that I wouldn't enjoy riding this vehicle at all. High-speed train is so much more comfortable. Most people taking the plane everyday hate it. It's a so-so idea.

errantspark 6y ago
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.
- tick_tock_tick 6y ago
  Wonder if the mass is low enough for a parachute to be used as a final failsafe.
  - jmercouris 6y ago
    It absolutely is!
- Alupis 6y ago
  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.
  - yread 6y ago
    Couldn't you come up with some smart way of changing the throttle of the engines to keep you stable. Bit like these fins www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rCWnI8r_EQ
    - Alupis 6y ago
      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. [1] http://www.kitegen.com/en/technology/wind-data/ http://www.kitegen.com/en/technology/wind-data/

giarc 6y ago

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.

aeternum 6y ago
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.
- qppo 6y ago
  This is what they say: > 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
hristov 6y ago
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.
- wefarrell 6y ago
  Black hawks are quiet enough for specops teams to use them in urban raids like the Bin Laden one.

ordinaryradical 6y ago

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.

tmh79 6y ago
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.
- mishftw 6y ago
  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...
  - nine_k 6y ago
    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? Serious question.
- runarberg 6y ago
  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.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    To be fair, this is how most technology proliferates. In the mid-20th century, airline travel was an endeavor strictly for the rich. Today it is also accessible to those in the middle class.

k__ 6y ago

What would make a "flying car" worthwhile for under 20km flights?

radicaldreamer 6y ago
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.
ethanbond 6y ago
Basically a failing state. No public transit, bad roads, or safety issues between wealthy enclaves. Yet the market always has solutions up its sleeve! Short range flight!
dsr_ 6y ago
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. And then be economically justifiable.
FabHK 6y ago
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.

dheera 6y ago

> 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?)

strig 6y ago
Obviously you have your personal driver pick you up and bring you to your 10k sqft "cottage" /s
rvnx 6y ago
Also, the website underestimates one point. The air taxi is not on top of your house. 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.
- dheera 6y ago
  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?

bananabreakfast 6y ago

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.

pdelbarba 6y ago

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.

CalChris 6y ago
Part 135 is FAA. Lilium is German/EU.
- pdelbarba 6y ago
  If they're operating in the US (given all the pictures of US cities) then they will absolutely be flying part 121 or 135.
- looping__lui 6y ago
  Trust me - Germans wish they had FAA because it is magnitudes more customer focused and actually “reasonable”. The German LBA is literally Prussian Bureaucracy stuck in the 19th century...
  - looping__lui 6y ago
    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?
6y ago

tschwimmer 6y ago

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.

pdelbarba 6y ago
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.
- kart23 6y ago
  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. https://www.aneclecticmind.com/2010/12/28/the-real-cost-of-helicopter-ownership/ https://www.aneclecticmind.com/2010/12/28/the-real-cost-of-h...
- nlawalker 6y ago
  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?
  - looping__lui 6y ago
    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...

epicureanideal 6y ago

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 Ok, so this isn't going to cause me to move.

mjlee 6y ago
From the article: > 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 $250 at launch and less in the near future. It might not be something you’d do every weekend, but saving you three hours each way might well make it worthwhile for an occasional trip.
- burlesona 6y ago
  Even at tech salaries those are expensive commutes. But for a ski weekend in Tahoe? Seems legit, assuming these aircraft have a great safety record.
  - gopalv 6y ago
    > Even at tech salaries those are expensive commutes. Are they really that expensive? I was paying 40$ 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.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      You could do a line or pool in 2019 for as little as $17 even slightly off-hours, fwiw. Your point remains well taken.

krm01 6y ago

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)

Jabbles 6y ago

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.

praveen9920 6y ago
One word: compliance. FAA has lot of restrictions to allow a planes to fly with pilot in it. Imagine convincing them that without pilot.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  Honestly that is as it should be. 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.
  - Jabbles 6y ago
    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.
  - praveen9920 6y ago
    As grim as it may seem, our air safety is built on deaths of thousands of people died in airplane crashes. some may call it cost of progress.

LouisSayers 6y ago

I can’t see this taking off. If people truly wanted to travel between these places faster they’d already be doing it in Helicopters.

looping__lui 6y ago

I love innovation and stuff. Radical ideas. 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”...

mattigames 6y ago
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.
- looping__lui 6y ago
  I mean, they probably do that. 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.

legitster 6y ago

> 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.

divbzero 6y ago
> 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.
wffurr 6y ago
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.

mrwnmonm 6y ago

Haven't humanity learned that celebrating and running after their 'abilities' is not a wise move?

mangecoeur 6y ago

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?

microcolonel 6y ago
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.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  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.
  - brianwawok 6y ago
    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)

abraxas 6y ago

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.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago
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.
ceejayoz 6y ago
> 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.

chris_va 6y ago

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.

GekkePrutser 6y ago
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.
- dylan604 6y ago
  >However engine failure can also occur on fuel-powered aircraft This. Why would a battery powered aircraft be more susceptible to failure than another engine type?
  - joosters 6y ago
    Because we have decades of experience with the existing engine & fuel types, but very little experience of battery powered aircraft?
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      Not with battery powered aircraft, but quite a lot with battery powered anything.
  - chris_va 6y ago

gorpomon 6y ago

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.

baybal2 6y ago

Switzerland is one of few countries where "air taxi" services turned to profit. 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 6y ago
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.
- FabHK 6y ago
  Distances are much larger in Alaska though, I'd think, which means that electric aircraft will struggle. Switzerland has 8.5m people on 41k km^2, while Alaska has 0.7m people on 1500k km^2.
toohotatopic 6y ago
Hilly terrain with ice and snow. How do you get to work in a snow-storm? Possible in a car, but something else in an "air taxi".
benhurmarcel 6y ago
Also, Switzerland is crucially a very wealthy country.

pengaru 6y ago

The last thing I expected was EDF (Electric Ducted Fan) propulsion on something described as a jet.

therockspush 6y ago

There's a bunch of these companies getting more traction right now. Joby Aviation, Kitty Hawk Aero, Wisk, Terrafugia, Opener, Lillium, probably more. 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. Guessing some consolidation is coming up.

nradov 6y ago
Investments and prototypes are not traction. Paying customers are traction.

alexchamberlain 6y ago

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.

Hovertruck 6y ago

> 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.

looping__lui 6y ago
I guess they address the pressing problems of their investors? Like people with too much money to spend and a bit detached from reality? ;-)
- notatoad 6y ago
  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
FireBeyond 6y ago
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...)
- gojomo 6y ago
  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. If physically possible, safe, & available for the prices they're claiming, this would have a big market. And, competitors, like the Larry Page-backed 'Kitty Hawk': https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/06/04/larry-pages-flying-car-project-shifts-its-focus.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/06/04/larry-pa...

ogre_codes 6y ago

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.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

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.

einpoklum 6y ago

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.)

viburnum 6y ago

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.

barbegal 6y ago

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.

deleted 6y ago
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scarier 6y ago

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-successful-flight-of-worlds-first-commercial-electric-airplane/ 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.

djohnston 6y ago

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.

monomyth 6y ago

great solution for some with noise pollution increase for everyone.

annaaix 6y ago

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bfuclusion 6y ago

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.

ricardobeat 6y ago
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.
- trynewideas 6y ago
  Now you can have the relative noise level of a nearby industry road wherever your house might be!

peter303 6y ago

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Tables_of_energy_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Tables_of_energ...

raz32dust 6y ago

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.

kraig911 6y ago

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.

the_duke 6y ago
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.

opportune 6y ago

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

voska 6y ago

If you think building apartments in SF is hard, you should try getting a heliport approved! Their plan for SF based routes will be near impossible. 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

projektfu 6y ago

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?

teleforce 6y ago

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]. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmwEbjzLtDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmwEbjzLtDo [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8IB-5PbL9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8IB-5PbL9U

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

I've read about "Uber for jets" or "AirBnB for jets" startups for a while, but most of them are out of business. What's the hardest thing for them? Regulation? Else?