After 70 years of the the “flying cars” push, one no need longer wonder if it’s a dead end.
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“And you know what, good for them, because one or some of these projects will eventually break through.“ actually disagree here (depending on your definition of breaking through). If you’re referring to a unicorn in VC terms. But in aviation there is no such thing. In tech sure. There are plenty of examples of billion dollar ideas. Anytime you have to have people and or pilots in a position to plummet to the earth you will not have a unicorn. If the liability won’t kill you, the very shrunken market that actually materializes will be proof that it was about the same size as the paraglider market size. No mass market here and no Uber-like growth chart. Hope I’m wrong, but I just don’t see the market here.
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My definition of breaking through is getting past the steep barriers to entry and achieving a successful, sustainable business. And of course it has happened in aviation. What do you think Cirrus is? And Diamond. I covered both from the outset and both were given little chance of success. But both achieved the right combination of timing, product features, performance and marketing expertise to make it over the hump.
I think it’s inevitable that this will happen in the distributed electric power space, eventually. Not with hoverbikes, but with some kind of useful aircraft.
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All significant advances in aircraft were a result of revolutionary advances in power plants. The Wright brothers engine made powered flight possible for the first time. Rotary engines made airplanes militarily useful, radial engines made practical airliners, and jet engines enabled revolutionary increases in performance.
The question is what is the next revolutionary power plant ? Personally think it is going to be electric but what will be the energy source, battery, hybrid battery, hydrogen, something else? That is where there is much uncertainty with likely many failed attempts before someone comes up with the secret sauce.
The journey is going to be interesting….
All ya gotta do is look at Icon which I’d closely view as this hoverbike. For just over $100K, buyers were going to be able to zip around in a little high tech auto-like seaplane. Look where that went. Cirrus – on the other hand … and as you say – started as two driven brothers in Baraboo, WI with a vision, the good luck to time their entry, a market ready for the picking and a modicum of good luck. The product they produced isn’t a toy but, rather, a useful transportation machine. THAT’s the key. A usable product at a price the market is willing to bear.
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I guess what I was trying to say was that any company that wants to mainstream an aviation product for the masses including non~pilots is in for a ride. Cirrus or any other ga doesn’t count b/c they were never targeting the masses. They were after the existing and new ga pilots. Folks like icon that think showing at the auto show in Detroit to entice people who would never ever have flown ga, but somehow will buy their airplane are deluded. They will entice some but those folks were toying around with the idea of getting their ppl or sport pilot certificate anyways. Mainstream people are scared to death of anything capable of falling out of the sky.
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Paul mentions it only in passing … pilot certificate. But there’s a lot more here than just rider (?) qualification that those companies and their investors seem to conveniently ignore.
There’s no way in this reality that vehicles of this kind will simply be allowed to buzz around whichever way they like. There’s a whole slew of regulations that needs to be created. Are those things meant to follow roads? If yes, how far above ground? There are obstacles like power lines, traffic lights, underpasses… If you need to follow the line of cars in front of you, what’s the point?
Or will they be allowed to criss-cross the landscape freely? What about private property or installations with restricted access? How can they protect themselves from unauthorised overflight? How do you enforce those rules? Are cops going to go on patrol in the air and force offenders to land, like a pair of F-18s?
The only solution here would be to require these vehicles to adhere to MSAs and make them part of the rules of the air rather than the ground. So now you’re sitting out in the open, on a vehicle with no glide or autorotation capability (as far as we know), with spinning bone shredders all around you, 1000 ft above a city. Or your sharing the narrow airspace between the skyscrapers and airplane territory with sightseeing helicopters and that other miracle-in-waiting - unmanned drone taxis.
I don’t think so.
Economically, aviation industries are not in a thriving market, and it will not improve for the foreseeable future. These innovations are fantastic, and we should applaud the efforts of such firms, but the timing is wrong for marketing such expensive, non-essential hardware.
“If it’s hydrocarbon powered by an H2 engine, it surely ought to run more than 30 minutes. The specs further say it has a battery…” Surely from that you would have to conclude its a hydrogen fuel-cell-powered machine…?
“How do you make a small fortune in aviation?.. start with a large one”.
Like a few others, my bet is the tech challenge is a…challenge, but it pales in comparison to getting any significant fraction of the population interested in actually sitting in one, much less repeating the experience after a windy, stormy hop to a “lily pad”…and if that doesn’t end well for the wealthy early adopters on board and/or innocent bystanders below, the lawyers, insurance industry, media, legislators, regulators and your Aunt Mabel will all weigh in to change whatever assumptions facilitated the initial “success”. Perhaps we’ll get a preview if (when?) one of the space tourist rides goes off the rails…
For routine proof of market size…what look do you get from the majority of your friends/family when you offer a flight?
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And a pile of money from the Communist Chinese…
Another Toldyouso. “Distributed electric power is not going to suddenly vanish as we veer enthusiastically back toward fossil fuels.” Yes, it already has. And most thinking people have never swayed from supporting our wonderful fossil fuels, except crony hucksters taking advantage of an administration controlled by enviro fanatics, themselves fueled by millions from Putin and the CCP. The old confused man in the WH rubber stamps anything put before him during his 2 hours of daily “work” between frequent naps and calling 80 million patriotic working Americans a threat to the country.
Good morning. Don’t forget that the launch (piloted by a chimp) that proceeded John Glenn’s first flight….blew up. America’s greatness has always been as a result of its brave pioneers. We owe everything to the imaginations, creativity, and guts of those that were not afraid to take a chance.
Good bless.
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“… it surely ought to run more than 30 minutes.” - Think of it as a courtesy extended to the operator. You can see how bad the “rider/pilot” was trying to manage the willies. After 30 minutes, the risk of the operator peeing ones’ self would seem inevitable.
The Jetson model videos are pretty compelling. Unfortunately, it has already been ripped off by what I assume is a Chinese company displaying a copy at Osh this year. The back drop in their booth was a riot… “Now everyone can be owned aircraft”, for real.
The foundation is the most important part of a house. The weakest part of an electric vehicle is the battery. Why would anyone use the battery as a foundation to build upon?
Colin Furze built one of these in his shed a few years ago. It was barely controllable, but it flew. Find it on YouTube.
No one wanting to make money is targeting this bunch of old, angry codgers.
Cirrus clearly believed they could expand the market greatly, and one of the key reasons they succeeded was they not only attacked the existing market, they went hard after the people who were interested, capable, and not joining our little club.
Talk to some folks in the piston plane business and find out how often they lost a sale to Cirrus when they could get the prospect into a competing demonstration flight. It wasn’t that often. A LOT of Cirrus airplanes showed up at fields with pilots no one had met who often did not have a certificate yet.
Dries had money, and was brilliant, and made better planes. He wasn’t a marketer, or a revolutionary, and he didn’t understand the cesspool that is piston GA.
IMO, the secret to success is navigating Washington, DC. The tech will come. The winner will be the one who gets the game fixed in their favor. Smart investors would be virtually ignoring the fancy demonstration models and asking to shake hands with politicians and bureaucrats who are committed to making the company successful. This ain’t no free market capitalism contest.
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As long as those trusting their money and their lives with these concepts are aware of the risks, no issue.
Unfortunately, everything I’ve seen so far is worthy of a bad late night infomercial…though they’re apparently catching enough venture capitalists drunk-dialing after last call.
…while the rest of us not so well funded participants in the national airspace system and residential property owners hang on for the loopy regulatory mess that’s going to accommodate these visions of utopia.
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You’re right. Elon Musk is busy with rockets and we only get one of them a century.
The contraption, as is, sucks.
I’m probably a little late to the party and I though I’m not intending to be a bandwagon naysayer, I will be a naysayer. My logbook pales in comparison to many around here but I do have, by my estimation and thanks to the sheer cheapness of it, hundreds of hours behind the sticks of FPV and line of sight multirotors. Not DJI or toy grade ones, the home built, racing and freestyle kind. I’d never accept the risk involved in flying a manned multirotor, let alone a quadcopter. An airplane is highly unlikely to just drop out of the sky unless you make it, a helicopter can autorotate, a fixed pitch quadcopter? Its mode of failure is to drop or, more accurately; tumble, to the ground. A hexacopter will probably allow you to make a safe forced landing, an octocopter may allow you to find an airport, a quadcopter you’d better hope you can bail out as it spins end over end from asymmetric thrust. None of them stay in the air if there’s a complete power failure. There are collective pitch equipped multirotors, I have only flown one since they’re pretty rare and fairly expensive, they may be able to autorotate if there’s a power loss, but any asymmetric condition is still instant and irrecoverable LOC.
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“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.
I hear ya! I owned a Grumman TR2, and I got a version of tennis elbow after constantly pulling my wallet out.
I think that Cussler already met his dead end.
Moller at 86 while not dead, the company is “dormant”.
Adding a battery does not solve the problems.
Thanks for that perspective. Makes sense
Meanwhile La Moto du Ciel (Sky motobike in English) made by Humbert Aviation has been flying and giving great pleasure since the 1980s…
Always a good point.
Does a BRS work when you’re tumbling end over end at an uncomfortable but unspecified number of RPM? Multirotors don’t just ignore the laws of physics when there’s a thrust imbalance, hence my comment about tumbling to the ground.
“Visions of utopia”….interesting. People probably said the same thing about the Wright Bros. or cartoonists like Jules Verne. How about Kennedy’s speech in 1962 regarding a moon landing in the same decade?
There will always be scam artists in every industry and there will be sincere dreamers that fail. The road to success is almost always paved with failures.
Thank God for the dreamers and visionaries.
God bless.
They’ll all sell in Dubai!
Is Cirrus viable without the financial power that comes from ownership by the Chinese Government?
Nope.
The vast majority of the entire US GA industry likely doesn’t exist without the massive resources of a foreign power, who owns the various entities for a different reason than simple capital returns.
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It sure is now. In 2008, apparently not.