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

Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 95 posts

Re: Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

#71

Post by ChuckMcM »

This looks a lot more credible than the Moeller flying car :-). I'm never sure if I should be excited or not about flying cars in that I am already paranoid about someone running a red light, I'd hate to be tootling down the freeway and suddenly have a carplane appear on the road in front of me!

That said, make it a four passenger version and have them streaming across the Bay to off load the bridge infrastructure? That would be pretty cool. Would need a really good load/unload infrastructure though. I could see it making living in the Sierra foothills more realistic though.

Re: Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

#72

Post by walrus01 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #71

This looks a lot more credible than the Moeller flying car :-). I'm never sure if I should be excited or not about flying cars in that I am already paranoid about someone running a red light, I'd hate to be tootling down the freeway and suddenly have a carplane appear on the road in front of me! That said, make it a four passenger version and have them streaming across the Bay to off load the bridge infrastructure? T…

A ten year old child scribbling with crayons on grid paper is more credible at this point than the Moller skycar. There's a number of companies that have flown (sans humans) small air taxi sized octocopters in the past 8 years, none of them Moller. Just off the top of my head, there's the Germans with their thing that has 16+ rotors, there is ehang, there's the Airbus vaihana project, there's this company, and several big names like Bell are working on tilt rotor small electric vtols.

Re: Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

#73

Post by UIZealot »

mannykannot wrote: post #48
_8j50 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about this aircraft but this appears to be a winged aircraft which unlike quadcopters and helicopters,losing an engine or rotor does not translate to a crash(?) because it had n number of rotors on each side,if one is lost,you lose altitude maybe and turn off matching rotors on the other side,which naively appears safer than a helicopter.

Wings don't help if you are below the stall speed.

Isn't that true for all winged aircrafts?

By all means let's hold the Heaviside to the same high safety standard as other aircrafts, but not higher.

Re: Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

#74

Post by walrus01 »

heyflyguy wrote: post #24

Every time I see a multirotor carrying people, I think of the many times while building them at the beginning of the drone renaissance that I saw 4/6/8 bladed multirotors have an AP failure, a blade break, a speed controller overheat, etc etc and it fell out of the sky, literally. These do not have a glideslope! Sure, a ballistic chute might prevent an onboard tragedy but I continue to wonder about what the flying ca…

This is one of the reasons why this craft and the Airbus vahana craft have at least eight motors and propellers.

Serious camera carrying octocopters for filming are strongly preferred over quad and hexacopters. They often carry $60,000 RED or Arri camera+lens combos. In a quad, motor failure is a guaranteed crash. In a hex, it's extremely dicey. Octocopter design with eight separate ESCs is safer.

In many cases the battery system is still 1+0 non redundant, however. As is the flight controller.

Re: Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

#75

Post by UIZealot »

Tossrock wrote: post #57
mysterydip wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May not be exactly the same, but I don't believe there's an appreciable drop on a tiltrotor like the V-22.

There isn't - the V-22 rotors tilt continuously from vertical to horizontal rather slowly as it builds up enough speed to transition to forward flight. Same thing with Quantum's VTOL UAVs.

And since the Heaviside has many pairs of small rotors, it has another option which is to switch the rotors gradually pair by pair, but switching each pair quickly.

Re: Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

#76

Post by fsloth »

dchichkov wrote: post #49
lmetro wrote: post #30

[I've been an engineer working on this vehicle for the past 2 years.] Hi HN! It's great to see lots of interest. One big reason we went public with the project is to help with recruiting, as we're starting to scale up our hiring for lots of positions, including testing, manufacturing, and every sort of engineering that you can think of. The team is super strong technically, and is full of people with interesting back…

It'd be nice to have emergency vehicles. But, don't build hanging parkways with good views, for the privileged, please. We've been there before - https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2003/putting-pleasure-... - with Robert Moses parkways, "bridges instead of tunnels" and the likes. And we've now learned - it's a mistake to put mass transportation system into the air. (Love flying, private pilot, airplanes, sailplane…

Couldn't the parking be organized by just putting roboticized "air garages" to the top of sky scrapers? Carriers operate a fleet of aircraft in a very constrained space. With purely VTOL craft there is no need for that to be horizontal, it all could be put to vertical.

So you would have

1. Landing bay (helicopter pad or an enclosed bay).For enclosed bays those could be stacked on top of one another.

2. Robotic parking

3. Air control system to facilitate traffic and parking.

I'm not saying this is a necessarily a good idea. But I would love to know why it would not work.

Re: Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

#77

Post by product50 »

dchichkov wrote: post #49
lmetro wrote: post #30

[I've been an engineer working on this vehicle for the past 2 years.] Hi HN! It's great to see lots of interest. One big reason we went public with the project is to help with recruiting, as we're starting to scale up our hiring for lots of positions, including testing, manufacturing, and every sort of engineering that you can think of. The team is super strong technically, and is full of people with interesting back…

It'd be nice to have emergency vehicles. But, don't build hanging parkways with good views, for the privileged, please. We've been there before - https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2003/putting-pleasure-... - with Robert Moses parkways, "bridges instead of tunnels" and the likes. And we've now learned - it's a mistake to put mass transportation system into the air. (Love flying, private pilot, airplanes, sailplane…

Privileged? Would you call shuttle buses employed by tech companies as privileged too? What about using these planes instead of shuttles to mass transport people?

Re: Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

#78

Post by foota »

fsloth wrote: post #76
dchichkov wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be nice to have emergency vehicles. But, don't build hanging parkways with good views, for the privileged, please. We've been there before - https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2003/putting-pleasure-... - with Robert Moses parkways, "bridges instead of tunnels" and the likes. And we've now learned - it's a mistake to put mass transportation system into the air. (Love flying, private pilot, airplanes, sailplane…

Couldn't the parking be organized by just putting roboticized "air garages" to the top of sky scrapers? Carriers operate a fleet of aircraft in a very constrained space. With purely VTOL craft there is no need for that to be horizontal, it all could be put to vertical. So you would have 1. Landing bay (helicopter pad or an enclosed bay).For enclosed bays those could be stacked on top of one another. 2. Robotic parkin…

I think you'll find building sufficient parking on top of skyscrapers will run into cost and weight issues.

Cost, because much parking is currently on street or in dedicated low cost parking structures.

Weight... For obvious reasons.

Re: Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

#79

Post by twic »

rrss wrote: post #54
dmix wrote: post #15

> The Mountain View, California-based company calls it Heaviside, after noted physicist and electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside, who advanced a variety of theories and innovations in mathematics, electronics, and communications in the early 20th century. I like this idea of naming things after people who've contributed to the field. Mount Everest's name came from a British surveyor and geographer George Everest. Bra…

I'm psyched they named it after Heaviside. For the caliber, scope, and importance of his contributions, he is extremely under appreciated. Most of the people who have heard the name only know of the step function, but much of how electrical engineering is done (and named) is due to him. Some things that could reasonably have his name attached (intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive): Maxwell-Heaviside equations…

Heaviside is particularly inspiring to me because he was (somewhat) self-taught. He came from a modest family, got a job as a telegraph operator, then as an electrician, then learned physics, then made huge contributions to it.

Re: Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

#80

Post by twic »

blendo wrote: post #40

I'm encouraged to see proper wings and empennage, glad you're not making an octocopter. Bonus points for conventional (tailwheel) landing gear. But questions: How fast can it fly and for how long? Article says "weighs about one-third of a Cessna". So less than 1000 lbs empty? And, importantly, with those wings, does it "stall" normally, at 40 mph or so? Asking as a former J-3 Cub pilot who'll assuredly never afford t…

Proper but forward-swept wings, which mean you won't be able to fly this without substantial computer assistance.
Post reply on HN