Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km

lilium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 334 posts

Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km

#281

Post by divbzero »

legitster wrote: post #41

> With a range of up to 300km (186 miles), we’ll be able to focus on connecting entire regions with high-speed transport, rather than trying to persuade you that we’re quicker than a crosstown journey on an underground train or bike. As an air-taxi skeptic, I have to say I am refreshed to see a startup actually spend more than five minutes figuring out the market fitness problem. Focusing on bypassing geographic barr…

> I find it amusing that one of their examples of bypassing noise ordinance restrictions is to follow existing infrastructure routes. The irony seems lost on them.

Yeah, I noticed this too in their depiction of a hypothetical Palo Alto vertiport. The caption “high-throughput vertiport with intermodal last-mile connectivity” made me think it would ideally be located by the Caltrain station, but the road in the illustration didn’t look like El Camino and there were no train tracks in sight. I later realized during their “low noise footprint” discussion that they were depicting a vertiport located towards East Palo Alto and using 101 as the flight corridor.

My guess is they recognize the irony but are trying to strike a judicious balance.

Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km

#282

Post by renewiltord »

looping__lui wrote: post #278
renewiltord wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a $250 flight which is mostly labour turned into a $70 flight without the labour. That's a marginal cost thing. It goes in a different part of the book. I'm not saying this is doable but those numbers show nothing.

? Pilots essentially work for free... It has become “almost industry standards” that young pilots PAY to fly. If I threw a wild guess at 30k USD salaries for these kind of “pilot jobs” with 1000h of flying per year, that puts labor costs to 30-50 USD/h. Maintenance and gas will by far outweigh that.

Helicopter pilots in the Bay Area get paid $30k/year? Okay, I don't know that to not be the case but it sounds hard to believe.

Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km

#283

Post by causality0 »

lisper wrote: post #64
looping__lui wrote: post #40

I love innovation and stuff. Radical ideas. But the aviation market is one of the most heavily regulated - bureaucracy beyond comprehension. Did you ever wonder why Piper or Cessna airplanes look EXACTLY what they did 50 years ago? And why the engines used in these planes (e.g., Lycoming) are referred to as “Lycosaurus”!? If you go for a sightseeing flight with a local aeroclub - you will find the pilot spending 30mi…

Private pilot here. Yes, aviation innovates slowly, but it's not nearly as bad as you make it sound. Cirrus aircraft have been a game changer, as has the Garmin G1000 avionics. I can fly just about any instrument approach entirely on autopilot. The only thing I have to touch is the throttle and the flaps. I get real-time traffic information via ADS-B, real-time weather via Nexrad. I do my flight planning in five minu…

You could hold the director of the FAA at gunpoint and they still wouldn't let personal planes fly close enough to each other to make this remotely scalable. Even if you pulled the nonexistent vehicles out of a hat like magic we missed the social acceptance window. Automobiles emerged at a time when nobody really cared about safety regulations and they've continuously gotten safer, so nobody has a problem with the current 1.5 fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles. These personal air vehicles could hit that value but it wouldn't be nearly good enough. We won't accept that in something new. We barely accept the airlines' current 0.2 deaths per ten billion passenger-miles safety record; they'll never accept a danger value 750 times as high.

Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km

#284

Post by TylerE »

_ph_ wrote: post #280
TylerE wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming production is constant - it isn't. It vastly dropped off in the early 80s due to increasing liability costs, and has never recovered.

Well, one factor would be, that people are happy to fly old planes. If due to the environment regulations, you would have to buy more new planes, demand and consequently production would increase.

That would have to be onerous regulation.

The cost difference between new and used is truly immense.

A new Cessna 172 starts at around $400,000, and that's before you start checking off things on the options list.

Used can be as low as $20,000 for examples for the 1960s. If you thought depreciation on luxury cars was bad...

The GA system is already frankly dieing due to ever increasing costs. Your suggestion would just kill it for good.

Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km

#285

Post by looping__lui »

wahern wrote: post #138
looping__lui wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrealistic business plan estimations not factoring in the true costs of operating an aerial vehicle... It’s a bit like “soon to be plane owners” that don’t quite pay attention when they are told the spark plug for their Cessna is 50USD, they need 8 for 4 cylinders and replace them rather frequently ;-) Changes when they realize that those companies chartering out planes for less than 200 USD/h probably don’t make lo…

> It’s a bit like “soon to be plane owners” that don’t quite pay attention when they are told the spark plug for their Cessna is 50USD, they need 8 for 4 cylinders and replace them rather frequently ;-) That's supposed to be the promise of electric aircraft: almost all serviceable parts go out the window, just as with electric cars. Construction and maintenance costs are reduced to a fraction of what they are for mec…

Ok, the only certified batteries you can install in a Cessna is like 500 USD and it literally dies after 2 years of (not heavy) usage. It’s worse and less sophisticated that your 50 USD car battery.

I don’t want to sound like an aviation cynic, but for pilots (even in the non-commercial sector) spending 50 USD for a spark plug or 500 USD for a battery is “normal”.

Tiny bit of innovation and disruption = very very expensive in aviation.

Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km

#286

Post by looping__lui »

cheerlessbog wrote: post #272
dreamcompiler wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of innovation has happened in aircraft electronics. The powerplant? Not so much. Most light aircraft engine designs are four or more decades old, and the only ones cheap enough for a moderately-priced aircraft have carburetors. I don't think you can even buy a car these days with a carburetor, but with airplanes they're still standard, even though fuel injection makes a lot more sense in an airplane than in a ca…

How do carburetors work when inverting the plane?

Most GA planes are only permitted to fly “positive g” for reasons like this...

Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km

#287

Post by tjohns »

drewm1980 wrote: post #269
dreamcompiler wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of innovation has happened in aircraft electronics. The powerplant? Not so much. Most light aircraft engine designs are four or more decades old, and the only ones cheap enough for a moderately-priced aircraft have carburetors. I don't think you can even buy a car these days with a carburetor, but with airplanes they're still standard, even though fuel injection makes a lot more sense in an airplane than in a ca…

Wow, hearing that rich people are still allowed to dump lead into the atmosphere above our heads just ruined my morning. What things of non-entertainment value would we loose if we just banned leaded fuel overnight? Are crop dusters burning lead while spraying pesticides over our food crops?

You don't need to be rich to fly. You can buy a older used aircraft for the cost of a nice car. Sometimes cheaper. (Note: Not the Cirrus they're talking about upthread.)

They're working on replacing leaded fuel. The challenge is mostly regulatory, since they won't certify any of the replacements until they're sure it's 100% safe. It's still a work in progress.

As for what you'd lose: Search and rescue, medical transport (both commercial and volunteer), transport of blood samples for lab testing, high resolution aerial photography on your smartphone, powerline inspection to prevent forest fires, crop dusting. I could go on...

Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km

#288

Post by redis_mlc »

looping__lui wrote: post #172
hindsightbias wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lycoming/clones with fuel injection, you typically only mess with mixture when starting and stoping them. There is of course a minority religious sect within GA who follow lean-of-peak theory and mess with their mixture constantly for better mileage (and possibly better wear, but that can go either way).

I can recommend Mike Busch on that topic (like somebody did earlier). Leaning is not only for better mileage. The engines usually do not like a fat mixture for prolonged periods of time... I can’t recall all the reasons, but I think a couple of mayor ones were: 1) lead in the avgas will foul the spark plugs for rich mixture settings which is a safety risk, 2) exhaust gas temperatures will be lower which can lead to a…

Some argue that the US won the WW2 War in the Pacific by running LoP with the P-38 Lightning.

Charles Lindbergh demonstrated to US pilots how to do it, based on his Atlantic crossing testing, and the result was double the range. This allowed the US to surprise and "outrange" Japanese island installations, and to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto at great range.

(I would argue that the full story hasn't been told of the latter, since the planning was literally perfect. Something like radio navigation would have been needed, or incredible luck.)

Outrange was a Japanese strategy to attack US ships without expecting a return attack because of the Japanese planes having greater range initially. ie. LoP disrupted Japan.

AOPA: Technique: Lean-of-peak engine operations Keeping your cool on less fuel

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2019/may/flight...

Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km

#289

Post by LilBytes »

wpearse wrote: post #223
dreamcompiler wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of innovation has happened in aircraft electronics. The powerplant? Not so much. Most light aircraft engine designs are four or more decades old, and the only ones cheap enough for a moderately-priced aircraft have carburetors. I don't think you can even buy a car these days with a carburetor, but with airplanes they're still standard, even though fuel injection makes a lot more sense in an airplane than in a ca…

US$5/gallon is about the same price as our vanilla automobile juice here in NZ. We pick up avgas (half the price) from the small airport near us if we’re doing strictly off-road activities in our vehicles (no fuel tax).

Fuel in NZ is $5 NZD? Has Covid had an impact on that local price or is that standard? It's

Less than $1.50 AUD across the ditch at the moment. And that's a bad day.

Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km

#290

Post by solraph »

LilBytes wrote: post #289
wpearse wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US$5/gallon is about the same price as our vanilla automobile juice here in NZ. We pick up avgas (half the price) from the small airport near us if we’re doing strictly off-road activities in our vehicles (no fuel tax).

Fuel in NZ is $5 NZD? Has Covid had an impact on that local price or is that standard? It's Less than $1.50 AUD across the ditch at the moment. And that's a bad day.

Per gallon. $1.30 / L => $5.85 / gallon.

Petrol is/was always more expensive in NZ though, around ~70c/L from memory. On the flip side, registration and insurance is much cheaper.

Post reply on HN