Hacker News Reader

Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

Exciting times for VTOL companies. They've been called various flavours of "scam" or "vapourware" a lot because of their energy demands, but ultimately they're all bets on the continued improvements of battery tech, which is a pretty safe bet. There's tens of billions of capital flowing into battery development every year (https://report.volta.foundation/annual-battery-report/public...), so if you have everything else nailed down and just need better batteries, you're in good shape.

View on HN

My understanding is that even if you solve the actual plane + battery etc, the real rub is where do you take off and land? Most of the demand is going into/out of a city, and cities have very few places appropriate to land helicopters. Basically at the top of buildings that already have structural support, which are expensive and few.

_If_ we can make them generate a lot less noise and be a lot safer (both not that unrealistic), I would think more places to land them would rapidly pop up.

Also, but that’s in the really long term, if we could do air traffic control for millions of machines without creating congestion, I would expect city centers to sprawl out a lot. Why impress your clients with an office on the 50th floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan if you also can put it on a hillside overlooking some national forest, unreachable by car, but only 20 minutes flying away?

The rest of us plebs that are forced back to the office do not get a spot on the helicopter?

Helicopters are VTOLs. And all VTOL concepts have basically the same aerodynamic problems. So no, it is incredibly unlikely these problems can be solved easily.

Which is why VTOL concepts have stayed vaporware. People are simply trying to sell helicopters with a new name. It mirrors the endless attempts to build systems that work exactly like trains, but with a much sillier mechanism of operation. Both strategies are built on willful ignorance of what they're really trying to do, and are nearly guaranteed to fail.

The Moller Skycar [1] will finally have it's day!

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar

If battery is the only problem, it can be solved by using gas now (except emissions). There are many reasons human riding eVTOL called scam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com