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Businesses Transportation

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.

Electric Aircraft Startup Lilium Ceases Operations, 1,000 Workers Laid Off

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  • by Frank Burly ( 4247955 ) on Monday December 23, 2024 @02:53PM (#65035125)
    They should have claimed that they were using AI to design an airplane that would be flown by an AI pilot and serviced by an AI ground crew... and to facilitate this, the plane would have to be electric.
  • 1000 people? What exactly were they all doing?

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      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.

    • by CEC-P ( 10248912 ) on Monday December 23, 2024 @03:21PM (#65035205)
      Leaks from inside the company suggest they were doing everything except putting batteries on scales and then adding those values up.
    • 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.

  • the "darling"? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Monday December 23, 2024 @04:34PM (#65035401) Journal

    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.

    • by Sique ( 173459 )

      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.

  • This thing was a nice tech-demo. Tech-demos are typically not useful in the real world.

  • by tiqui ( 1024021 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2024 @12:50AM (#65036115)

    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.

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