Electric Aircraft Startup Lilium Ceases Operations, 1,000 Workers Laid Off (techcrunch.com) 30
Lilium, once a darling in the nascent industry of electric aircraft that raised more than $1 billion before going public, has ceased operations and laid off about 1,000 workers after efforts to gain financing and exit insolvency failed. From a report: Lilium co-founder and CEO Patrick Nathen confirmed on LinkedIn that the 10-year-old company had stopped operating. "After 10 years and 10 months, it is a sad fact that Lilium has ceased operations. The company that Daniel, Sebastian, Matthias and I founded can no longer pursue our shared belief in more environmentally friendly aviation. This is heartbreaking and the timing feels painfully ironic," wrote Nathen. The layoffs cover the bulk of the company's workforce and come a few days after about 200 workers were let go, according to a regulatory filing on December 16.
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CEO Malpractice (Score:5, Funny)
What were they doing? (Score:2)
1000 people? What exactly were they all doing?
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While it's probably inflated from reality, you still need quite a few people for aircraft design work to proceed apace. Everything from engineers to actual makers to compliance specialists to investor relations people.
Re:What were they doing? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Companies get stupid, when they get too much money, too fast. People think they're "rich forever", and stop striving to be efficient. Eventually reality sets in...and they're stuck with a bunch of overhead.
I've seen it happen from the inside.
Re: Maybe we will (Score:2)
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Until they're not. I personally wouldn't bet on seeing practical electric planes in the next decade, but I wouldn't care to bet on it never happening.
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E-fuels (Re:Maybe we will) (Score:2)
just have to give up on heavier than air flight. I don't see a way of doing it without burning carbon based fuels.
The problem isn't carbon based fuels, it is that the primary source has been from digging it out from the ground. We can produce carbon based fuels in a carbon neutral manner, they are called electrofuels or e-fuels. Well, not exactly carbon neutral but really really close to carbon neutral. All "zero carbon" energy does emit some carbon from the ground because we dig in the Earth for raw materials to produce any energy, it's far too small of a contributor to be concerned about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w [wikipedia.org]
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Petroleum isn't going to get harder to find any time soon.
The only way efuel is going to compete on price with oil is if demand shifts and oil loses some its economy of scale advantage.
That's not going to happen very easily while we have several countries who's economy is based primarily on oil export. If demand shifts to something else, they'll just sell their oil for cheaper to keep the money flowing.
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It's a net loss no matter how you sell it.
Re:Maybe we will (Score:4, Informative)
So Pipistrel will need to stop selling their electric plane they have been selling for 9 years and the 2 other electric planes they have been selling for 4 years? Harbour Air will have to stop the commercial certification process for their working prototype?
Do not confuse an unrealistic electric plane project focused on funding rounds with the functional ones that actually did the math. Electric planes right now today are functional for short flights, about 1 hour or 100 miles.. Harbour Air's routes are usually 20-30 minutes. It's a great match for their business.
And you also think that battery technology has peaked and they will never get lighter for the same power? You think cell phones and laptops are all content with current battery weight and density, and zero further development will ever be done in the field?
Electric planes are not ready to replace airliners anytime soon, but the energy density commonly available right now is absolutely enough for an hour long flight, as demonstrated by the planes you can buy today. You can take any 10 year period since the 1950s and batteries have averaged a 3-5% increase in energy density every year. Some years plateau, some years have jumps, but it's just 3-5% a year. Just that same plodding, slow increase in energy density will be enough to have electric airliners in 30-40 years. No huge dramatic breakthrough is needed or likely, just boring small improvements.
If you don't see a way, you must be blind, because it's happening for almost a decade.
Re:Maybe we will (Score:4, Insightful)
Pipstrel has around 250 employees.
Harbour Air has around 400 employees.
Lilium had around 1000 employees.
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Pipistrel has electric aircraft for sale, and has been selling them for nearly a decade.
Harbour Air has a production commercial prototype and is seeking certification.
Lilium had unrealistic expectations, some CAD models, and marketing.
What is your point? Does number of employees have anything to do with anything I stated?
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Does number of employees have anything to do with anything I stated?
It shows the mindset of management.
the "darling"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing here sounded right from the beginning yet, like so many pie-in-the-sky bullshit tech presentations lately (eg Commonwealths announced new FUSION power plant construction in VA...) , they seemed to be able to harvest 10-digit funding based on nothing more than fancy CGI and hope.
Batteries are heavy as fuck, even heavy for cars & trucks (heavy enough that presentations of commercial grade delivery trucks dance their statistics into ephemera when you ask direct questions about load capacity). And planes need a lot of energy to get off the ground.
So the idea they they were just going to imagineer a design for a plane that could a) get off the ground for b) a meaningful amount of time was already a very, very high engineering bar
And then to add the expectation of VTOL? Why not just also plan for a kitchen sink in there too?
I don't want to malign the founders because I don't know them, I'll hope that they were native optimists. But this whole thing looked to me more like it was something designed to fly only through venture capital funding rounds.
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Batteries are heavy as fuck, even heavy for cars & trucks (heavy enough that presentations of commercial grade delivery trucks dance their statistics into ephemera when you ask direct questions about load capacity). And planes need a lot of energy to get off the ground.
I don't know from which source you drink your wisdom, but Scania, MAN, Renault, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo sell electric semi trucks in Europe. and transport companies are buying them.
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And nobody with a clue is surprised (Score:2)
This thing was a nice tech-demo. Tech-demos are typically not useful in the real world.
How to make a small fortune in aerospace biz... (Score:4, Insightful)
First, you start with a large fortune...
It's an old joke in the industry, but it's mostly true. People outside of the industry often wonder why we still have no flying cars, and why there are no new (and AFFORDABLE) versions of things like the Cessna 172, etc. It really comes down to two things: [1] the industry was ravaged by lawsuits of relatives of people who killed themselves in small airplanes, and [2] MASSIVE levels of government regulation.
The lawsuits got so bad that when a drunk guy killed himself in a small plane and the NTSB found his body among the emptied liquor bottles and the autopsy report showed the guy was more alcohol than human flesh (yeah, an exaggeration, but I'm making a point here) the guy's family nonetheless sued not only the plane maker but the makers of nearly all the parts (NONE of which were at fault). All those businesses being sued spent small fortunes on lawyers, and some got out of the industry. Congress finally acted to clean some of this up, but making aircraft, or even parts for aircraft is still a bigger legal risk than most people realize.
The regulations are actually worse. Most people have no concept of the time and money it takes to get FAA approval for a new aircraft, or even to get FAA approval for a new part to be used on an existing aircraft. It's fine to have a great new idea for some aviation-related thing, and to say "we'll need [x] man hours for the hardware and [y] man hours for the software, and so we need to budget [z] money to get to where we can sell these things and start recovering the investment... but that's NOT how it will work. There will be MOUNTAINS of paperwork, tons of requirements, and reviews, and sign-offs and it will probably drag-on for YEARS before you are able to be reasonably confident of eventually getting approved... and then the approval might only be to install it on a particular make and model of plane, with much of the process needing to be repeated if you want to sell to owners of some other make and model of plane. You REALLY need to have deep financial pockets (and extremely deep pocketed patient investors who'll be willing to put in more cash as needed) if you plan to make a product in the aerospace field. It should not be that way, but the FAA is the flagship for slow bureaucracy and regulatory capture. If you want to make a commercial product in the aviation sector, you need to budget for probably 10 to 20 times the money needed for the same thing but not in an aviation context. People who start such companies without being aware of this, and without the financial capacity to go YEARS without revenue, WILL go bust and end up laying-off all their people and boarding-up the windows.