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Transportation Technology

Flying Car Startup Kitty Hawk Is Winding Down (businessinsider.com) 41

Sebastian Thrun, the CEO of Kitty Hawk, informed employees on Wednesday the company was laying them off, according to a news report. The company also posted the news on its LinkedIn page. From the report: Sources inside the company told Insider that Kitty Hawk had recently wound down work on its most recent flying-car project, Heaviside, and reverted to research-and-development mode with Google co-founder Larry Page more closely involved with the work. However, it appears the company couldn't see a way forward. Laid-off staff have been given four months of severance pay, an employee said. Thrun, a self-driving car pioneer and a Google veteran, founded Kitty Hawk in 2010, and Page financially propped it up. Insiders said Page remained the sole bankroller of Kitty Hawk throughout its lifetime. He became increasingly hands-off over the years, though he would involve himself in newer projects as they sprung up, including an internal initiative to make flying cars run more quietly. The company produced several prototype models of its flying cars, including Flyer, which the company shuttered in 2020. Heaviside, its most recent model, was designed to be quieter for flying in densely populated environments. In 2019 the company also spun up Wisk, a joint venture between Kitty Hawk and Boeing, which will continue.
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Flying Car Startup Kitty Hawk Is Winding Down

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  • It's weird that the demand for exotic helicopters is so low, right?

  • by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2022 @04:40PM (#62902703)
    ... then nothing of value was lost. Rich people financing time and again projects that sound futuristic but are doomed to fail for practical reasons at least keep some engineers and journalists entertained and paid for a while.
  • by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2022 @04:55PM (#62902751)

    For one thing, it wasn't actually a flying car. It can't travel on any road. For fucks sake, it did not even have wheels! it was basically a quieter and more advanced helicopter. So of these contraptions of "flying car" companies didn't even have wheels on their vehicles, forget even being street legal, yet they were touted as "flying cars" to tag onto the hype wave.

    • I can accept the term "flying car" since it's designed to be used in a similar manner to a car (i.e. door to door travel). It's one of those definitions that requires a bit of squinting but it sort of makes sense.

      Actual flying cars have always been a dead end. Planes need too many compromises to make them into worthwhile road vehicles.
      • But it's not really door to door unless you have a landing area/pad on your lot. These are air taxis to designated locations.

  • Pilot, not engine (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2022 @04:58PM (#62902765) Homepage

    For the past 50 years or so, people keep coming up with ways to make flying cheaper. Every decade there is some genius that comes up with a great new engineering method.

    The problem is not how expensive it is to build and sell a flying vehicle. The cheapest is a PPA, a Powered Parachute Aircraft. For under $600 you can buy (https://www.ebay.com/itm/183268615874?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-213727-13078-0&mkcid=2&itemid=183268615874&targetid=4580496732614411&device=c&mktype=&googleloc=&poi=&campaignid=418233788&mkgroupid=1230353745471221&rlsatarget=pla-4580496732614411&abcId=9300542&merchantid=51291&msclkid=df03f574e88e1ff9406b965f6cda5676/ [ebay.com] an air frame with 3 wheels, a big fan and a parachute wing. Max speed of about 29 mph or so, lifting no more than 360 lbs or so, but it flies. Not for very long, but it should be able to get you from your home to the grocery store and back.

    The problem is and always has been two things that have little to do with engineering.

    1) Piloting. Humans are not naturally good at it, particularly at high speeds and high altitude. Any flying vehicle with enough speed, fuel, and cargo capacity to be worthwhile becomes too dangerous for a human to fly without a lot of training.

    2) Maintenance. Aircraft need a LOT of maintenance. Typical you do a look over every day you fly, plus a series of increasing examinations/repairs every 25/50/100/300 hours of flight.

    To truly get to the point where Joe Shmoe can buy a flying car we do not need a better flying machine. Instead we need better computers. Specifically:

    a) A computer good enough to take off and land a specific aircraft better than the majority of current commercial pilots (getting where you are going is the easy part, take off and landing is the hard stuff).

    b) A sensor plus computer kit that can cheaply track all the common problems found in that aircraft for the 300 hour maintenance test, and report it directly to an insurance company.

    We have the autopilot. We built it for military drones. Expensive, but it works. So we would need to cut the price down significantly.

    We do not have the sensor kit. Or anything close to it. Without it, it is too dangerous to sell people a flying machine unless we can trust them to actually have maintenance done it every week. The way we currently do that is threaten to take away their license if they cannot prove their flying machine has had the maintenance done properly.

    So, no pilot license, no flying machine - except for toys like the PPA I mentioned.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      2) Maintenance. Aircraft need a LOT of maintenance.

      The things are eggshells, but yes.

      To truly get to the point where Joe Shmoe can buy a flying car we do not need a better flying machine. Instead we need better computers.

      Most if not all of the tech is there. The commercial guys fly ILS and that means quite a lot of make-work running checklists "configuring" the aeroplane, including getting a good lock on the homing beaconry. The actual lining up with the runway and guiding the plane down is more or less automated. "Configuring" is something computers could do fine but you need the pilots alert and engaged. Boredom is one real problem with commercial flying.

      Of course, not everybody has a ho

    • Electric motor aircraft may soon be much more reliable and low-maintenance than anything we have now. Their range would be limited of course, but good enough for commuting in a single municipality. I imagine them being something like oversized drones. A lot of their technology would come from drones. Cost would go down with mass production. Definitely they would need artificial intelligence to pilot them. That is probably the most significant hurdle. Auto-pilots of extreme dependability, and we don't

      • Electric motor aircraft may soon be much more reliable and low-maintenance than anything we have now. Their range would be limited of course, but good enough for commuting in a single municipality.

        The future is here. [google.com] Yep, it's literally just a light and cheap plane with an electric motorcycle motor, speed control, and battery in it. The plane is more efficient than the donor motorcycle while cruising, and even regenerates on descents.

        • The electric motor is cheaper maintenance, but they still list a $30-$40 cost per hour of use, which far exceeds that of a car.

          Worse, it is only the cost for the engine, does not take into account the maintenance cost of the air frame itself. They do not mention that at ALL. Why? Because it will likely exceed the motor maintenance cost significantly.

          • I didn't say the future was cheap. If you want the future, you have to pay for it.

            That's why we should be building next-generation public transportation systems. We might as well pay for something good, collectively. Flying is cool and fun, but it doesn't really make sense for travel around land masses. We have better options. If people want to pay for it, that's their business. If we'd study and remediate aviation emissions (at the expense of whoever owns the plane) then we'd see a lot more electric aviati

    • The problem is and always has been two things that have little to do with engineering.

      1) Piloting. Humans are not naturally good at it, particularly at high speeds and high altitude. Any flying vehicle with enough speed, fuel, and cargo capacity to be worthwhile becomes too dangerous for a human to fly without a lot of training.

      2) Maintenance. Aircraft need a LOT of maintenance. Typical you do a look over every day you fly, plus a series of increasing examinations/repairs every 25/50/100/300 hours of flight.

      Those problems can be solved today. What problem I see for flying cars is noise. For aircraft to fly requires moving a lot of air, and that moving air is going to make a lot of noise.

      There's no easy fix for the noise problem. Noise is going to limit paths aircraft will be allowed to fly.

    • The problem is not how expensive it is to build and sell a flying vehicle. The cheapest is a PPA, a Powered Parachute Aircraft. For under $600 you can buy (https://www.ebay.com/itm/183268615874?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-213727-13078-0&mkcid=2&itemid=183268615874&targetid=4580496732614411&device=c&mktype=&googleloc=&poi=&campaignid=418233788&mkgroupid=1230353745471221&rlsatarget=pla-4580496732614411&abcId=9300542&merchantid=51291&msclkid=df03f574e88e1ff9406b965f6cda5676/ [ebay.com] an air frame with 3 wheels, a big fan and a parachute wing.

      That $600 thing is a 14" long model FFS! It is not the thing in the photo.

  • What's the difference between a flying car and an airplane or helicopter?
    • By those fools definition, nothing. But the real definition of a flying car is that it can be driven around on the roads like a normal vehicle and can also fly. Examples of actual flying car are vehicles like the Terrafugia and the Klein Vision AirCar.

    • To people who care, the difference between a flying car and a roadable airplane is being able to practically take off from a road or not (and ideally, a parking space.) There have been a few roadable airplanes, mostly with trailered wings. All of them required all the same love and attention as an airplane though, and when people imagine a flying car, they usually imagine just pushing a button to take off.

      The whole idea is frankly dumb today, cars and airplanes have very different problem domains because th

  • by p51d007 ( 656414 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2022 @05:35PM (#62902901)
    Heck, we have people that can't operate a ground based motor vehicle. You want them up in the air with these things? Oh, I know they have to be a "trained pilot" but you know how this would actually work out. Death and destruction on a wider scale. I'm sure ATC's would be flooded too.
  • Link has a Paywall
  • in the mid 2000s when he was still at stanford and riding high on his grand challenge success.

    I was very much a greenish kid back then, but even I could tell he was more luck and ego than breakthrough technical genius.

    Color me completely unsurprised he ended up in the corner office of an obvious dead end like a flying car startup that was magically going to revolutionize transportation with a headcount of 19 people.

  • Real question: will NHTSA have purview over a flying car and will they try to mandate anti-drunk driving technology to prevent drunkos from crashing into your house?
  • I guess the owners made enough money off their scam and are now moving onward to greener pa$tures.

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