The whole business case for this vehicle is that it enables extremely low cost granular travel between distant city pairs. The short regional hop is not its target market. It’s designed to be competitive with commercial air travel.
That's fair--400 miles is on the shorter end of the spectrum. Still, "low cost" is relative to a chartered private jet--which, emphatically, is not a service that people purchase because it's the most economical option--rather than a commercial airliner (although, if true, the SFC per passenger of the Celera would be in the same ballpark as modern commercial airliners, which is very impressive). The average domestic…
No, they intend to compete with like commercial travel, maybe business class at first, in price per seat per trip to charter an aircraft like this.
$300/hour charter price with 6 seats for a 5 hour trip (2000 miles) is about $250 per seat each way. This is pretty competitive.
Another point that doesn't get mentioned in the article is noise. Laminar flow with a 59% reduction would make the aircraft much quieter, especially during approach. Aerodynamic drag is the primary source of landing planes, reducing that can greatly help communities around airports and avoid curfews.
But planes need that to decelerate / reduce both kinetic and gravitational potential energy though, don't they? I suppose air should always be able to do that even at higher efficiency.
Because COVID has completely rejiggered the economy. Airlines legally are not allowed to pack hundreds of people into a cramped cabin. They're selling fewer tickets at lower prices, and they were already losing money on poor passengers to begin with. Plus, the oil crash is still coming. Fracking has delayed it for a short time, and the covid lockdowns also have slowed consumption, but it is still inevitable. Before f…
Peak Oil? Banging that drum again? This must be at least the 7th major iteration of it. For all that expense with fracking it still beats the snot out of solar and wind. Until we get over the hysteria around nuclear fossil fuels are going nowhere. A real game changer could be a discovery in electrical energy storage. Even out the peaks from solar/wind. Solid chemical batteries aren't doing it - there's some cool stuf…
Fossil fuels are going into the atmosphere, and they dont come back. I had no idea hn was so delusional about energy.
It's still a GA aircraft though... so you still have to deal with all the BS. If you don't own it yourself then you need to pay a pilot (though with the recent downturn there's no shortage of pilots). There is absolutely no way many people will try and get their pilot's license. The FAA written test for a PPL may be easy compared to IR but it's still not a walk in the park. The checkrides are very strict nowadays too…
Is there automated flying on the horizon? Seems to me that it should be a lot simpler than for cars and would make operating so much simpler and more cost effective.
I used to think totally automated flight was possible before I started getting my pilot's license. Now I doubt we'll even see it in the next 50 years. The national airspsace system relies on interactions with other pilots and unless all planes became automated it would be really hard to pull it off.
For starters, flying is the easy part. It's the fuel management, dealing with communications to ensure aircraft are safe, and reacting to constantly changing weather that gets tricky. When there's an emergency things get even more complicated since electrical malfunctions are definitely a not so uncommon possibility. For anything safety critical you're going to need 2-3 way redundancy.
Plus you'd need some kind of standardized aircraft to aircraft data link on all aircraft.
It's still a GA aircraft though... so you still have to deal with all the BS. If you don't own it yourself then you need to pay a pilot (though with the recent downturn there's no shortage of pilots). There is absolutely no way many people will try and get their pilot's license. The FAA written test for a PPL may be easy compared to IR but it's still not a walk in the park. The checkrides are very strict nowadays too…
That said, it would definitely be cheaper to certify a pilot on this than on a business jet, since the flight hours for the aircraft cost much less.
Ehhh usually type ratings aren't the most expensive part of training though. Plus on larger business jets there are simulators that are used in lieu of in-aircraft time for most of the training.
You're still looking at bare minimum a CPL with instrument rating which is minimum 250 hours (realistically 350 or so). Probably more than that before any insurance company is OK with you flying it single pilot.
Not gonna lie, this week I've read two HN postings about dope planes for rich people (boom, now this)......and news articles detailing a crisis of austerity for the NYC subway. It's really sad to me that we can VC these wild bets on inefficient transport for the few, meanwhile perhaps the most efficient people-mover ever devised for the many is on an entirely politically-caused death bed.
NYC is a very rich city. NYC can definitely afford a better subway. People come to the voting stations and pick the candidate with the most important agenda for them. Obviously, the NYC subway does not seem to be the largest issue. If you want to blame rich people for that, well, welcome to the USSR.
The subway that benefits the city is controlled by the state of New York. The state of New York that would like to spend counter-cyclically is constrained by laws and the inability to issue currency, and thus has a budget that is controlled by the feds.
At every level, the political power is structured poorly to make the subway (and regional infra in general) a low priority.
That's fair--400 miles is on the shorter end of the spectrum. Still, "low cost" is relative to a chartered private jet--which, emphatically, is not a service that people purchase because it's the most economical option--rather than a commercial airliner (although, if true, the SFC per passenger of the Celera would be in the same ballpark as modern commercial airliners, which is very impressive). The average domestic…
No, they intend to compete with like commercial travel, maybe business class at first, in price per seat per trip to charter an aircraft like this. $300/hour charter price with 6 seats for a 5 hour trip (2000 miles) is about $250 per seat each way. This is pretty competitive.
$328/hr is the advertised operating cost of the aircraft (fuel and maintenance), not anything close to what a charter would actually charge. Commercial airline operating costs, including crew salary and overhead, are roughly an order of magnitude more (~$3000/hour is a rough, somewhat conservative, number for something like a B737, including fuel, crew, maintenance, and aircraft depreciation/rental costs). The airline is paying under $20 per passenger-hour for all expenses, while a charter service operating with volunteer pilots, free airplanes, and no other costs would break even at ~$55 per passenger-hour (assuming the $328/hr estimate is accurate, which is still very much an open question for an aircraft that's still undergoing initial flight testing and may never be produced in significant volume). Even the best-case scenario doesn't strike me as particularly competitive.
A single engine plane is most likely not going to be used for ocean crossings regularly, for safety reasons, even if it is technically capable of it. Additionally, I'm not sure it has enough spare fuel reserves to make the trip with enough margin for error or unforeseen circumstances.
This airplane has a "2 in 1" engine. Two separate engines running on one physical engine block. So there is some engine redundancy.
yes but that really only matters if the second "engine" produces enough power for maneuvering if the first one fails. Plus, there is still mechanical interconnectedness so it isn't truly redundant. That said it is likely far safer than a traditional twin, the axiom with those is if you lose one engine the second will fly you all the way to the scene of the crash.
Which is why companies like this are going to be doing what Musk is doing with Electric vehicles. Now, if they could make these for 2000-3000km flights and they ran on 250kWh to 350kWh electric they'd be what the future entails. Especially if they weren't piloted and were fully automated.
Did you hear what I said about COVID? Also your imaginary battery that doesn't exist, is imaginary, and doesn't exist. Unless you want to fly around on a nuke. And can we stop giving elon musk credit for everything? Tesla employs 48,000 people and contracts god only knows how many. It's pretty clear that elon musk is stealing credit for everyone's work, and Im sure the rest of the company physically cringes whenever…
Eh, kleenex, scotties, brand name recognition is a trite point.
And when it comes to EV batteries, Tesla is leading the field. 21700 batteries are a smart improvement over 18650 cells.
And I'll happily give the engineers at Tesla credit. However, realistically speaking they should be branching out and applying the same technology elsewhere. Especially in regard to hybrid vehicles.
It's not an either/or situation. We can eat our cake and drive it halfway too.
Which is why companies like this are going to be doing what Musk is doing with Electric vehicles. Now, if they could make these for 2000-3000km flights and they ran on 250kWh to 350kWh electric they'd be what the future entails. Especially if they weren't piloted and were fully automated.
Removing your energy source (fossil fuel) and replacing with energy storage doesn't fix anything - where does the energy to fill that storage come from? In some hypothetical future where renewable energy is very cheap, it will still be more efficient to use that energy to produce liquid fuel for planes.
ITER. Tritium breeding reactors by feeding it recycled lithium.