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?
It's not really a train journey, it's mostly by bus.
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
#62I 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…
Until you invent anti-gravity, VTOL will always be (i) very energy intensive, and (ii) and very disruptive to the surrounding environment. This is both in terms of noise and air turbulence. Self driving is something that may be solved and can become practical for popular use with current and near-term foreseeable technology. Everyday mass use VTOL is not. Sorry, the Jetsons lied to you.
Black hawks are quiet enough for specops teams to use them in urban raids like the Bin Laden one.
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#63Can 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?
There are several reasons, terrain being one of them.
Also the commuter/long distance tracks are all owned by the freight liners, so passanger trains have to yield for them. There are also hour+ stops at some stations.
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#64I 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 minutes using Foreflight on an iPad. It is all pretty awesomely cool actually.
It's not installed in the plane I fly, but Garmin's auto-landing system was recently certified for emergency use.
https://generalaviationnews.com/2020/05/19/garmin-autoland-c...
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#65Can 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?
We don't have separate high speed rail tracks like Europe does; we have a single rail system used for slow cargo trains that take priority over passenger trains. Imagine driving everywhere with giant cargo trucks driving 80 km / hr in every lane with no way to pass them and you'll get the picture.
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#66Most people do not have the years to devote to becoming a good pilot, much less get a new category cert, so I find that these sorts of prototypes have a very limited audience.
"Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet" ... ah, mountain flying with batteries, what could possibly go wrong.
Also, I find the lack of a vertical stabilizer this plane to be an odd choice. It seems like they have a ballistic chute for backup when the power fails, but it might be hard to deploy that when you cannot do any spin recovery.
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#67Can 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?
This discrepancy is much higher from the other destinations they mention, so I would imagine there is either no station nearby the lake so you have to take another mode for the last leg, or you have to get some complicated multiple-train route with long layovers :)
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#68I love this idea. I don't envy the work ahead of them at all though.
In my career I've worked in both mechanical and software engineering and IMO the mechanical engineering involved here is daunting. Caveat: when I was in that industry 3D printing was just around the corner and you could print a part per day and the machine cost $80k, so probably creating and testing prototypes is far more pleasant now.
This looks like a truly fun project to work on that's full of frustration, waiting, scrapped parts, broken CAD models, regulatory bs, good regulations that save lives, tons of changes in direction, mercurial investors, endless naysayers, and all done while considering that chances of success are small. Honestly it looks fun as hell.
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe that’s exactly what someone said about cars in 1900. BTW: In 2019, 39k people died in car crashes, in the US alone.
You can throw around statistics but the reality is aircraft receive far more scrutiny. Nobody wants to sit helplessly as one of these things flies them into the side of a skyscraper or watch as one falls out of the sky onto them. Is that fair? Maybe? Is that reality? Yes. This isn't like the invention of cars. We have had all manner of airplanes for over 100 years and know how they work. This is like the NYC helicopt…
One big difference is that these EVTOL aircraft are small enough that they can use ballistic parachutes for an extra degree of safety. They usually also have more redundancy due to distributing thrust between many small electric motors. There has been a lot more research into autonomous drone flight than autonomous helicopter flight as well, which is crucial for safety and keeping costs low. I could be totally wrong, but I feel like battery, motor, flight control, and composite material technologies are finally good enough for EVTOLs to start making sense. Just like the tech boom of the late 90s there will be a lot of investment, most of which will be lost, but the survivors will have a big impact on society.
Re: Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
#70Can 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…
Is there no push for this to be stimulated again? In the EU there is a lot of talk about stimulating high-speed rail. Currently it's a total mess though, with each country still having their own standards, high-speed tracks having non-highspeed portions through cities, and simply not having sufficient capacity to support anywhere near the amount of passengers that are carried by air.
But I really hope some day the EU will standardise this too, and get more tracks built. I'd love to take a train between Barcelona and Amsterdam. But right now it is 2 hours by plane or 14 by train with 2 changes. And the price has a similar ratio in favour of the plane, which makes the train simply nonviable.