6 ms·

> No way. Wait until you see the motor carriages they claim are going to replace horses one day.

by jstummbillig 4y ago

tpxl 4y ago
When a motor carriage loses power, it stops. When a helicopter loses power, it kills people.
- underdeserver 4y ago
  When a helicopter loses power it glides, safely, to the ground - assuming it's being flown by a qualified pilot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation
  - jackpeterfletch 4y ago
    I guess the question is - can we maintain the standard that is ‘qualified pilot’ as it is today while making it accessible enough for this to scale. Learning to drive and learning to fly isn’t the same bar today. And if Lilium think Palo Alto to San Francisco could be $50, they’re gonna need _alot_ of flights to balance their costs.
    - jstummbillig 4y ago
      I think it's safe to assume this class of vehicles (and likely any new class of vehicles from here on out) is not designed to be piloted by a human past its prototype stage.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    That is a fantasy that almost never works out in real life. Autorotation is only feasible with enough forward air speed and control authority. Most helicopter crashes happen outside that narrow zone of survivability. Even if an autorotation is semi-pulled off it's likely to be a hard landing that causes significant injuries.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Autorotations are regularly trained (and often taken all the way to touchdown during training). The checkride for private and commercial rotorcraft has a power failure at hover taken all the way to touchdown as part of the standard. Autorotations are by no means a "gimme", but if every autorotation "likely" caused significant injuries, there wouldn't be enough helicopters or pilots to go around (no pun intended).
      - vanattab 4y ago
        Well to be fair those training exercises are probably done in near ideal conditions of altitude, landing zone, forward airspeed, and you know it's coming have studied mentally ahead of time. It's one thing to pull it off during training and another when the engine fails at a random point during a flight in LA/SF/NYC.
        HPsquared 4y ago
        Don't you think pilots would tend to try and stay within that "safe autorotation" envelope most of the time while flying? It seems mostly a case of having sufficient altitude and/or speed, similar to what fixed wing pilots try and maintain - a safety margin.
        Deritio 4y ago
        Why would they? They will probably want to fly across non easy terrain because otherwise you could just use some other means than an expensive helicopter. Hight perhaps but you will fly across water, woods, power lines, cities.
        sokoloff 4y ago
        Watch a helicopter take off sometime. It (almost) never lifts into a hover and climbs straight up. Instead, it lifts slightly off the ground and accelerates forward following the recommended takeoff profile. That’s so the craft can stay in the “autorotation possible” section of the HV diagram as much as possible.
  - Deritio 4y ago
    And it then glides onto what? Humans? A uneven roof? A busy road? And for whom? The rich? People who can afford a few hundred dollars for a quick flight from the airport to the city? How about no?
    - cjg 4y ago
      I don't know about other parts of the world, but in the UK, helicopters are quite carefully controlled so that they can land safely in such an event. For example, to fly a helicopter over London requires pilots to fly only over well defined routes - although those with multiple engines are allowed more scope.
gnulinux 4y ago
You can recognize that cars are going nowhere and it's best if we embrace this fact in our own ways (either by being a car owner, or working around car-designed cities the way we prefer), but still note that our cities could have been designed better from scratch that doesn't favor cars. Similarly, avoiding the same mistake now for helicopters wouldn't be inconsistent with living with cars.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  That seems reasonable, but what is missing (at least in this branch of the debate) is data and counter arguments that will not clearly peter out while the technology matures, if they are even trying to be factual to begin with. As an example, just on the topic of safety: Why would we assume these machines are relatively dangerous once they reach production? Just because they fly? I know of at least one category of vehicles where on that basis our intuition fails us to this day. And what happens when they do fail? They are not going to explode randomly or purposefully target the closest building. So what are the chances of all fail-safes failing, and catastrophic outcomes occurring? Why would we assume whatever this technology eventually enables will be operated by human pilots? I for one would be fairly surprised if that was to happen at any noteworthy scale. Clearly, the interesting part about this prototype is electric flight, not its HID, agreed? So let's build cool things (electric flight is potentially a cool thing) and then gather actual data about other things it brings (some maybe not so cool), before we "no way" it without any facts on the basis of weak conjecture and personal feelings.
  - regularfry 4y ago
    > Why would we assume these machines are relatively dangerous once they reach production? Just because they fly? I don't have a particularly positive or negative opinion of the technology here, but the one good reason I can see to treat these machines as inherently dangerous is because they take all the kinetic energy of something traveling faster than a car and add the gravitational potential energy of something hundreds of feet off the ground, while not being constrained to a well-defined corridor that you can protect with safety barriers. When cars meet stationary objects at speed they tend to make a mess. These things are likely to be lighter, but when out of control they'll be going faster, and this thing specifically, when it goes bad, will go bad carrying several hundred kilos of lithium into an uncontrolled energetic event. If risk is probability times expected outcome, my estimate would be that Lilium comes out worse than driving on both sides of the formula. That's not a reason per se not to do it because, like you say, let's gather data. But the basic physics of the situation is also not something to ignore.
thescriptkiddie 4y ago
The motor carriage and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Deritio 4y ago
We know much more today than when no one knew what a car is. And honestly we didn't do a good job. After all climate change is real, lead poisoning was real too.

> No way. Wait until you see the motor carriages they claim are going to replace horses one day.

tpxl 4y ago

When a motor carriage loses power, it stops. When a helicopter loses power, it kills people.

underdeserver 4y ago
When a helicopter loses power it glides, safely, to the ground - assuming it's being flown by a qualified pilot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation
- jackpeterfletch 4y ago
  I guess the question is - can we maintain the standard that is ‘qualified pilot’ as it is today while making it accessible enough for this to scale. Learning to drive and learning to fly isn’t the same bar today. And if Lilium think Palo Alto to San Francisco could be $50, they’re gonna need _alot_ of flights to balance their costs.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    I think it's safe to assume this class of vehicles (and likely any new class of vehicles from here on out) is not designed to be piloted by a human past its prototype stage.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  That is a fantasy that almost never works out in real life. Autorotation is only feasible with enough forward air speed and control authority. Most helicopter crashes happen outside that narrow zone of survivability. Even if an autorotation is semi-pulled off it's likely to be a hard landing that causes significant injuries.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Autorotations are regularly trained (and often taken all the way to touchdown during training). The checkride for private and commercial rotorcraft has a power failure at hover taken all the way to touchdown as part of the standard. Autorotations are by no means a "gimme", but if every autorotation "likely" caused significant injuries, there wouldn't be enough helicopters or pilots to go around (no pun intended).
    - vanattab 4y ago
      Well to be fair those training exercises are probably done in near ideal conditions of altitude, landing zone, forward airspeed, and you know it's coming have studied mentally ahead of time. It's one thing to pull it off during training and another when the engine fails at a random point during a flight in LA/SF/NYC.
      - HPsquared 4y ago
        Don't you think pilots would tend to try and stay within that "safe autorotation" envelope most of the time while flying? It seems mostly a case of having sufficient altitude and/or speed, similar to what fixed wing pilots try and maintain - a safety margin.
        Deritio 4y ago
        Why would they? They will probably want to fly across non easy terrain because otherwise you could just use some other means than an expensive helicopter. Hight perhaps but you will fly across water, woods, power lines, cities.
        sokoloff 4y ago
        Watch a helicopter take off sometime. It (almost) never lifts into a hover and climbs straight up. Instead, it lifts slightly off the ground and accelerates forward following the recommended takeoff profile. That’s so the craft can stay in the “autorotation possible” section of the HV diagram as much as possible.
- Deritio 4y ago
  And it then glides onto what? Humans? A uneven roof? A busy road? And for whom? The rich? People who can afford a few hundred dollars for a quick flight from the airport to the city? How about no?
  - cjg 4y ago
    I don't know about other parts of the world, but in the UK, helicopters are quite carefully controlled so that they can land safely in such an event. For example, to fly a helicopter over London requires pilots to fly only over well defined routes - although those with multiple engines are allowed more scope.

gnulinux 4y ago

You can recognize that cars are going nowhere and it's best if we embrace this fact in our own ways (either by being a car owner, or working around car-designed cities the way we prefer), but still note that our cities could have been designed better from scratch that doesn't favor cars. Similarly, avoiding the same mistake now for helicopters wouldn't be inconsistent with living with cars.

jstummbillig 4y ago
That seems reasonable, but what is missing (at least in this branch of the debate) is data and counter arguments that will not clearly peter out while the technology matures, if they are even trying to be factual to begin with. As an example, just on the topic of safety: Why would we assume these machines are relatively dangerous once they reach production? Just because they fly? I know of at least one category of vehicles where on that basis our intuition fails us to this day. And what happens when they do fail? They are not going to explode randomly or purposefully target the closest building. So what are the chances of all fail-safes failing, and catastrophic outcomes occurring? Why would we assume whatever this technology eventually enables will be operated by human pilots? I for one would be fairly surprised if that was to happen at any noteworthy scale. Clearly, the interesting part about this prototype is electric flight, not its HID, agreed? So let's build cool things (electric flight is potentially a cool thing) and then gather actual data about other things it brings (some maybe not so cool), before we "no way" it without any facts on the basis of weak conjecture and personal feelings.
- regularfry 4y ago
  > Why would we assume these machines are relatively dangerous once they reach production? Just because they fly? I don't have a particularly positive or negative opinion of the technology here, but the one good reason I can see to treat these machines as inherently dangerous is because they take all the kinetic energy of something traveling faster than a car and add the gravitational potential energy of something hundreds of feet off the ground, while not being constrained to a well-defined corridor that you can protect with safety barriers. When cars meet stationary objects at speed they tend to make a mess. These things are likely to be lighter, but when out of control they'll be going faster, and this thing specifically, when it goes bad, will go bad carrying several hundred kilos of lithium into an uncontrolled energetic event. If risk is probability times expected outcome, my estimate would be that Lilium comes out worse than driving on both sides of the formula. That's not a reason per se not to do it because, like you say, let's gather data. But the basic physics of the situation is also not something to ignore.

thescriptkiddie 4y ago

The motor carriage and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Deritio 4y ago

We know much more today than when no one knew what a car is. And honestly we didn't do a good job. After all climate change is real, lead poisoning was real too.