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KittyHawk air taxi startup is winding down
- esel2k 4y agoAs central european I don’t see the problem to solve here. Getting to work (which is let’s day 100km away), typically there is a fast train to get there. If it doesn’t at least a regional train will get you to a hub. For the last mile you either have one more bus or companies offer shuttle bus. You can fill up TGVs or other high speed train efficiently, no TSA. I would rather invest in short distance highspeed solution to simplify commuters living in suburbs and stop congesting cities.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoIt's hard to catch the train when your elected officials will sell them off to their friends for $5 as soon as they are built after twenty years of funnelling money into their construction business.
- metadat 4y agohttps://archive.ph/ocNtC https://archive.ph/ocNtC TL;DR: Only Tres Comma Club members will be affected
- yieldcrv 4y ago> Startup’s closing marks an exit from a crowded industry
- metadat 4y agoSurprising.. Who else is competing to be an "air taxi"!?
- robinson7d 4y agoA couple are mentioned in the article: Wisk (invested in by Boeing), and Eve (backed by United Airlines)
- dmix 4y agoIt's probably the most crowded market for an unproven market category. There's literally a hundred across the globe.
- smabie 4y agoFirst thing that comes to mind is Uber Blade. Haven't had a chance to use it personally as my flights always seem to come in to late, though.
- eli 4y agoIt's linked from the article. Archer Aviation, Joby Aviation, Lilium, Vertical Aerospace are some. > Hundreds of companies, new ones and legacy aviation players alike, are working on such vehicles—also called air taxis or eVTOLs (short for electric vertical take off and landing). Five such startups have gone public in the past 12 months. They are trying to shape a near future in which taking a flying cab is an economically viable alternative to taking a terrestrial one. https://archive.ph/gZOlU#selection-237.0-237.373 https://archive.ph/gZOlU#selection-237.0-237.373
- carabiner 4y agoRelated - first electric commuter jet, that everyone on HN thought was a scam, just had its first flight: https://tcrn.ch/3frler3 https://tcrn.ch/3frler3
- MichaelCollins 4y ago(Electric props, not a jet.)
- ck2 4y agoBlows my mind we are going to have commercial electric planes BEFORE they bother to get poisonous lead out of avgas for decades after knowing it was deadly
- hef19898 4y agoAs crazy as it sounds, getting a conventional (as opposed to eVTOL) aircraft in the air is easier than replacing the fuel thousands of legacy aircraft engines.
- DarmokJalad1701 4y agoFAA has approved G100UL though. Now it is just a matter of scaling up + distribution.
- RC_ITR 4y agoSure, but that’s a lobbying thing. AVgas isn’t what runs jet engines (as I’m sure you know), it’s what runs hobbyist planes. And given how many other externalities there are to hobbyist flying (noise, airports on prime land, etc.) US hobby pilots find their way onto various political committees almost as matter of survival. It also doesn’t hurt that the average hobbyist pilot is a wealthy white man above 40.
- akiselev 4y agoLobbying by pilots might redirect some money to upgrade someone's favorite small airport but their influence pales in comparison to long standing national security doctrine. Pilots and airports are part of our emergency infrastructure, the kind you don't think you need until the worst happens like a natural disaster. The FAA, FEMA, and the DoD take that kind of preparedness very seriously so they pretty much refuse to come down on private aviation as long as there's not enough PPLs for their liking.
- mradek 4y agoJust give me one of those jetpacks that was poppin' up everywhere recently on reddit and twitter. Toss 'em all over the city like Birds and let people zip around in 3-d space lol. Why have such large vehicles? Think small, think big.
- Thorrez 4y agoSuper loud and dangerous...
- smaili 4y ago> One major issue is there aren’t enough places for these vehicles to take off and land. Is that really a "major" contributor?
- klyrs 4y agoIt ain't a "taxi" if it doesn't get you from where you are to where you want to be. Sounds like a major showstopper to me...
- bee_rider 4y agoIt is a major showstopper in the same way that the lack of widespread huge trampolines installations is a major showstopper for my giant cannon based transit concept. Sure it is a problem but is it the problem?
- whateveracct 4y agoexactly - no place to land was counterpoint no1 lol
- bee_rider 4y agoOn one hand, the lack of landing places is a problem. On the other, the whole idea of an Air Taxi Service is sufficiently ridiculous as to render a ranking of problems somewhat academic.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoIsn't it the number one reason all "flying car" proposals are doomed to fail? They don't violate physics and the '3d driving is too hard' problem could in principle be solved with software. But they simply don't fit into our society. They literally don't fit. Even if you can fit a VTOL on a suburban driveway, it would be too dangerous and noisy to not get banned. The space requirements are such that they could only work in rural areas, which severely limits their utility and consequently their commercial viability.
- 4y ago
- jmugan 4y agoHow loud are these?
- tpmx 4y agoQuite loud: https://youtu.be/itYYhudPZeE?t=45 https://youtu.be/itYYhudPZeE?t=45
- dylan604 4y agoHell, I think the drone was quiter than the sliding door on the hanger!
- cush 4y agoUnbearably loud. No chance these will ever fly in a city.
- hindsightbias 4y agoWaverunners in your airbase
- wiradikusuma 4y agoPeople underestimate (total) transit time. Yes, flight from city A to B is only an hour. But you need another hour, each, for Ubering between home and terminal. And checking in. And waiting for everything in between. And delay. All that and 5 hours gone. Personally, I prefer to get in a car, be a couch potato, and when I wake up, I've reached my destination.
- menzoic 4y agoThere could be multiple pickup and dropoff points distributed throughout the city. Check-in could be streamlined through an app.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoFor short to medium distances I think trains offer superior comfort. Train stations can be put in cities so they're much easier to get to. No TSA (I think that's still the case?), you can walk into the train station and straight onto the train. When flying I plan on getting to the airport two hours early but when traveling by train I only arrive 5-10 minutes before the train is scheduled to board.
- oefrha 4y agoHigh speed rail is competitive even at a “medium” distance of 1000-1500km. It’s so much nicer to have a comfortable and completely predictable three and a half hour train ride compared to the air travel counterpart, especially at a similar price point, which means economy class, or economy plus at best. (I’ve taken plenty of these trips in China.)
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoBut Chinese HSR stations are mostly located far away from city centers, so you are still stuck taking a taxi in heavy traffic to and from the station unless it is somehow connected well by public transportation. It’s a wash to say Beijing to Changsha is better by HSR than plane, given where the HSR stations are (Beijing South was much farther from our apartment than BJS, and Changsha’s HSR station is as far out as its airport). But my wife’s hometown is one HSR station south of Changsha (on the BJ to GZ line) and wasn’t served by an airport, so an 8 hour HSR trip made sense. But now that they have an airport, I’m sure I would just prefer to fly.
- OneLeggedCat 4y ago> Kittyhawk says on its LinkedIn page that the company has flown and made over 100 aircraft Wow. Wonder where all these are?
- elcritch 4y agoOhhh time to keep an eye on Ebay!
- hindsightbias 4y agoBuzzing the Navy off of San Diego.
- tonytifao 4y ago[dead]
- cush 4y agoIs it even in production? Also, hard to compare the two when the Eve is 30ft x 50ft, more than twice the size of a small helicopter
- tonytifao 4y agoIt's like helicopters. Cheaper and faster.
- nradov 4y agoWe don't know if they will be cheaper. You can go buy a new helicopter today and take delivery within a few months. But none of these eVTOL aircraft are even close to obtaining FAA certification, let alone available for purchase.
- snickerbockers 4y agoI really wish all the money that gets funneled into trying to re-invent travel (self-driving buses, hyper-loop, boring company, this, etc) could get invested into developing competent American public transit networks based on technology that already exists.
- Dylan16807 4y agoOkay, so you take an $80 billion yearly budget and dump an extra fraction of a billion on top. Is that going to do much? I'd rather risk it on an attempt to make self-driving busses. Getting more development money for electric planes is a nice side effect too, but just in terms of improving transit, reducing the need for drivers would be massive.
- soco 4y agoI wasn't aware that the lack of drivers is what was holding up public transit.
- ncmncm 4y agoPresumably their wages is meant. Labor, not just by drivers but also mechanics and other staff, is a substantial part of transit costs. Cutting fuel cost makes wages a bigger fraction. Reduced maintenance load of an electric fleet could be important.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- teh64 4y agoBut that is more the cost of other stuff. I bet the difference in costs between driver and self-driving vehicles that are as reliably and safe as bus drivers is not that much. Mechanics etc... would still need to exist for driverless vehicles just as much. I think creating electric busses is much needed, without dumping lots of money into making them autonomous at the start.
- dustedcodes 4y agoOne very efficient way of making travel faster is by taking out a lot of current traffic. We should redesign our cities so people simply need to travel less. Make things available to communities at the door step. More smaller grocery stores dotted than those super mega stores. More coworking offices with a hot desk model instead of big offices crammed in downtown. More bars, clubs, entertainment in residential areas for their residents. More schools, libraries, restaurants, coffee shops, etc. where people live. That would be much better. Maybe that combined with fast trains and subways which are not packed, run frequent and are clean will fix most of those issues which we think we have today.
- nradov 4y agoThere used to be smaller grocery stores all over the place. Customers didn't like them due to high prices and limited selection. It's cheaper and more time efficient to drive to a big supermarket or Costco and load up your car with everything you need.
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoDo you have a source for this claim? All the urbanists will tell you that small grocery stores are a joy to use in Europe due to transit oriented development that makes quick trips by bike to grab groceries fast and easy. But in North America we’ve built out larger and larger car-centric developments which have become so hostile to anyone not in a car that people are forced to drive to the grocery store. This makes the experience way less enjoyable than a quick trip by bike to a small store, the urbanists will say. So your claim is that small stores were essentially selected out of existence by customers, but it may in fact be the case that city planners destroyed walkability in a way that left big box stores as the only viable option. Those two things are not the same, as the theoretical “we could have more smaller stores accessible by bike and foot traffic” would be true in the latter case. For a detailed argument see the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes: https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54 https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54
- nradov 4y ago
- captainmarble 4y agoWe need airship, not a lifesize drone
- nradov 4y agoAirships aren't going to be viable as air taxis either. Too expensive, too slow, too vulnerable to bad weather. The only real use case for airships is delivery of bulky cargo (like wind turbine blades) to remote areas that lack transportation infrastructure.
- Gregioei 4y agoWhy do they even start with auch things? Pipedreams? Rich execs who lost all relations to day to day living? Taxi are expensive, air taxi adds a trained pilot, airspace handling (permission hell), additional space requirements AND airtaxi maintenance. All the reasons why I don't fly my own little plain.
- hnbad 4y agoIt's appealing to people who don't want to drive because they don't want to have to deal with other drivers and who don't want to use public transit (even if it were improved) because they don't want to be exposed to yucky poor people. The requirements for piloting this being more expensive and bureaucratic than for driving a taxi are a plus because it means you only have to deal with a pilot (well-groomed, stylish, sexy) and not a taxi driver (nasty, smelly, weird accent). Much like all "privately owned public transit substitute" startups, yes, the target demographic is obnoxious rich people.
- ETH_start 4y agoThis response seems overly resentment motivated.
- Nextgrid 4y ago> Why do they even start with auch things? Because somebody is happy to give you money for it. That somebody might themselves be getting money from someone else for such a project. It doesn't have to be viable or lead to a successful business. If you can live the "founder lifestyle" and get a decent salary for yourself and your friends while bolstering your resume (since such failures aren't seen as bad by the industry), a lot of people will be happy to do it. This happens very frequently in software/SaaS startups but there's no reason it can't happen with physical things.
- nradov 4y agoThe civilian air taxi thing is obviously a pipe dream. Not going to happen. But in the process of failing in that market, some of these eVTOL companies might create some IP that would be very attractive as an acquisition target for the major aerospace defense contractors. It's probably impossible today to build an air taxi that would meet FAA certification safety requirements while still being cheap enough for profitable operations in US airspace. But it might fit the resupply or medevac mission for ground troops under enemy fire. The military doesn't have to make a profit, and they're more flexible on safety requirements. So it's a long shot but some of these investments might turn a profit.
- bambax 4y agoThe proposed vertiport symbol by the FAA: https://twitter.com/carey_bill/status/1507089714184077322 https://twitter.com/carey_bill/status/1507089714184077322 is highly reminiscent of the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (11th century AD): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Jerusalem#/media/File:Vexillum_Regni_Hierosolymae.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Jerusalem#/media/Fi...
- Grustaf 4y agoApart from helicopters for well off finance people and travellers to Monaco landing with their private jets at Nice, there is one example of this kind of thing already: the sea plane from Copenhagen to Aarhus. The boarding point is within walking distance from the Royal Palace and it doesn't seem that expensive.
- RugnirViking 4y agowow, I recently started a role at Aarhus. This one is definately going on the bucket list
- Grustaf 4y agoIt's only about 100 dollars, so you can put it pretty high up on the list... https://www.seaplanes.dk/ https://www.seaplanes.dk/