Advanced Air Mobility pioneer Lilium has ceased operations and laid off almost all its more than 1,000 employees after failing to raise the capital it needed to continue. The German company, which stunned the aviation industry 11 years ago with its electric multi-rotor design and audacious plan to introduce short hop inner-city-to-inner-city service, raised more than a billion dollars in private investment before going public in 2021. It only attracted two orders for at total of 320 aircraft.
Translation from Avnewspeak: Lilium has ceased operations after failing to produce anything useful. The German company already wasted more than billion of private investors dollars with the false promise that their investment goes to the aviation industry.
Yes, sad. But for a different reason; a billion auroras were burned into a project whose foundations were anything but sustainable. Alarm bells were ringing from the very beginning of the project, and those familiar with the basics of aerodynamics saw the impossibility of the project simply because of the weight of the batteries and the poor efficiency of the numerous small turbines.
But the hype, the uncritical attitude of even professional magazines and the promised brilliant future prospects were too much of a temptation for investors. Even projects that will be profitable in the future are finding it increasingly difficult to get risk financing. “Environmentally friendly” is an expression that makes politicians open the taxpayers’ purse and risk investors squander their profits. The CAGW, or catastrophic global warming caused by human-caused carbon dioxide -scam has once again found a new victim.
This was nothing short of a fiasco (as they all are) when it first was born. You cannot change the law of physics. One cannot possibly be this stupid unless you’re a politician spending your constituents money. This was a crime right from the get go. There was never any due diligence. There could not have been. The outcome would have been to obvious. A lot of people got rich over this and a lot of dumb people bit the dust including the people who voted for politicians that spent their money on this joke of a venture.
I was censured a year ago by this publication for predicting the demise of these electric Rube Goldbergs. As a (VKI-trained) aerodynamicist with 40+ years industry experience, you’d think my opinions might matter a bit. Ever since the aviation media replaced writers with real-world experience with liberal-arts scribblers, it has chased every goofball idea on the planet, like roadable airplanes and eVTOLs.
From Russ:
Kent, you always get censured for irrelevant political rants, not criticizing designs and engineering. You’ve been quite a bit better lately:)
I can’t wait to tell my wife I’ve been accused of being a “liberal arts scribbler.”
We run stories on these things because there is interest in them and some might work so that affects the way the rest of us fly or maybe will fly in the future.
Yes, all of those (Global warming, Global Stupidity and Greed) are true. The Earth’s temperature has always changed and will change, it’s just that the direction and speed of change are unclear. On the other hand, the contribution of human-produced carbon dioxide to the change is less true.
I haven’t been following this company nor its story. For $1,000,000,000, did they get any of these things flying? Or was it literally a hole in the air investors were throwing money into?
WBJohn, science has to match reality or you’re doing it wrong.
The atmosphere has not measurably warmed nor has 100LL contributed to measurable background counts for lead. While not directly relevant to this discussion, Lilium does show the same pattern of hype and deceptive wordsmithing and false altruism being used by most co2 alarmists.
They had a scaled prototype flying for several years which, I believe, was sized somewhere around 60% of the production model. The production model would have had 7 or 8 seats. They had videos on their web site of the prototype flying which was done remotely. It flew at a relatively fast speed and was able to maneuver easily and land vertically. I thought the concept was pretty cool but several posts here have pointed out the aerodynamics of the many small fans were apparently not efficient.
A double day for the naysayers. First unleaded fuels and now Lillium going Bankrupt. There was an interesting article a few days back about an opinion piece in the New York Times dated Oct 17th 1903 predicting that it would take a million years of development to make manned flight possible. Of course, it only took about 9 weeks. Lillium went bankrupt and more will follow but we will have commercial battery powered electric flight because it will be quieter, cleaner, and, most importantly, cheaper. And yes, human caused global warming is real.
"Mobile Uplift Corporation, a company set up by investors from Europe and North America, has agreed to acquire the operating assets of the startup’s two subsidiaries, Lilium GmbH and Lilium eAircraft GmbH, per an announcement Tuesday 24.12.2024 "
I would love to see a total of salaries of the top dogs in that company. I bet in 11 years executive salaries were a large portion of that 1$ billion. So not everyone lost…they will now move on the next pie in the sky.