Can an American please explain how a 3h41 minute car journey to Tahoe turns into an 8h49(!) train journey? Are your trains pulled by horses or something?
Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
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Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#52If flying in this involves the all-cavity search like for all other passenger flights then forgetaboutit. I'll take a train ride 3x as long just to avoid the hassle of the airport experience.
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#53Can an American please explain how a 3h41 minute car journey to Tahoe turns into an 8h49(!) train journey? Are your trains pulled by horses or something?
The roads are really good (though the official speed limits are lower than they should be), and nobody wanted the trains since they became obsolete for a lot of North American geography, which in turn reduced the overall interest and investment in trains. The U.S. also has very high standards for the structural integrity of railcars, which precludes many international trainset vendors.
The costs of acquiring land for rail projects are also higher, because of very strong property rights.
Basically there are a lot of reasons, some of them are not mere political disagreements.
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#54To me this marketing just looks like a slightly less expensive helicopter. It's great that we can travel to our ski trips or vacations a bit faster but it's not going impact the mobility needs of 95% of people. Why isn't anyone working on improving commutes through dense cityscapes? It's obviously a much harder problem but it's also a more important one.
> Why isn't anyone working on improving commutes through dense cityscapes? As someone who's been on and off involved in moving-people-technology, it's two-fold: it's "in the physical world" so you have all of the attendant problems (objections from people around the proposed construction, overlapping government bodies, cost, and that "the real world" isn't "sexy" for investment). And second, if you make something tha…
Integrated light rail/subways that are well designed and well run are pretty much the best mass transport solution we've come up with.
The tricky part is the well designed and well run part and as you alluded to they run into a lot of real world issues during construction.
They also really need to be state run at break-even or even subsidized since the benefit is the general increase in economic productivity across the whole region rather than an opportunity to make a lot of money.
So politically they don't really fly in the US.
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#55I 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…
Well, they should just use some of that VC money into pocketing (AKA lobbying) politicians to relax rules for these specific kind of airplanes, it has worked pretty well for the health industry in the US.
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#56I 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.
I'm sure it would be a decade-long task. But I'm not sure it's monumentally harder than either the process for piloted aircraft, or the task of automating the aircraft in the first place.
And you can much more easily demonstrate the limits of an automated aircraft. Simulated bird-strikes, thunderstorms, power-outages, emergency landing in fields, blinding by laser-pointers, stray bullets or whatever scenario the FAA throws at you can be done without the risk to the (non-existent) human pilots, just the cost to VCs.
Whether that argument would work on them is a different matter, but I find it quite convincing.
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I absolutely guarantee this will be anything but less expensive. You can get an R44 with better range and payload for a couple hundred thousand. This will be an electronic nightmare requiring extensive certification and maintenance efforts. Cessna can't even sell ridiculously old designs for reasonable prices due to certification overhead.
Yeah, what I'm not clear on is: what's the cost to fly from SF to Lake Tahoe in a helicopter? If it's a lot more than the $250 that Lilium is promising, what is it that makes Lilium cheaper? Is it just the up-front investment in scale and the route network?
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 loads of cash but just keep track of actual expenses, have a high utilization and capable maintenance staff...
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#58Can an American please explain how a 3h41 minute car journey to Tahoe turns into an 8h49(!) train journey? Are your trains pulled by horses or something?
Don’t worry, the drive can take that long if you are planning on a weekend trip.
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#59I 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…
Totally agree about the certification. It's so annoying having to do stuff like managing the mixture. There is absolutely no chance I'm going to be better at that than even the most basic FADEC system.
Every car since the early 90s has done away with the choke, but for some reason in a 2020-built C172 I still have to do this... :X
I would argue that this insistence on safety certification makes actual flights less safe. Because it results in it not being done, leaving something to the pilot who is more error-prone than an automatic system.
I haven't heard of accidents in GA aircraft that were due to poor mixture (though I haven't looked, and it could technically cause one if you set it too explosive) but when I still flew there were several incidents reported by our maintenance company who complained about cylinder scoring due to overheting.
It would be much better to have this automatically managed, and more environmentally friendly too, because there is no need for 'full rich' settings during takeoff/landing, it would just adjust it to ensure sufficient cooling. The full-rich is just a precaution to avoid the pilot miscalibrating it during this critical flight phase (and to avoid overheating on the ground of course).
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#60> 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. Therein lies the problem with public transportation in the US. What do you do after you get to Tahoe, Santa Cruz, or wherever? Most of these places are devoid of functional public transportation, and rental car companies have long lines and ro…
They need to come up with an accompaning service which allows you to arrange for someone with a car to arrive and drive you to your desired final destination.
Or in the case of Lake Tahoe the area ski resort, hotel or casino might provide shuttle service.