Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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 backgrounds, from former Tesla execs to competition wingsuit jumpers (Seriously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk1ChndsN8Y).
The whole "flying car" industry has a high hype-to-substance ratio, but I think we're the real deal. The jobs page is here: https://kittyhawk.aero/heaviside/
I'd love to talk technical details on here, but we're still keeping pretty quiet about specifics. All I can say is that our test video is real footage, and not a render ;).
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, sailplanes, paragliders, had been flying half of my life. Yes, really cute bird. Yes, shiny. It's a mistake to put mass transportation system into the air. It is even worse to put a private road there.)
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.
Cost, because much parking is currently on street or in dedicated low cost parking structures.
Weight... For obvious reasons.
Not remodeling. Redesigning. It's very straightforward to move and redesign urban centers. Lot of countries do it all the time. The proble.s are not related to human nature or engineering, but to purely finances.
The mistake that would be great to avoid is "private parkways in the sky" in the urban areas.
I hope we see a vid with a 100kg test dummy in the chair soon.
This is about how much noise your aircraft are allowed to create. What you should be able to hear in the street are "the tweeting of birds in the camellias, the tinkle of coffee spoons and the sound of human voices".
Sounds good. The same rules should apply to lawn mowers, motor bikes, construction, bars, stereos, drones, public transport, bands, dogs, children...
I'm with you regarding motor bikes and public transport but the same rules should not apply to the others. They can have their own rules.
To suggest this new vehicle has to operate at a level to not drown out birds before it can fit into society is silly. It's reasonable to place restictions on their use, e.g. you shouldn't be able to takeoff and land in quiet residential neighborhoods, instead limit them to landing on the tops of very tall buildings or transport hubs.
Also, if people are allowed to use lawnmowers and loud exhausts on motorbikes, and have been doing so for years, suggesting a new technology has to be subject to more stringent restrictions is a little unfair.
To be clear, I really dislike noise pollution, and welcome the day when noisy lawnmowers, leaf blowers, jetskis and motercycles are banned from where people live, relax, most places really. I think it is really selfish for others to produce such noise around others.
What is silly is to say this noisy thing can't possibly fit into the world without hitting an extreme benchmark, when society has already accepted much worse offenders (whether you and I like it).
http://files.meetup.com/4709972/Leaf%20Blower%20bans,%20etc....
These do not have a glideslope!
Sure, a ballistic chute might prevent an onboard tragedy but I continue to wonder about what the flying car gets parachuted onto. What fires get started? Who gets crushed?
Super cool tech. Huge accomplishment for the engineers involved.
I want to know how this makes a safe unpowered descent.
Speaking as a pilot, if I were flying (or being flown) by this thing, the electric powerplant would be the least of my worries.
In rain, people would have to resort to ground based transport, so it doesn't really solve the problem. Transportation has to deal with weather. In the future, when batteries are light and powerful enough to run heavy aircraft (ie. Less vulnerable to light winds) vstol craft will be more practical. So much is waiting on Kw per AA sized battery.
By all means let's hold the Heaviside to the same high safety standard as other aircrafts, but not higher.
Indeed it is, and my comment should be read in the context of the post I am replying to. Having wings gives Heaviside an advantage over purely multi-rotor aircraft most of the time, but during VTOL operations, there is a stage where the wings do not help.
Helicopters have an advantage over all other VTOL aircraft in that they can autorotate, though this is especially tricky in lightweight helicopters, on account of a lack of rotor inertia.
the wings seems to be enough for reasonable unpowered gliding. The canard design naturally helps prevent stall. And i'd be surprised if the engines on production models aren't split into 2 completely independent groups (given their number - 3 per/wing - on that prototype i think they aren't split) with completely separate power, controllers, etc, so even relatively serious failure would still leave you with half the engines - that would allow while uncomfortable, yet still controlled even vertical landing from lower hover which i'd suppose would be the worst situation to lose engines.
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.
That's likely one area where a helicopter would have a significant advantage.
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.
Brand names quickly take on meaning, it doesn't have to be <NounVerb>.
I also can't imagine someone starting an aircraft company without having safety being drilled down their throat a million times before they produce anything that get's off the ground.
Some things that could reasonably have his name attached (intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive):
Maxwell-Heaviside equations
Heaviside-Gibbs Vector calculus
Heaviside transmission line equations
Poynting-Heaviside vector
Heaviside loading coil
Heaviside-Cherenkov radiation
Heaviside-Lorentz force
Heaviside s-plane
In that case I think you'd have to be sure you were building something great or at least challenging before you take on their name. Which has to be considered but regardless it's a nice gesture and the aircraft name which can change easier than a company name.
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 this.
I imagine that's hard to do while in operation.
Meanwhile, a heli has autorotation, which is quite convenient in various failure modes.
On the older 'teetering head' designs like the Huey, you can bump the mast (rotor shaft) in aggressive nose overs or low g conditions which would also separate the rotors from the aircraft.
[0] https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=213384
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHC_Helikopter_Service_Flight_...
https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?N...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN6vGxyMcVU
This definitely isn't shooting for mach 1.8, so the X-29 isn't an analogue, but there are interesting points about aerodynamics in that video nonetheless.
I frequently wonder about the things we're waiting for batteries to grow into, this is one of those things that makes me think the future has a decent shot at being insane.
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.
I could see any drop before it kicks in being startling for customers, especially if the motors are less powerful than a helicopter or jet.
I noticed the video makes a cut from flying to the landing part, without showing the transition of the blades downwards from forward flight. I'd imagine this also takes some careful timing to line up properly with the ground target.
I wonder how much of the advertised quietness will dissapear once it gets speced for range and passengers.
If they've solved a fundamental problem of noisy props I would be very impressed.
That was a video of a sub-scale prototype, they have newer videos of a larger one at http://www.lilium.com
The flight jerkiness probably comes from the flight controller not being super polished, and also the aircraft being piloted remotely by a drone pilot, so the pilot doesn't have the same feedback an onboard pilot would have.
From what I gathered, this kind of noise level is a standard feature of the new electric air taxis.
I myself had a rather similar talk to what that the panelist had with Kitty Hawk people with a very well moneyed, but also very naive CEO of a drone delivery startup. Some sarcasm added, but it went along these lines:
Me: your best bet is to make a helicopter. Men much brighter than you were banging their heads against the wall non-stop for 60 years trying to solve this exact problem.
Startup CEO: But I hired most brilliant engineers from Amazon and Waymo for that. I'm paying them near 200k each.
Me: If this, this, and this thing breaks, your drone drops dead upon an urban area. And if you get into negative gees over ridgelines, your motor don't have enough torque to keep COM behind the centre of aerodynamic forces to prevent inversion. You can't change the law of gravity.
And he was like "can't we really do anything about that, can't we?" These people are so used to the culture of "easy solutions" that it's scary.
A convertoplane this big will be extremely unstable in wind gusts
One of the most successful car makers in history from the early days of mass production of cars was run by an accountant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_P._Sloan
The OP is spreading FUD.
But I agree that flight (and ESPECIALLY manned flight) needs extensive experience in aerospace engineering.
V22 have 2 lateral DOF in which it can move without moving COM relative to point of aerodynamic force, and without changing its aerodynamic cross-section, so you don't get positive feedback to change of orientation in wind gusts.
This thing cannot do that as far as a glancing look can tell.
I am not an aeronautic engineer, just a motoglider pilot wannabe. If it looks borderline silly to even a man like me, it's scary to imagine what wool they must have pulled over for their mentors and industry advisers to go with that.
From what I can tell from the picture, it has 8 props, two wings, and a N-number of N221HV. Anything beyond that would be pure speculation.
Analogously, if the company is pilled to the brim with ex-Boeing engineers, but don't seem to recognise an obvious lack of airworthiness, they must probably doing that intentionally