Hacker News Reader

Comment by fh973 | Hacker News Reader

It might actually be too good to be true. The German magazine Aerokurier is citing experts that seem to have doubts about feasibility [1].

The category is called air taxis, other competitors are Volocopter and Archer, with different concepts.

[1] https://topgear-autoguide.com/category/sports-car/futuristic...

View on HN

Experts always have questions about disruptive technology.

They are often not right, since disruptions are not incremental change, but tons of nuanced ones that lead to a significantly better overall system.

Edit: "Often" does not mean always, or the majority of the time. Lilium is clearly not a scam, and seems to be making steady progress towards their goals.

...but physics isn't something that cares If you want to disrupt.

I think this is such an important point to differentiate. Yes, incumbent experts can be caught flat-footed when a new technology comes along that is essentially just much better at what they do. Best example in my mind is the iPhone, where essentially the big old-school cell phone execs totally poo-poo'ed Apple's ability to create a compelling cell phone in 2008: "A computer company doesn't know what they're doing."

But that is fundamentally different than pointing out real physical limitations of an idea, and the danger is you get exactly the OP response, "The old guard always dismisses you until you change the world!" yada yada. This is basically exactly what happened with Theranos - anyone in the actual field of microfluidics knew it was all bullshit.

Of course, but it seems like the gap between what is physically possible and what has been demonstrated is pretty large when it comes to aircraft. Has anyone made a specific argument that Lilium violates the laws of physics?

How energy efficient is this concept? Can't this air taxi thing be done with better public transport and urban design?

Air taxis are unlikely to become as common as the industry hopes.

But helicopters are already viable. Increase reliability, drop upfront/operating costs an order of magnitude, and make it autonomous to remove cost of a pilot; then you have a lot more cases where it would be a viable option.

> Experts always have questions about disruptive technology. They are often not right

They're usually right, because most technology that seeks to be disruptive doesn't end up working.

Aerokurier has an axe to grind with Lilium. That their initial coverage caused quite a stir up just motivated them to continue down that road.

Doesn't mean Lilium is actually a guaranteed success, just that Aerokurier isn't the most balanced source.

"Futuristic air taxi: is the Lilium jet a blow job?"

Is "blow job" a literal translation of a German phrase?

That whole article looks and reads like an automatic translation. I’m guessing the original says “Ist der Lilium Jet eine Luftnummer?” Or perhaps “Luftpumpe”. A “Luftnummer”, an “air number”, is “hot air”. A “Luftpumpe” is an air pump but can also mean someone is a BS artist.

There’s also a bit of a bad pun hiding in there if it was “Luftnummer”, because “eine Nummer schieben” means to have sex, colloquially. If you really wanted to preserve that … you’d reach for the “blow job”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com