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

lilium.com

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

#41

Post by legitster »

> 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 barriers seems to be a much better use case.

I am still pretty skeptical on the idea overall. Everyone drools over the travel times and not enough on the confounding factors. Getting to and from the taxi. Dealing with regulations. We can't even make public transit in dense urban cores work - why would this much harder idea work?

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.

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

#42

Post by qppo »

aeternum wrote: post #13
giarc wrote: post #4

I can't remember who said it or on which podcast, but they basically said that VTOL is the real game changer, not autonomous driving. Sure autonomous driving might be able to shave some time off of your commute, but you are still in a car and still driving on roads. VTOL is what really allows you to experience what the ultra wealthy with access to private jets and helicopters have experienced. Getting out of the city…

The problem is a landing spot in the city and noise. Most buildings no longer have helicopter pads and neighbors are not going to appreciate the amount of dirt your VTOL kicks up whenever you leave for vacation.

This is what they say:

> The Lilium Jet engine has been fully developed in our in-house sound lab where we have used proprietary acoustic modelling software, simulated on high-performance computing clusters, to optimize its design. As well as a customized electric motor, it contains innovative liner technology which means the aircraft will be inaudible from the ground when flying above 400m and will only be as loud as a passing truck while taking off. On the ground, the aircraft will move to and from parking bays using separate electric motors, allowing it to be as quiet as a typical electric car.

The usage of future tense (will be) makes me somewhat skeptical

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

#43

Post by noir_lord »

praveen9920 wrote: post #38
Jabbles wrote: post #35

I would have thought any new transport technology would be heavily automated - from a brief look these require 1 pilot per 4 passengers. Not that it would be easy, I'm just surprised something so ambitious doesn't also include automation. At first glance I would have thought automating a small plane would be easier than automating a car - for one thing there are fewer things to crash into.

One word: compliance. FAA has lot of restrictions to allow a planes to fly with pilot in it. Imagine convincing them that without pilot.

Honestly that is as it should be.

Does that kind of regulation inhibit progress in some domains, sure - is the cost of the loss of that progress worth it against the likely outcome of de-regulating it absolutely.

Safety regulations are written in blood and when organisations like the FCC, FDA etc fall down on the job people die.

I want my cyberpunk aircar as much as the next geek but not at the price of having them fall out the sky because some programmer made an error at the end of a 70hr work week to make a deadline for shipping.

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

#44

Post by soperj »

giarc wrote: post #4

I can't remember who said it or on which podcast, but they basically said that VTOL is the real game changer, not autonomous driving. Sure autonomous driving might be able to shave some time off of your commute, but you are still in a car and still driving on roads. VTOL is what really allows you to experience what the ultra wealthy with access to private jets and helicopters have experienced. Getting out of the city…

> VTOL is what really allows you to experience what the ultra wealthy with access to private jets and helicopters have experienced.

I don't really want to experience what Kobe Bryant experienced though.

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

#45

Post by gopalv »

burlesona wrote: post #28
mjlee wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > If we imagine for a moment that you work in an office in Palo Alto, you could now choose to live in Hayward (5 min flight, $25), downtown San Francisco (10 min flight, $50), or even San Rafael (15 min flight, $70). > Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet, at a cost of around $250 at launch and less in the near future. It might…

Even at tech salaries those are expensive commutes. But for a ski weekend in Tahoe? Seems legit, assuming these aircraft have a great safety record.

> Even at tech salaries those are expensive commutes.

Are they really that expensive?

I was paying 40$ on Lyft one-way to office earlier this year, which was a huge part of my transportation costs (economically speaking, I should've driven, but this allowed me to take the bullet back in the evening, which beat driving by a lot).

50$ for SF -> PA isn't that much more expensive than Lyft in 2019.

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

#46

Post by semicolon_storm »

burlesona wrote: post #28
mjlee wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > If we imagine for a moment that you work in an office in Palo Alto, you could now choose to live in Hayward (5 min flight, $25), downtown San Francisco (10 min flight, $50), or even San Rafael (15 min flight, $70). > Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet, at a cost of around $250 at launch and less in the near future. It might…

Even at tech salaries those are expensive commutes. But for a ski weekend in Tahoe? Seems legit, assuming these aircraft have a great safety record.

Sure the commute would be expensive, but if it lets you live in a lower cost area it may be more than worth it.

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

#47

Post by kjs3 »

burlesona wrote: post #28
mjlee wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > If we imagine for a moment that you work in an office in Palo Alto, you could now choose to live in Hayward (5 min flight, $25), downtown San Francisco (10 min flight, $50), or even San Rafael (15 min flight, $70). > Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet, at a cost of around $250 at launch and less in the near future. It might…

Even at tech salaries those are expensive commutes. But for a ski weekend in Tahoe? Seems legit, assuming these aircraft have a great safety record.

Since near as I can figure they've only built 2 technology demonstrators, they have basically no safety record right now. Interesting idea, tho.

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

#49

Post by noir_lord »

baxtr wrote: post #24
pdelbarba wrote: post #11

This isn't going to be certified and allowed for part 135 operations inside at least a decade. Boeing can't keep their jets from crashing due to simple trim control software, what makes anyone think the FAA is going to go along with these flights over densely populated areas? This feels a lot like when everyone was scrambling to start helicopter taxi services which promptly crashed and burned... Helicopters were a ma…

Maybe that’s exactly what someone said about cars in 1900. BTW: In 2019, 39k people died in car crashes, in the US alone.

I wonder what would happen if the car (or something similar had never been invented) and someone came out with a modern saloon today.

"It'll revolutionise personal transport but we estimate it'll kill 40,0000 people in a horrible way per year"

Like many things that are harmful in some way cars got grandfathered in (as did alcohol and tobacco) - if someone came out with an equivalent of alcohol with the same side effects it would be banned immediately as well.

In fact the UK did exactly that with the psychoactive substances laws - we didn't ban a particular drug we banned any drug with a set of side effects - largely because the chemists got really good at tweaking the underlying chemical structure enough to evade the law.

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

#50

Post by looping__lui »

CalChris wrote: post #15
pdelbarba wrote: post #11

This isn't going to be certified and allowed for part 135 operations inside at least a decade. Boeing can't keep their jets from crashing due to simple trim control software, what makes anyone think the FAA is going to go along with these flights over densely populated areas? This feels a lot like when everyone was scrambling to start helicopter taxi services which promptly crashed and burned... Helicopters were a ma…

Part 135 is FAA. Lilium is German/EU.

Trust me - Germans wish they had FAA because it is magnitudes more customer focused and actually “reasonable”.

The German LBA is literally Prussian Bureaucracy stuck in the 19th century...

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