Joby, Volocopter Fly Electric Air Taxis Over New York City (techcrunch.com) 30
An anonymous reader writes: Joby Aviation and Volocopter gave the public a vivid glimpse of what the future of aviation might look like this weekend, with both companies performing brief demonstration flights of their electric aircraft in New York City. The demonstration flights were conducted during a press conference on Sunday, during which New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city would electrify two of the three heliports located in Manhattan -- Downtown Manhattan Heliport and East 34th Street. (The third heliport is privately owned.) Beta Technologies, which is also developing an electric aircraft, showed off its interoperable aircraft charging technology at the event. You can watch a demo of the Joby Aviation flight here. Additional assets are available via Joby's press release.
Flight of fantasy (Score:2, Interesting)
These things *do* fly but they are a very, very, very long way from being economically viable.
In essence we have something that serves the same role as a helicopter but:
a) has a much shorter range/endurance
b) requires much longer to refuel
c) can not autorotate in the event of power failure
d) is unlikely to be able to land fast enough in the event of battery fire
e) uses batteries that, in this application, have a life measured in just a few hundred cycles
The bottom line is that there's no way to make money f
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c) can not autorotate in the event of power failure
And that's a big one. Anyone who has ever dealt with a prop/motor failure on a drone knows they do a fin imitation of a rock at that point.
d) is unlikely to be able to land fast enough in the event of battery fire.
True, that will be one way to become a rock.
In the meantime, little display flights like this prove nothing -- if there is a demand (and that's largely unproven) then helicopters will provide the solution for quite some time to come.
Helicopter services have been attempted in the past. They failed.
And last time I checked, Manhattan Island has these things - buildings, I think they are called. Lot's of them. Big ones. Aside from the tops of some of these, landing places aren't all that common. So ya gotta land on the helipad that you gotta build on the ro
The rich folk use Teterboro (Score:4, Informative)
If you're landing a private jet at JFK you're doing it wrong. Those folks land at Teterboro [wikipedia.org], because they're special.
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Notable that you can take a bus or a train to and from the airport. I imagine that if you can afford to fly a charter plane, you probably don't need to make use either.
Well yeah, but that public infrastructure is really useful for the common worker class that service the airport of the wealthy. Give credit where it is due. (But I do see your well-made point)
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If you're landing a private jet at JFK you're doing it wrong. Those folks land at Teterboro [wikipedia.org], because they're special.
Okay - thanks for the correction!
But the rest of that trip, in a vehicle one prop away from being a rock, and landing on top of buildings, a a strong likelihood of then taking a cab to the final destination makes for a possible explanation for why this business model failed before with helicopters.
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The people who can afford to ride these aren't going to get in "a cab". They are going to either get in a private livery fleet vehicle that is much nicer than a cab, or they are going to get into their own limousine... same as probably the largest percentage of the people who are taking helicopter flights to somewhere other than an airport now. Not all of them have a helipad at their home. A popular trip is between JFK and Manhattan, and it can be done for "only" a couple of hundred dollars. If you're an ex
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The people who can afford to ride these aren't going to get in "a cab". They are going to either get in a private livery fleet vehicle that is much nicer than a cab, or they are going to get into their own limousine... same as probably the largest percentage of the people who are taking helicopter flights to somewhere other than an airport now. Not all of them have a helipad at their home. A popular trip is between JFK and Manhattan, and it can be done for "only" a couple of hundred dollars. If you're an exec about to get on a first class flight, that's a minor addition to the cost of a trip.
Some of y'all are getting wrapped around the axle with the details. The details of where the person/s fly into are not important, and the vehicular contraption they use to get to their destination isn't either. So okay, these wealthy people will not fly to JFK. The airport is irrelevant to my point.
Let us agree that they will fly into some airport the NYC area?
So, eschewing that cab, they will step into their livery as you say. or their personal limousine, as you say. It performs pretty much the s
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They can cut a couple of hours off of the trip time. If that means getting to be somewhere (and possibly with someone) by a specific hour then it's going to be money well spent, especially if it's cheaper than the couple of hundred it can cost now if you do it frequently.
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They can cut a couple of hours off of the trip time. If that means getting to be somewhere (and possibly with someone) by a specific hour then it's going to be money well spent, especially if it's cheaper than the couple of hundred it can cost now if you do it frequently.
If you are a billionaire, with your own limousine and all of the accouterments that come with that, you dictate the time. Anyhow - not much point in debating this much further, have a really great day If you say theis ais a dead lock success, then okay - there will be no issues.
Next possible issue. Your billionaires with this system - what if two or more of these people want to land on the same helipad at the same time. Indeed, if you have the fix for that, you should get in touch with the FAA, seems ai
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If you are a billionaire, with your own limousine and all of the accouterments that come with that, you dictate the time
So that's your billionaire fantasy? Telling your wife what time you're going to have dinner, and if she doesn't like it, well you're the billionaire so she can lump it? What a sad little man.
Re:Flight of fantasy (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were designing these I would give them twice as many rotors as they needed to land, with two completely independent power systems including two batteries, and using LiFePo4 despite the ~5% reduction in range vs. NCM. That addresses two of your points.
I'm not sure what you mean by "endurance", if you mean that the helicopter is more durable then you are a loon. It has a ton of moving parts, one prop, and one engine. If any one of hundreds of parts fails, it falls out of the sky. The heli does have more range, but you only need enough to get people out of the city. The heli does refuel faster, but with all the checks you need to do to fly safely, it doesn't really operate faster. The cost of the battery is significant, but the cost of maintenance on the heli is also significant.
Electric multicopters are more reliable than ICE or even turbine singlecopters. They're easier to fly. They're quieter. They pollute less. They can be built to still be able to land safely with the loss of multiple rotors, if you use enough rotors — and you can do that, because the components are cheap. Electric motors are simple and reliable. Electric motor controllers are very reliable when you don't have to worry about stall current like you do with cars. It's inevitable that they will displace helicopters as we now know them completely over time. Yes, it's early for that now, but they probably already make sense in dense cities like these where short hops can accomplish a lot of time savings.
There's enough ultra wealthy (Score:1)
You are not a person, you are a number in their spreadsheets.
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The "forced back to the office to maintain real estate portfolio" makes no sense. It implies that the same entity that employs you owns the real estate -- which is possible .. but then it means they'll be moving money from one of their own accounts to another of their own accounts, and losing some money too because now they have to pay you extra. If they were going to do that, why do they need YOU in between? If they own both the company you work for, and the real estate .. they gain nothing by having you g
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There is no need to be able to make money from this. All that is necessary is for taxpayers to subsidize it, like every other climate boondoggle.
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Until your Volocopter's in flames
With their batteries aflame
Oh what a shame
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No. These things will be economically viable next year. Sure, only in limited use cases for rich people, but they're already going to be cheaper than a helicopter once service between airports starts in Chicago and New York in 2024. Yes, range sucks. OTOH, Batteries are getting better. Charging isn't going to be an issue, these aren't plugged into a 110v line.
Do you really think mid-air battery fires are going to be a problem? Put down the crack pipe.
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Do you really think mid-air battery fires are going to be a problem?
Yeah, because I mean we don't see any EVs catching fire do we? And EVs are *far* less demanding of their batteries than a craft that flies.
I mean... an EV runs for about three hours on a charge, a flying craft runs less than 1 hour so puts three times the load on the battery. An EV is usually slow-charged but to be even remotely economically viable a flying craft will have to be fast-charged *every* time.
Nah... Lithium Ion batteries treated in this way will *never* catch fire -- don't believe all that d
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don't believe all that deepfake stuff showing Teslas and other cars burning like road-flares.
The vast majority of those cars have NCM batteries, usually lots of little cells which is what Tesla is known for. But that's frankly a bad design, because there are so many potential points of failure. Part of the appeal of LFP is that because it's safer you don't have so much pressure to use lots of little cells, which is above all a fire protection strategy. You can build prismatic cells in basically any bricklike shape you want, and equip them with serviceable connections. Then battery packs can be serv
Its all good til it rains bird guts on pedestrians (Score:1)
NYC is pretty fowl in general, free umbrellas for pedestrians?
Here's my prediction (Score:3)
The first one of those electric choppers that crashes in this ultra-densely populated area will promptly bring about a blanket ban in all major US cities.
I wouldn't want to be the sucker who invested in that company...
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The first one of those electric choppers that crashes in this ultra-densely populated area will promptly bring about a blanket ban in all major US cities.
How many helis have crashed there?
32 deaths since 1977, you say? Not banned yet, you say?
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The two addresses mentioned imply both heliports can be reached by flying exclusively over the East River. I assumed that's what they'd do unless they chose shortest path to save maybe two miles.
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Yep, and that's why that's where virtually all of the helis which went down there went down in the river. A couple of them collided with other aircraft; an automated copter with enough sensors on it can already avoid that. And a couple blew up on or near pads.
Fly it in Scotland... (Score:2)
Air drag (Score:1)