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Lilium achieves first main wing transition for all-electric aircraft [video]
- reacharavindh 4y agoThis has been one of my “shower thoughts”.. If jet fuel is very efficient and dense for the more demanding take off and low altitude legs of the flight, we aren’t there concepts that do a hybrid of jet fuel and electric powered flights that use the electric propellers only where they are efficient, leaving the existing system for the more challenging tasks like take off?
- ramesh31 4y agoSame problem as all hybrid power systems; weight and complexity. You can't get away with generalist designs in an aircraft the way you can with a land or water vehicle. Carrying around the weight and drag penalties of an unused engine would more than detract from any efficiency gain with an electric auxiliary.
- Ekaros 4y agoAlso unlike with sea where efficiency gains from hybrids out gain the mass and volume losses, same doesn't apply to air. Also, some of the engine types like turboprops are pretty good already. And hybrid systems likely won't make gains and probably even lose quite a bit.
- krallja 4y agoThen you have two different energy storage areas plus two different drive trains, and the associated weight gain that implies. Hybrid road vehicles make it work because they have the weight supported by the ground, plus the additional benefit of regenerative braking, which evens out energy usage in stop-and-go and hilly travel. Planes don’t work at all in either scenario.
- cjbprime 4y agoThere are some electric gliders which at least use the same intuition -- you need a ride for takeoff, but then there's an electric sustaining motor for once you're in the air (and don't have lift).
- rwmj 4y agoOr can you have a 100' long cable to directly power the lift off and first hundred feet of the flight? (For a conventional runway takeoff, some kind of powered tracks.)
- amluto 4y agoAircraft carriers effectively have powered tracks. As I understand it, this is currently quite dangerous and expensive.
- p_l 4y agoIn addition to other comments here about increased weight and complexity... There's an area where it makes sense, and it's being trialed in few places. Namely electric propulsion for taxiing. You see, Taxiing on jet engines is very, very, very inefficient - you stay pretty much in worst fuel economy all the time to the point that taxiing burns more fuel than few hundred kilometers of cruise on the heaviest airliners. In fact optimizing taxiing is important enough that landings are calculated to ensure you have shorter distance and can reuse kinetic energy from landing, and depending on plane it might be norm to shut off all engines except one during taxi. So there's experimentation with either adding electric drivetrain to main gear or having remote-controlled pulling car or quick-detachable (and also remote controlled) drive blocks that could attach to main gear. This way the plane would only start the engines just before going onto its designated runway.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoThis all just furthers my idea that if I’m ever a time traveler, I’ll try and convince the past to make airplanes that all have aircraft carrier sling shot systems… for fun.
- stavros 4y agoTaxiing is the process of getting the plane to the slingshot.
- simonsarris 4y agoYeah, you'd need to convince the past that "tugboats but for aircraft" is a good thing to standardize.
- dwighttk 4y agoI am not an expert This doesn’t seem to make any sense to me. If taxiing is so inefficient, why not use the pushback carts to push/pull the planes into position? I’ve been to many more airports that make the plane taxi for quite a distance, like 20 minutes (not just sitting and waiting, but moving) to get to the gate than ones that “ensure you have shorter distance and can reuse kinetic energy from landing”
- akira2501 4y agoBecause we use the engines to generate hydraulic power and electric power, and on larger planes it drives the air conditioning. The engines do a lot more than just provide thrust.
- baybal2 4y agoLilium is a shady company First, it's people without even most basic aeronautic backround designing an aircraft. Second, the number of flaws with their scheme being pointed by experts is so huge they cannot possibly get certified without throwing out everything, and redesigning completely from scratch. Third, they finally hired somebody with the background, but so far nobody seen any change from "submarine ramen startup," to a serious company happening. Unlike with SpaceX, where Elon promptly yielded to professional engineers shutting down his fantasies like an SSTO design, 3D printing the whole rocket, or developing an ion engine to replace chemical one for last stages. Fourth, they lash out on all criticism with "you have no vision," it's "aircraft 2.0," and similar dismissal. Fifth, they courted investors with physically unachievable performance figures. To me it's very clear, the company is heading the way of "HTML supercomputer" P.S. Speak of the devil, it's already starting: https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2022-06-02/lilium-investors-class-action-lawsuit-filed-on-behalf-of-investors-the-portnoy-law-firm https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2022-06-02/lilium-i...
- heisenbit 4y agoThey have 600 people, onboarding a veteran Airbus exec as CEO and are located in the south of Germany which is the center of the German aircraft and high tech manufacturing industry. On the surface they pass my smell test. From their website: > As Co-founder and VP Product, Patrick leads the global digital and physical product strategy owning the technical operation readiness of the aircraft and its mobility service . He holds a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the Technical University of Munich. Claiming they have no clue seems to be without facts.
- bouchard 4y agoTheir website isn't exactly up to date. Dr. Patrick Nathen who published Lilium's white paper detailing their aircraft architecture has left his VP role and is now an engineer within their flight mechanics team [0]. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-patrick-nathen-1a0840b3_engineering-love-lilium-activity-6916627589885231105-13F6 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-patrick-nathen-1a0840b3_en...
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- robonerd 4y agoThis is kind of cool, but I'm skeptical that these sort of planes will ever be practical as much more than rich people toys. The power density of even speculative near-future batteries favors small airplanes and short flights. This doesn't really mesh into the existing aviation industry, so proponents of these small electric planes usually propose creating new markets entirely; e.g. Uber for Helicopters. But I'm pretty skeptical that laws will allow regular operation of these in residential neighborhoods for long, if at all. Also, where is the vertical stabilizer and rudder? I assume they're using differential thrust in powered flight, but what if they lose power? Can this plane be controlled in a glide?
- toomuchtodo 4y agoEnjoy the engineering achievement in the moment.
- kurthr 4y agoA lot of the electric (mostly fuel cell) aviation startup industry is funded/supported by currently profitable aviation companies. The 1000hp motors for them are, like the airframes, one of the mostly off-the-shelf elements of their development. I agree that even modern batteries are pretty absurd for any human scale flight, though scaling laws make smaller aircraft more reasonable.
- amelius 4y agoIsn't synthetic fuel much more promising?
- jeffbee 4y agoYeah they are, and this fact is just overlooked by people who aren't thinking through the implications of abundant renewable energy. With a surplus of renewable energy it makes much more sense to manufacture synthetic liquid fuels and burn them, than it does to power airplanes with batteries. The energy cycle is grossly inefficient but nobody is going to care because the energy inputs will be nearly cost-free.
- amelius 4y agoWhy does this look like it's entirely CGI?
- AustinDev 4y agoResolution and framerate. What were you watching the video in?
- xeromal 4y agoIs hydrogen gas dense enough to power an aircraft? I don't think battery technology will be dense enough to power aircraft in our lifetimes, but I feel like hydrogen could play a part
- p_l 4y agoHydrogen has been tested, including in Soviet Union which considered it the future fuel for airliners, tested on Tu-154M modified for cryogenic hydrogen fuel.
- stareatgoats 4y agoAgree: https://newatlas.com/aircraft/hypoint-gtl-lightweight-liquid-hydrogen-tank https://newatlas.com/aircraft/hypoint-gtl-lightweight-liquid...
- skykooler 4y agoHydrogen has an excellent energy-to-weight ratio, but in terms of energy-to-volume it's even worse than lithium-ion batteries as a gas. This is why proposals for hydrogen airliners usually need a complicated cryogenic setup to store it as liquid hydrogen instead.
- ncmncm 4y agoYou don't need a "complicated" cryogenic setup. You just need insulated tankage. But it won't fit in the wings, so you need new airframes or fuel nacelles. We have a very great deal of experience with fuel nacelles already, because that is what a "drop tank" looks like; you just omit the "drop" complication. The advantages over inboard tankage are safety, possible retrofitting of existing fleets, and short plumbing runs. Once LH2 aircraft are used on any route, kerosene craft will be wholly unable to compete, even without carbon taxes. Carbon taxes could be spent on accelerating the transition.
- hgomersall 4y agoOr a radically different airframe design. One that perhaps is much bigger and flies slower but is very low weight (by virtue of being mostly full of hydrogen).
- fmakunbound 4y agoRecently read unleaded aviation fuel seems to be an insurmountable problem for the FAA. Will it be that hard with electric aircraft or is it further along?
- p_l 4y agoCompletely unrelated. The issue with unleaded fuel is that the goal is to make it a drop-in replacement on all engines that currently use AVGAS100LL, which is the only remaining leaded fuel in large use (a lot of small planes can actually fly on unleaded aviation fuels and there are some available, it's just 100LL is "default" fuel when thinking of piston engines). So they have to certify that if you swap the fuel, preferably without any modifications, then it's safe to fly. Battery powered aircraft go through normal certification process for a new design.
- rklaehn 4y agoThis is a major milestone for them. Very nice to see the indicators suddenly transitioning to laminar flow. It is a shame that they only stayed in this flight regime for a few seconds, but they will now gradually expand the envelope. Here is a good article explaining the tradeoffs they make vs. more traditional VTOL craft with larger propellers: https://ir.lilium.com/news-releases/news-release-details/technology-behind-lilium-jet https://ir.lilium.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tec... . TLDR: they accept more inefficient performance during hover because they won't stay in this flight regime for long.
- mrfusion 4y agoI was actually just thinking that VTOL aircraft could solve the housing crisis considering we’re using 1000s of acres of prime real estate in every city for airports. Anyone want to flesh out that idea and write it up? (I’d be curious if anyone could correct my thinking instead of downvoting)
- hrgiger 4y agoI didnt downvote, I think those VTOLs also at the end gonna land somewhere, its reminds me this pic [1]. https://www.google.com/search?q=1+bus+vs+related+cars&newwindow=1&client=firefox-b-e&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiiv9r4rqj4AhVM_qQKHeppB3IQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1472&bih=725&dpr=1.3#imgrc=WZB5OwYa19nwaM https://www.google.com/search?q=1+bus+vs+related+cars&newwin...
- mrfusion 4y agoThat’s true but runways are quite long and we need several of them at least. And we wouldn’t need the same level of centralization for small landing pads.
- ncmncm 4y agoNo city will be scrapping its runways. Period. So if you add VTOL pads that takes more of high value real estate.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoThey can land on roofs, in parks, any open area large enough basically. That kind of is the whole point being able to land anywhere. Short term, anything that already accommodates helicopters would be good enough. The problem with those is mainly that helicopters are very noisy so people don't like to have helipads everywhere. But considering, these VTOL planes tend to be a lot less noisy, having them land in more places might end up being less controversial. Either way, it would be a perfectly valid way to commute 50-80 miles in ten minutes or so and skip the 2 hour car ride. I could see that become a popular thing. Initially probably quite expensive but the pitch for these devices seems to be that they could be mass produced cheaply.
- runlevel1 4y agoHaving motors along the whole trailing edge of the wing surely kills the glide ratio of this, right? Losing power on one side seems like an even more frightening prospect. Even if the motors were somehow allowed to freely windmill, that's a lot of surface area for drag. At the very least, it must have some unusual aerodynamic properties.
- melony 4y agoWhy is the airflow so turbulent over the trailing edge? Is it even considered a full transition?
- rklaehn 4y ago> Having motors along the whole trailing edge of the wing surely kills the glide ratio of this, right? The motors are running at reduced thrust and changed geometry during all parts of the flight. Regarding power loss: Last time I read about it in more detail, the impellers were organised in groups of 3, and you could lose one such module anywhere on the plane, even on the front canards, without issues. On the wings you could probably lose several. If you lose all electricity everywhere that would be a bad day, but the same is true for a modern airliner with fly by wire controls.
- nradov 4y agoModern airliners are equipped with ram air turbines to provide electrical power for critical systems even if they lose all engines and the APU.
- Zak 4y agoI am (perhaps unreasonably) annoyed by the mixed units. The narrator and captions are using knots for speed, which is standard for aviation in most of the world. The on-screen display is using km/h, which is standard for everything else in most of the world.
- benhurmarcel 4y agoInterestingly, glider pilots use metric units in metric countries. So altitudes are in m, airspeed in km/h, and vertical speed in m/s.
- 369548684892826 4y agoAnd ft/s for vertical speed. Really got a bit of everything going on there!
- aero-glide2 4y agoThat is standard for vertical speed everywhere
- andbberger 4y agothe hover power density is insane, 2500W/kg
- ur-whale 4y agoOh, wow, that is intense indeed. Where did you get these numbers? Was it in the vid?
- dwighttk 4y agoWhat percentage of available battery did that 4 minute loop take?
- _Microft 4y agoI would guess a considerable percentage because launching and landing takes a disproportional amount of power. Iirc their information correctly then launching and landing takes 10x as much power as level flight. That's because in these situations lift has to be generated by the fans instead of the wings. So short flights are actually disadvantageous.
- 01100011 4y agoShower thought: Is anyone working on ground-assisted takeoff of aircraft using something like an aircraft catapult? It seems like it would be fairly straightforward to provide the initial momentum of an aircraft and save a bit of fuel & weight. Sure, you're not gaining much just getting the aircraft up to takeoff speed, but it seems like an easy way to make commercial flights more efficient.
- drexlspivey 4y agoI think I am going to stick with the commercial flights without the catapult if this ever happens
- blktiger 4y agoThe short answer is that catapult systems are expensive and require a lot of maintenance. Even many Navies don’t use catapult assisted launches for that very reason. Additionally, commercial aircraft aren’t designed for that kind of force applied to their main gear. They’d most likely have to be modified.
- 01100011 4y agoI wonder what sort of force you could generate with a series of electric coils in the ground? It lacks moving parts, so it should be low maintenance. You'd need magnets on the gear of the plane, offsetting the weight savings though. Yeah, you'd definitely need to reinforce the landing gear, but I think that's doable.
- chipsa 4y agoNaval catapults don't apply force to the main gear either. Mostly is to the nose gear now, but it used to through the use of bridles to points on the wing (and wing spar). The bridles were a pain though, so they transitioned everything to the nose gear attachment. You can tell when a carrier transitioned, because they took the bridle catchers off the bow (the little narrow ramps at the front).
- pilot7378535 4y agoYes, for gliders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(sailplane)#Launch_and_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(sailplane)#Launch_and_... Also related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_carriage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_carriage
- mLuby 4y agoI love that tell-tales are still part of vessels thousands of years later.
- beefman 4y agoTransportation economics are dominated by the passengers per pilot ratio. Small vehicles aren't economic unless they are piloted by a passenger or an AI. AI piloting should be easier with aircraft than cars.
- drexlspivey 4y agoFuel costs are in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars per flight. Surely that’s much more expensive than the pilot costs?
- redleader55 4y agoAccording to [1] fuel costs are in the tens of thousands for intercontinental flights. Pilot training is around 200k USD [2] and thousands of hours to be accepted to fly reputable companies' planes. I wouldn't call pilot costs negligible. [1] - https://www.google.com/amp/s/simpleflying.com/commercial-airliner-fuel-cost/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/simpleflying.com/commercial-air... [2] - https://fly-ga.co.uk/how-much-cost-become-pilot-learn-fly/ https://fly-ga.co.uk/how-much-cost-become-pilot-learn-fly/
- hef19898 4y agoWe are living in a world were co-pilots sometimes pay to be allow?d to fly in order to get flight hours in towards type ratings and promotions. Initial pilot trainig through airlines, and paid by those with almost guaranteed employment afterwards, is a thing of the past. Most pilots pay for their own training now. Ehich leaves salaries, which are indeed negligable. Even if you accoubt for training costs, those are negiligable whem compared to fuel, maintenance,...
- ledauphin 4y agoConsider that, as a ballpark average, a commercial pilot gets paid maybe ~$200/hour for their work. Double that if you're feeling generous. Whereas total operating costs for a 737 is somewhere in the $5000-$10000/hour range. That doesn't include airport fees, either. The cost of pilots next to the cost fuel+maintenance+everything else is...pretty negligible.
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- cvccvroomvroom 4y agoNot really a plane so much as a expense, semi-hovering, large drone, inefficient consumer of electricity. An efficient vehicle would have significant aerodynamic properties like a glider. Instead, it's mostly pushing itself up rather than using an airfoil. Also, in terms of climate change, widespread use of anything similar would be devastating for the environment as it's an inherently extremely uneconomical mode of transportation. If we wanted better transportation for less energy, it look like a train.
- throwaway019254 4y agoIt has vertical take off? It must burn so much electricity for that? Wouldn't be classic horizontal take off more efficient?
- lucb1e 4y agoI guess since they're mainly competing with helicopters, the advantage of being able to go to a random building rather than requiring huge runways in the place you want to go (usually somewhere in the middle of a city) is bigger than the advantage of improved fuel efficiency.
- m00dy 4y agoand again, we see an amazing german engineering.
- carabiner 4y agoMaking a comment to represent all aerospace professionals getting major gell-man amnesia vibes from this thread.
- akrymski 4y ago1. We already have VTOLs - helicopters. How do the economics of this compares to helicopters? 2. Surely hydrogen is a better fuel source for VTOL?
- sigmoid10 4y ago1. Helicopters are technically VTOL, but what you'd really want is something that can transition between vertical takeoff and horizontal flight using conventional wings, which is much more efficient and stable when travelling from A to B. 2. VTOL requires engines which provide very high thrust and very short response time during vertical ascent. This is incredibly hard to do using combustion engines - which includes hydrogen - but trivial using electric engines, which is why every cheap drone can easily fly using only vertically mounted propellers.
- akrymski 4y ago1. I'm interested in the economics of this vs helicopters. Why would someone buy one? Is it cheaper? Faster? More energy efficient per mile? 2. Hydrogen fuel cells drive an electric motor, no combustion needed. Battery weight seems to be a huge factor for VTOL. Hydrogen drones can easily fly for hours for example. Also what about safety? Helicopters can be landed even in case of power failure.
- robonerd 4y ago> VTOL requires engines which provide very high thrust and very short response time during vertical ascent Not necessarily. That's how you do it with electric multirotors, because it's simple and electric motors are good at it. With turbine powered VTOLs, the rotor blades are actuated to change their angle of attack, and consequently how much lift they're producing, using swashplates and cyclic controls. That's what traditional helicopters do, and what tiltrotors like the V-22 do too. Incidentally I think tiltrotors are what you're describing as the VTOL ideal; they take off like helicopters then transition into horizontal flight using conventional (albeit stubby) wings. They're not exactly a runaway success and have had a rocky history, but they do work.
- staunch 4y agoPretty exciting. I consider this a real proof of concept for shuttlepods AKA flying cars. I'm sure there's a lot of work left to do this shows how much is already possible with relatively little effort by a relatively small company. Seems like there's a few advances that should enable it to finally happen: Automated: so there's no pilot to make mistakes and drive up costs. Automated flying is easier than navigating streets, so this is probably already doable at scale even though self-driving cars are taking longer than hoped. Electric: so the at-scale/long-term cost per flight can be nearly zero. Seems possible something like this could be manufactured for $100k at scale and fly (with maintenance) for multiple years. Multi-rotor w/efficient DC motors, multi-battery pack w/advanced batteries, and multi-computer w/advanced processors: so there's no single point of failure and lots of opportunity to recover from failure, and to enable easy VTOL without runways. The Wright brothers would love it. Their initial vision was to not need specially built runways or airports. It turns out that was "too early" of an idea to be practical but we're getting close. An "infinite highway of the air" (Wilbur Wright) is an exciting goal.
- a-dub 4y agoi don't know what the proper term is, so i'm just going to make bjork happy and call them aerodynamic scientifical tassles. are they just recorded visually by a camera and then inspected manually for a test flight or are they part of some kind of active sensor system. cool stuff.
- carabiner 4y agoTufts and they are recorded on video.
- cousin_it 4y agoI think the ideal personal aircraft would work like a quadcopter during takeoff and landing, but unfold wings for cruising flight with much better efficiency. It seems there's already such a drone called Transwing, I hope they make a personal aircraft like that.
- ansible 4y agoThat really is the basic idea here, except with more redundancy. Pulling the air over the wings and canard generates a lot of lift.
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- dtgriscom 4y agoI'm impressed by how quiet 36 electric turbines can be. (Of course, that's almost certainly a function of whoever mixed the audio...)
- ansible 4y agoThe ducted fans help reduce the noise.
- Humphrey 4y agoWhy is the speed in metric (km/hr) and the vertical acceleration in imperial (ft/min). Hurts my brain!
- dreamcompiler 4y agoI'm skeptical. They're claiming they'll be able to store 300kWh of energy on board. That's the equivalent of about 4 Tesla Model Y cars. Even if they could pack this much energy on board, flying that much weight 200km is almost certainly going to take more than 300kWh, especially with 7 passengers. Lilium is very proud of their ducted fan designs and their power usage profiles -- and they should be! -- but they're counting on advancements in battery tech that are unlikely to happen in the timeframe they need. It's much more likely they will be limited to 100km range or 30-minute flights at a maximum when reserves are factored in. This says nothing about how fast they can recharge those massive batteries. If they have the equivalent of four Tesla superchargers available they can probably recharge completely in 40 minutes or so, which is probably good enough. But that charging infrastructure needs to be in place at virtually every pad where the plane lands, so the "ordinary helipads" they brag about using are not going to work without roughly a $million of power infrastructure upgrades at each. If they try to go cheap on this, they will have to live with multi-hour recharge times.
- theYipster 4y ago1,000 times this, and this is why they are mired in an investor lawsuit.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoLooks like I was overly optimistic. After doing some more research I found that the company has been saying "Our ducted fans are often assessed based on methodologies better suited to assessing open propellers, which are generally less efficient in flight than ducted fans" and "It is accepted in the aerospace expert community that ducted fans are aerodynamically more efficient than open propellers." [0] This is just thinly-disguised lying. Ducted fans are more efficient than open propellers of the same diameter, which is a telling detail that they conveniently leave unstated. A ducted fan of 10 cm diameter cannot be compared with an open propeller of 4 m diameter, which is closer to what Lilium's competitors use. This doesn't by itself mean the ducted fan idea won't work, but it's ridiculous to imply that the ducted fan is somehow "more efficient" without talking about the propellers' respective diameters. [0] https://investors.lilium.com/techfaq https://investors.lilium.com/techfaq
- happyopossum 4y agoI don’t care how skeptical or how much of a downer you want to be - if you can’t look at this and think “damn that’s cool” then maybe you need to take a step back.
- z9znz 4y agoWithout a vertical stabilizer, I guess it relies on thrust vectoring to control yaw. One would question why that uncommon decision was made (deleting the stabilizer), and the most likely reason I can imagine is weight. If that's the case, and considering composite structures, that would also suggest that payload (passengers and luggage) would be quite limited. Ultimately it seems this total package depends very much on the array of ducted fans. While there are many of them, it is still a serious single point of failure. In a no power situation with a crosswind, how would one control the direction of the aircraft? I notice from this film that the windsock showed virtually no wind, and I doubt this was a coincidence.
- benhurmarcel 4y ago> (deleting the stabilizer), and the most likely reason I can imagine is weight More likely than weight is drag.
- z9znz 4y agoI considered that, but forward speed doesn't seem to be the priority. I think the VTOL aspect is what matters, and that suggests weight is most important. But who knows. I would much sooner ride in a helicopter than this. At least a heli can potentially autorotate in a no-power scenario.
- Pxtl 4y agoVery nice, but the mechanics of the vehicle remind me of the Moller Skycar and the V22 Osprey, both of which were famous failures. So I'll remain skeptical until it starts doing manned airport-to-airport flights.
- davidravid 4y agoimpressive, what a smooth landing!!!
- theYipster 4y agoIt's always so fascinating to read about EVTOL outside of industry forums, especially where commenters are highly inquisitive (both in the physics/engineering of these vehicles and in their proposed business models.) For those who've read into Lilium and their business model, some comments: 1. There are lots of very talented people at the company, including several friends of mine. They also have strong leadership and a very well connected board. However, their design has several unproven aspects to it. 2. The biggest issue Lilium has is their battery, which is predicated on technology that doesn't exist yet. Battery technology doesn't improve like the semiconductor. There is no Moore's Law. What Lilium needs is an Einstein-level breakthrough in chemistry. Who knows if and when that will happen? 3. Lilium, like several other EVTOL manufacturers, managed to SPAC itself last year. Many of its investors are now retail investors who do not understand aerospace platform development, the challenges and risks of this nascent EVTOL domain, nor the necessary timelines for development, certification, or infrastructure development (a much bigger challenge IMHO than certification.) As a result, thanks in part to the reveal about above issue #2 some months ago (which may or may not be related to a major drop in stock price,) there is now a class-action investor lawsuit against the company. Uh oh! Btw, I do a lot of work in aerospace safety standards around emerging tech, and therefore have a lot of tentacles into this new domain of aerospace, although I do not work commercially in AAM/EVTOL/UAM. As an engineer and leader, I think broadly and connect dots. This is uncommon in the industry, which is highly siloed. In short, there is a good deal skepticism in these comments. I think that's warranted, and I tend to agree with that skepticism. Lilium and others will have a positive and positively transformative effect on aviation--especially in the general and business aviation space (what we aerospace nerds call Part 23, even though EVTOL is now Part 21.17b--another issue to read up about!) However, I wouldn't bet a dime on the current business models of most of these EVTOL/UAM OEMS.
- audunw 4y ago> What Lilium needs is an Einstein-level breakthrough in chemistry. Do you have details for this claim? Is their needs anything more than what their supplier Zenlabs claims to have developed? If so, it doesn't seem to me that they require anything more than what has already been proven in the lab, and is somewhere in the stages of late lab development to early pilot production by several companies (Zenlab, SES, QuantumScape, Sila, etc) Nothing is guaranteed until one of these companies have actually started shipping massive amount of batteries to a finished commercial product. But seems almost inevitable now that a step improvement in energy density will be achieved in a shipping product in the next 5-10 years.
- Aeolun 4y agoIs 120km/h considered a high enough speed for aircraft now? That looked like a very short span of time to use the main wings, and it was still going barely faster than a car.
- johntony678 4y ago[flagged]