3 ms·
Lilium is one of the companies that aimed for the "air taxi" market and touted any space or roof. They've since both increased the size of their planes a bit an
by vidarh 3y ago
Lilium is one of the companies that aimed for the "air taxi" market and touted any space or roof. They've since both increased the size of their planes a bit and dropped the idea in favour of flying between dedicated sites and backed away from the "air taxi" vision towards flying between small regional sites.
I think the issue being that even if you get to the noise level needed, convincing regulators about the safety will take a long time.
I think there will be market, and it might also very well make expansion of existing airports less controversial if it is for less noisy tiny electric VTOL planes, but I think at best in the short to medium term they'll also be able to fly to helipads.
Getting additional locations approved will probably happen, but I suspect it will be a very slow, arduous process at first, which will only accelerate once people have both spent significant time near a landing site and not felt inconvenienced enough to oppose one elsewhere and flown in these planes and felt them convenient enough to want them nearby.