The us will literally do anything but build better public transportation.
Cue DeSantis banning this for being woke.
I’m absolutely positive, if anyone can turn this into a horrible disaster…it’s definitely Florida…
Adding new and complicated aircraft to an industry of already overwhelmed and under trained private pilots?
This can only go the Florida way: with some dude, blasted on meth and bud light slamming one of these bad boys into the side of a resort.
Bets on if this is exactly what happens? I got $5 for this happening
I’ll bet 10 that there’s an instagram influencer who booked the flight 5 hours before as the passenger
I listened to a podcast about these electric puddle jumpers and how they actually could make a huge dent in aviation CO2.
Electric jets? Is that a thing? How do they work?
Jet is just marketing speak here. It’s a bunch of ducted fans.
If it’s not generating compression to power itself it’s not a jet engine, it’s just sparkling ducted fans.
Like electric model airplanes and drones, but larger. Battery energy density is not high enough (yet) to electrify long-haul jumbo jets, but we’re beginning to see the electrification of small short-range aircraft.
They’re not jets. They’re ducted fans. Different things. “Electric jet” makes as much sense as “electric V8 engine”.
There is work going on making actual electric jets. They use plasma to expand the compressed gas in the same way conventional jets use fuel. Very early days though.
Hell yeah! They got electric V8’s now?! Bout time!
Why so many small propellers instead of a few big ones?
Bigger propeller is less noise
Why are larger propellers quieter? Does it have to do with the rotation rate required to generate thrust?
We already have helicopters. They’re loud and somewhat dangerous. This is a dumb idea that will be you guessed it, loud and dangerous.
They claim that these are less loud and less dangerous. Since this uses a shit ton of engines it means that multiple engines can fail before it loses lift. The reason why helicopters are loud as fuck is because the tips of the blades break the sound barrier. The blades in these engines do not go faster than the speed of sound. And unlike a helicopter this eVTOL has wings so when it is in flight the rotors don’t need to spin as fast as during takeoff so the engines make less noise.
and the controls are supposed to be drastically easier. helicopters are constantly suicidal and need to be strong armed.
The thing is everything works in renderland. Just build a fucking train or something.
But this thing works https://youtu.be/ywJWka1evH8
Lol
In January 2020 Aerokurier published a report which stated that Lilium could not meet its stated aircraft performance goals and would only be able to fly for two minutes at a time.[41] The anonymously-authored report was dismissed by the company but later backed up by four German aerospace academics who wrote that Lilium was “using brilliant PR to create an illusory world to attract investors.”[42][43] In February 2021, Forbes published an article citing a number of former employees that stated the development of Lilium’s aircraft was “dogged by problems and that the flight test campaign made minimal progress.”[44]
From the companies Wikipedia page.
I ran the numbers myself a while back, it’s not pretty at all.
Until you hear about people traveling >200mi and getting their commercial pilots licenses entirely on conventional takeoff fixed wing electric aircraft (see pipistrel electro) it’s safe to assume this vtol industry is grounded. The conventional fixed wing aircraft are wildly more efficient in terms of battery mass fraction and range but they don’t get investors excited like a personal quadcopter for the (ultra wealthy) masses.
