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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I'm still waiting for my Moller Air Car, it's gonna be sweet!
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Propulsion? How about the drivers? Even if the technology was anywhere near up to snuff, I can't see adding another dimension the daily commute being safer when half the people on the road are putting on makeup, eating breakfast and taking a call while texting.
Exotic helicopters aren't profitable? (Score:2)
It's weird that the demand for exotic helicopters is so low, right?
One could say... (Score:5, Funny)
the idea failed to take off
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It was a bit on the Heaviside.
If they had fun at work and were not subsidized... (Score:4, Interesting)
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...unless they are just running a long-game grift [fastcompany.com]
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Not to mention increase the state of the art in that field so that the next attempt will have a better chance at succeeding.
Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that jazz.
Wasn't a flying car (Score:3)
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.
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Actual flying cars have always been a dead end. Planes need too many compromises to make them into worthwhile road vehicles.
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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)
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.
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I found the cheapest human flying machine I could, not as a comparison, but to demonstrate that the expense is not the real problem.
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Aside from that, you need some room to take off and land. You don't need as much space as a conventional ultralight winged plane, but you still need to catch the wind and run a bit. The parking lot of a typical grocery store has light poles, cars, and other hazards and is thus not an acceptable take off or landing site. Most suburban streets aren't either. So you'd have to truck the thing over to the nearest football field, then find the nearest football field to the grocery store, lug it over to the st
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Aside from that, you need some room to take off and land. ..... So you'd have to truck the thing over to the nearest football field, then find the nearest football field to the grocery store, lug it over to the store ...
Indeed, but you are being too kind about it. First you need to get permission to use at least two football fields. Even if you succeed, which is unlikely, there will be weeks of negotiating with the football club first. My nearest football field is much further away than my nearest grocery store anyway.
I was once in my works car park when a small hot-air balloon landed in it - the type where the guy lands on his feet. His support pick-up truck came in immediatly after and it was amazing how fast the
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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
Re:Pilot, not engine, maybe pretty soon (Score:1)
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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
Please explain (Score:2)
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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.
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Calling it a car implies an ease of use and being able to pilot/drive it with a relatively small amount of expertise.
So calling it a car is hype and potential advertising copy.
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So calling it a car is hype and potential advertising copy.
Most advertising IS "hype and potential advertising copy" .
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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
Nope, don't want these flying around. (Score:4, Insightful)
Link has a Paywall (Score:2)
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Editors give zero fvcks as usual.
I met Sebastian Thrun once (Score:1)
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.
Re: I met Sebastian Thrun once (Score:2)
Flying cars are fucking stupid (Score:2)
Money skimmed, business folded (Score:2)