6 ms·

All of these are solvable problems: * With short-hop flights. Swap out batteries at the destination, and slow-charge * Endurance. You don't want batteries dis

• hannob 5y ago
  > * I don't think the crash requirements need to compare to commercial aviation, but to cars. This is competing with cars. Noone will accept any new technology that is as dangerous as cars. (And I sincerely hope at some point we will agree that we won't accept an old technology that's as dangerous as cars...)
• Robotbeat 5y ago
  Take off power surge is one of the few areas that electric aircraft actually are well suited for. Batteries of specific power high enough are not uncommon.
  • blagie 5y ago
    The problem raised in the video was that high take-off power draw would age the batteries quickly, not that it was impossible. I haven't run the numbers to see if they were right.
    • Robotbeat 5y ago
      But you’re starting off in the best possible part of the flight, when battery voltage is highest. A burst of power there has the least bad impact. Also, if you have a large battery, the amount of power you can afford for burst is extremely high. It’s also possible to have a battery optimized for high discharge assist the main battery, like a hybrid vehicle. But that’s unlikely for most battery chemistries which have plenty high C-rate that a secondary power-optimized battery is totally unnecessary.
      • Leherenn 5y ago
        Well, if you only do one flight per charge, yes. One of the club around here tried to use an electric plane for instruction, and the constant takeoff/landing cycles killed the battery real fast.
    • _dain_ 5y ago
      Could you have some kind of slingshot on the runway to accelerate the plane, take some of the work off the batteries? Like what they have on aircraft carriers.
    • CoastalCoder 5y ago
      I wonder if a low-performance version of a carrier catapult would work. Perhaps a simpler / cheaper version would be a specialized winch at the end of the runway. Obviously it would limit the airstrips from which an electric plane could embark, but maybe that's an acceptable trade-off.
      • Robotbeat 5y ago
        That’s precisely what Zipline does, which is the only operational cargo electric plane company.
      • nradov 5y ago
        Gliders are already launched using winches at some airfields. https://www.camgliding.uk/about-gliding/launch-methods/ https://www.camgliding.uk/about-gliding/launch-methods/
  • thehappypm 5y ago
    Yeah, I mean you can put a bunch of AAA batteries in parallel to get an arbitrary amount of current!
• Lavery 5y ago
  Just to take issue with one piece of this, the crash requirements do need to compete with commercial aviation, because in the customer mindset they will.
• umvi 5y ago
  > I don't think the crash requirements need to compare to commercial aviation, but to cars. This is competing with cars. A lot of car crashes are not fatal. Would you be able to say the same of electric airplanes? I'm guessing fatality rate will be much higher, and with added collateral damage of a lithium ion bomb falling from the sky onto other cars, buildings, etc. the public will not tolerate electric plane crash rates the same as car crashes.
• EthanHeilman 5y ago
  To me "short-hop flights" is the real reason any of this makes sense. If you are commuting into NYC and can get picked up at 9am and flown past traffic to your building, thats an enormous win if you can pay for it. It will compete in helicopter taxi market and expand that market by being able to land closer to the destination because it makes less noise. This and its faster speed means shorter total commute. Passenger helicopters: speed 160 MPH, range 250 miles, cost $1.3-13.00 USD/mile Joby claims: 200 MPH, 150 miles, ~$4 USD/mile.
  • vkou 5y ago
    Except that NYC is one of the worst environments in the world for short-hop flights, due to the risk of killing dozens of people on the ground if you crash. The safety record of non-commercial aviation is not great. If you want to solve traffic, invest in public transit. Matching the throughput of a single train requires completely saturating the sky with small aircraft.
  • nradov 5y ago
    There are only 3 helicopter pads available for commuter use in Manhattan. Those won't be able to handle much more traffic during commute hours. Building more isn't going to be politically viable. https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/10/us/new-york-city-helicopter-flights/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/10/us/new-york-city-helicopter-f...
• sokoloff 5y ago
  If I were starting an aerospace company (which is roughly the same as saying “if I hated money…”), I’d damn sure start it in the US. The US has very friendly rules for experimental R&D aircraft development, is the largest single market for aviation, and what the FAA requires for certification of production aircraft isn’t going to be substantially more involved than what they’d accept from another member ICAO state. Aviation regulations are overwhelmingly federal in the US, so excepting any airport-specific rules, CA is an OK place to start. If you’re capable of making electric airplanes viable, you’re capable of doing it in the FAA and CA jurisdiction.
  • xyzzyz 5y ago
    An unrelated reason why California is not great place for it: an aviation company I am familiar with recently had its entire test site (remote, desolate place) closed for months, because of fire risk — one of its previous prototypes caught on fire upon crashing (as things packed with energy sometimes to do on crash), and so no more testing was allowed until things get less dry.
    • nradov 5y ago
      California aerospace companies have usually conducted flight tests in the Mojave Desert area precisely because a crash is unlikely to cause a major fire or other damage on the ground.
  • Gravityloss 5y ago
    If you're in Europe, you could do manufacturing in Italy as they have some kind of a special free trade agreement with USA regarding aircraft. Pipistrel is manufacturing some planes in Italy because of that.
    • Stevvo 5y ago
      Sure, but that doesn't really help anything. e.g. the AW609 mentioned in the video that has been stuck in certification for 20 years is built in Italy under that agreement.
• davewritescode 5y ago
  > A likely mistake seems to be trying to get this off-the-ground in the US regulatory climate. It'd be much easier to do this in a friendlier regime, more tolerant of occasional crashes, get experience, and move into Western markets after the concept is validated. California seems like just about the worst place to start. Where would this “more friendly” regulatory climate exist and how to you get the best aerospace engineers in the world there? There’s nothing to prevent this company from testing models in California, and unmanned. What’s the point of starting somewhere that lets you kill test pilots with fewer consequences. This is mastabatory libertarian bullshit. No high tech startup wins and loses on regulation.
• oleg_antonyan 5y ago
  > do this in a friendlier regime, more tolerant of occasional crashes, get experience, and move into Western markets This is brilliant: test in 3rd world b/c who cares about those anyway
• rhinoceraptor 5y ago
  I don't think it would be viable to do battery replacement. Pretty much no commercial EVs do it, partly because we don't need to, and partly because it's pretty hard problem. Battery packs have a pretty narrow range of temperature where they perform well so they need fluid lines to either heat or cool them, in addition to the electrical connections. Plus with a plane, the only place that really makes sense to put the fuel or batteries is in the wings, so it couldn't be a flat pancake battery pack like in a passenger car. I don't think you could make a wing where you can remove the battery from the wing easily, it would have to be sealed in place. So the only way I think that would really make sense would be for the fuselage to be removed from the wing assembly, and then re-attached to a fully charged wing assembly. And that doesn't seem that practical either.
• soneil 5y ago
  > A likely mistake seems to be trying to get this off-the-ground in the US regulatory climate. It'd be much easier to do this in a friendlier regime, more tolerant of occasional crashes, get experience, and move into Western markets after the concept is validated. California seems like just about the worst place to start. I'm not sure this is as straight-forward as it sounds. Simply put, there's not many places you're going to find a high cash-density with low regulation. Frankly - and I say this as a European - California is exactly where I'd want to launch this. You have the urban density to make it desirable, the cash-density to make it possible, and the most favourable year-round weather out of anywhere else I can think that'd make the list.
  • blagie 5y ago
    Let me give a few examples of decent places to launch: 1) Dubai 2) Doha 3) Maybe Manama 4) Maybe Riyadh Upsides: - "Regulatory regime" means that you talk to the royal family. This is a surprisingly sane and reasonable process. - Plenty of money to go around; people looking for things to invest into when the oil runs out - Better weather than California - Culture is more tolerant of occasional crashes - Cash-rich populations who would pay for this sort of thing The market isn't as large, but for a pilot, you don't want large. For large markets, though, I can think of a few cities in Asia which would be ideal for scaling up. As a footnote: Regulation isn't a question of low versus high. It's a question of easy versus hard. I worked in a highly-regulated field, and we did field testing in a small European country where the standards were probably higher than the US, but the process was much more streamlined. Approvals were done by talking to one expert who either gave a thumbs up, thumbs down, or told you what you needed to change. In the US, the process would have taken years of pushing paperwork, and a mechanical bureaucracy is less suited to evaluate safety than an expert. A multiyear process isn't necessarily any more robust than a fast one.
• euroderf 5y ago
  Take-off power surge: Maybe try catapult launch ? It wouldn't have to be as mechanically compact and precisely manufactured as an aircraft carrier's.
• jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Exactly. Joby is just one of many. They might fail and probably will. The reality: multiple companies are currently flying viable prototypes. A lot of the issues are at this point no longer issues: they are solved problems (or at least very solvable). The solutions might not be perfect but we are beyond proofs of concept at this point: these things are flying. The math is known, brutal, but not a show stopper. In short, within acceptable parameters of e.g. limited range (but also cost), these things can function as advertised. There are a bunch of uncertainties remaining that are essentially non technical and boil down to regulation, market dynamics, and people buying into this stuff. The main psychological issue is that people have been trained to believe that planes are complex machines that require advanced skills to fly, a lot of maintenance, and a high cost per hour/mile. While they are reluctant to let go of these notions, none of that is true for electrical planes. Think of them as a vacuum cleaners with wings and some power source (i.e. batteries or fuel cells). Simple to manufacture, maintain. and operate. Reliable too because there's very little that can break. It's the exact opposite of the complex, unreliable, expensive to build and operate planes that we have today. Their unreliability requires constant vigilance in the form of maintenance, inspections, and vigilance that requires extensive practice and training. You are not even allowed to operate a plane unless you can prove that you have gone through extensive training and have enough recent experience flying a plane. Flying a plane requires deep knowledge of all the complex machinery, its failure modes, and mitigations. Electrical planes not so much. The prototypes on the market right now have in common that they are "fly by wire" where pilot inputs are very limited and dumbed down to the point where you might wonder what the role of the pilot exactly is (some of these things are autonomous from day one). They are mechanically simple (lots of reliable electrical motors, wires, and batteries). And they cost a certain amount of $ per hours which is a function of the (long) mechanical life of the engines and the rest of the plane and the cost of KWH. The main argument in this video is that the FAA is going to be a PITA. That's correct; that's their job and they are good at it. But that doesn't mean it's a constant in the universe. Ultimately some country will start allowing these things and likely at that point FOMO and politics kick in. Simply put, if e.g. China (a likely place for this to happen) starts living in the future by manufacturing and operating these things at scale, there's absolutely zero chance of the FAA being allowed to hold that back in the USA for very long.