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Cora – Kitty Hawk's prototype air taxi [video]

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Re: Cora – Kitty Hawk's prototype air taxi [video]

#171

Post by dzhiurgis »

danielvf wrote: post #124
cowsandmilk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A Cirrus SR22 can go 1,200 miles on 80 gallons of gas. That's roughly speaking 15 miles per gallon - better than many pickup trucks or large SUVs. Sure, let's take the most energy efficient aircraft and compare it to the least energy efficient passenger vehicles??? I mean, how can one even pretend that is a fair comparison. More generally for energy efficiency, it is well known that the most efficient trip is a sho…

We do seem to have different value systems. I believe applying energy to make human lives better is a great thing! Electricity usage in the western world is getting greener fast. Total usage is going down, not up. This isn't going to reverse either of those trends. There's a popular perception that all aircraft burn energy like an oil refinery on fire. The reality is that small piston aircraft are approximately as fu…

> Electricity usage in the western world is getting greener fast.

81% of energy produced in NZ is renewable. Complex terrain would make such vehicle a saviour. Plus, in any terrain planes almost always travel less, so savings are intrinsic.

Finally, using "taxi" name here is awful. At the most it's going to be an entertainment device initially (tourism and extremely expensive attractions are insane in NZ), method of access remote places later.

Re: Cora – Kitty Hawk's prototype air taxi [video]

#172

Post by pc86 »

danielvf wrote: post #124
cowsandmilk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A Cirrus SR22 can go 1,200 miles on 80 gallons of gas. That's roughly speaking 15 miles per gallon - better than many pickup trucks or large SUVs. Sure, let's take the most energy efficient aircraft and compare it to the least energy efficient passenger vehicles??? I mean, how can one even pretend that is a fair comparison. More generally for energy efficiency, it is well known that the most efficient trip is a sho…

We do seem to have different value systems. I believe applying energy to make human lives better is a great thing! Electricity usage in the western world is getting greener fast. Total usage is going down, not up. This isn't going to reverse either of those trends. There's a popular perception that all aircraft burn energy like an oil refinery on fire. The reality is that small piston aircraft are approximately as fu…

> The reality is that small piston aircraft are approximately as fuel efficient as the vehicles around you on the highway

This is just objectively wrong.

Before taking wind into account, a Cessna 172 travels 120kts on a good day and at altitude and appropriately leaned can get down to 8 gallons an hour.

120 nautical miles in 140 miles (less, but benefit of the doubt and all). That's 17.5 miles per gallon. At cruise altitude. Leaned appropriately. You can tack on another few gallons for the climb, and you're going mixture rich on descent so you're back up to 10-11 gph for the last 20-30 miles of your trip. You're lucky to get 10mpg overall for a flight, and that's using gas that costs $5 a gallon.

There are a LOT of benefits to GA flight in order to get around. Fuel efficiency is definitely not one of them.

Re: Cora – Kitty Hawk's prototype air taxi [video]

#173

Post by chiph »

jgalt212 wrote: post #83
ethagknight wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with most of what you say, but two open questions- debt alone on $500k amounts to $180/day (10yr am, 6%). Then there’s cost of energy, dead time during recharge, dead leg trips to the next customer, dead let to charge port, maintenance will be rigorous even if the plane doesn’t need it because FAA. Landing fees while be high for urban landing points, plus ground crew at some locations. “Max $100/hr” is way low,…

Great video on the Pan Am building rooftop helicopter service to NYC area airports. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nbz5VFilxY

The family flew on one of New York Airways' helicopters from Newark to Kennedy back in 1974. Pretty exciting stuff for a 4th grader!

Re: Cora – Kitty Hawk's prototype air taxi [video]

#174

Post by aqme28 »

mrep wrote: post #143
clon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. People talking about flying cars sound a lot like people demanding faster horses. Or flying horses. I do not think the American dream of a private car scales too well to the future, be it with rubber wheels or tiny propellers. Especially given the population growth. Instead, a brief visit to Singapore, for example, will convince anyone what the future of transportation looks like. A public transport system,…

How safe is Singapore public transportation and walking? The reason I ask is that neither are as safe as driving here in the US which i consider a major blocker in the public transportation utopia people keep dreaming up. Relevant discussion I have had about this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16462803

I have a hard time believing that public transportation or walking are more dangerous than driving in the US or elsewhere.

Do you have any statistics on walking or public transit safety? I couldnt find any, though car safety is very accessible.

edit: It seems the vast majority of pedestrian accidents are because of collisions with cars. In a future with more public transport and walking, they will be even safer.

Re: Cora – Kitty Hawk's prototype air taxi [video]

#175

Post by jhall1468 »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #149
js3dev wrote: post #5

KittyHawk is not an Alphabet startup. It is no affiliated with Alphabet. The title is misleading.

Kudos to Ruth Porat for making sure that Google's founders use their personal money to fund personal side projects.

What? They've funded side projects in addition to Google X doing there thing for many years. You think the CFO gets to tell the CEO what to do? She brought in meaningful changes (namely, not throwing money around like it's nothing). But trying to weirdly give her credit for this being a non-Alphabet company is... weird.

Re: Cora – Kitty Hawk's prototype air taxi [video]

#176

Post by pc86 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #170
ethagknight wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with most of what you say, but two open questions- debt alone on $500k amounts to $180/day (10yr am, 6%). Then there’s cost of energy, dead time during recharge, dead leg trips to the next customer, dead let to charge port, maintenance will be rigorous even if the plane doesn’t need it because FAA. Landing fees while be high for urban landing points, plus ground crew at some locations. “Max $100/hr” is way low,…

I'm surprised almost nobody's talking about the relative change in safety yet. Transportation accidents are the leading cause of "unintentional injury" deaths (i.e., not disease, suicide, or homicide) [1]. Although the absolute rates are somewhat low (7.28 fatalities per billion miles for cars and light trucks), you are approximately 100 times more likely to die while driving than flying (table 2 in [1]). [1]: http:/…

This is not commercial aviation, this is general aviation (even if it's commercial in nature). GA is more dangerous than driving, roughly comparable to riding a motorcycle, and that's being optimistic.

Re: Cora – Kitty Hawk's prototype air taxi [video]

#177

Post by peterwwillis »

I just gave a talk on flying cars. It turns out technical difficulty is not the reason we don't have flying cars, or self-driving cars.

Innovation is one way new technologies can change the world. For example, the reason we have skyscrapers is due to the elevator brake.

Elevators have existed in some form or another for over 2,000 years. But without the modern innovation of the elevator brake, nobody felt safe being hoisted by a rope up into the air, where a fall could kill you. And nobody looked forward to walking dozens of flights of stairs. A new combination of a spring, gravity, and a ratchet-and-pawl (all existing for over 2,000 years, the same as the elevator itself) gave humans the feeling of safely moving up and down in space that they didn't have before.

But innovation is not a guarantee of success. Electric cars have existed for 190 years. Their innovation, combined with the development of modern batteries, made them the most popular car by the beginning of the 20th century. But two decades later they disappeared, when cheaper, more convenient, more useful gas cars became available. It took another 60 years to develop a new production EV.

In comparison to land-based vehicles, drones are used to fly automated GPS-coordinated routes around the world every day. There are about 31.7 Million airplane flights over the USA every year. And even though 37,000 people die in car crashes every year, only 399 people died in air crashes in 2017 (world wide!). Not only are flying vehicles clearly safer than driving, we can very reliably coordinate flying vehicles.

So why don't we have automated flying cars? Nobody decided to build them. Until startups like this one do the actual hard, long-term, complicated work to coordinate all the necessary pieces, and can figure out how to make it both convenient and cost-effective, it just doesn't happen. And the same is true of self-driving cars.

Until someone decides to coordinate all the complicated parts to get it working, it doesn't exist. Sometimes this takes convincing society to make compromises - like, you don't get the "freedom" of piloting your own vehicle, unless you are very very well trained to do so. And sometimes it just takes lots of elbow grease. Personally, I think we need more of the former than the latter. But I'm glad this company is taking on both challenges.

Re: Cora – Kitty Hawk's prototype air taxi [video]

#178

Post by soVeryTired »

danielvf wrote: post #47

Contrary to almost every comment here so far, this is both innovative and energy efficient. Let's talk energy efficiency first. Once it's up in the air, it's has a similar profile to a normal single engine airplane. A Cirrus SR22 can go 1,200 miles on 80 gallons of gas. That's roughly speaking 15 miles per gallon - better than many pickup trucks or large SUVs. And that's while going 180 mph. Slower is more fuel effic…

> On the revenue side, this would replace a two hour trip across a city in traffic with a fifteen minute flight.

If a city takes two hours to cross in traffic, that's a clear sign it needs a subway or monorail.

Re: Cora – Kitty Hawk's prototype air taxi [video]

#179

Post by Fricken »

pcnix wrote: post #14

I'm very skeptical on the energy expenditure here, this does seem to be a fairly energy intensive mode of transport, but I assume the market would balance the price accordingly. It certainly doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would become a mainstream mode of transport without a big change in the energy market.

Energy efficiency doesn't matter when it's electric. We don't have to worry about burning up the sun because we used it up too fast.

Re: Cora – Kitty Hawk's prototype air taxi [video]

#180

Post by jhall1468 »

endless1234 wrote: post #92
mrybczyn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure this is a literal "Not In My Back Yard" comment. I'm okay with it. Yes it will be for the 1% for a long time, but so were trains and cars and airlines...

But how does this system scale? Thousands of these simultaneously in the air above cities? The noise must be quite something. I think it's a novel helicopter replacement idea, but not really anything for mass transportation.

These would be extremely quiet while cruising but likely pretty loud on take off. The latter is moot since that's happening at an airport.
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