Very skeptical of any claims until I hear some hands-on opinions by individuals far smarter than I am. They didn't show anything about the inside of the aircraft or the controls.<p>However, to speculate for a moment. If it is possible to create a vehicle such as this, then this is what I would love to see as the real direction of all those self-driving car companies (Google,Lyft,Apple,Uber,etc).<p>I trust humans in land-craft far more than I trust humans in aircraft, and I might even consider the problems to solve by AI in shuttling humans from point A to point B through the air might actually easier than those you have to solve navigating the roads and ground-based hazards... way less human-driven vehicles and dumb animals (including humans) up in the air and a lot more ways to maneuver and avoid them.<p>I think a much better future is the one where our tech companies use their AI to control these air taxis and have them pickup and dropoff between tons of mini-airstrips (including the tops of apt buildings?) and we get a new ubiquitous form of fast public transportation which takes the load off of the rest of the transportation infrastructure without creating a weird human/AI dynamic on the roads.<p>But, as has been said... probably too good to be true for right now.
That thing's empty. It's a giant carbon-fiber drone. Cool and all, but that is not a test flight.<p>Initially I thought it was using those spinning-cylinder wings to produce the VTOL behavior! Decent approach, though.<p>No sound. I'd like to hear how noisy it is: the wind alone will be pretty loud, even if the electric motors are silent. And again, there's nobody in that: with a passenger it's going to work maybe three times as hard, depending on how light and dronelike it is empty. They might have next to no batteries in there, it behaves like it's quite staggeringly light.<p>Clever to use dronelike autostabilization to avoid having much in the way of control surfaces. This vehicle absolutely depends on having those fans working, and probably couldn't glide to a landing of any sort.
That's a nice achievement. The question is battery life. They've built a big drone. The cockpit is empty except for a GoPro.[1] How far can they go with a payload?<p>The video looks like a Kickstarter promotion. Too many neckbeards, not enough video of product working. A few minutes of uninterrupted flight video would be more impressive. They don't show the transition from vertical to horizontal flight, either.<p>There have been several battery-powered human carrying aircraft. Most are scaled-up quadcopters.[2] Here are five of them.[3] All have flown and none are shipping.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/ohig71bwRUE?t=65" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ohig71bwRUE?t=65</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrZwt9KIvWs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrZwt9KIvWs</a>
[3] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYsDcoS5Gt8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYsDcoS5Gt8</a>
As a pilot I would never step foot in this thing. The thought of being in an aircraft with zero aerodynamic control, or ability to glide in a dead stick situation is a complete nightmare. It doesn't matter how redundant your systems are if you have a fundamentally unstable airframe with no yaw control. In a total power loss situation, you <i>must</i> have some type of glide profile. All other forms of aircraft have this. Such a design would be fine for drones, but this will never carry humans.
I have to say I'm impressed. This is a game changer for several reasons. The first is that full autonomy is much easier in aviation than with ground transport. Second is successful implementation of flying cars would change things (for the middle class and rich) in a major way: potentially for everyone if the economics of sharing these works out where regular folks could afford to hail these and the system could scale.<p>Something like this that connects the exurbs to the city would be a game changer. I would imagine inner city luxury housing would take a big hit. Anyways, super cool to see that thing take off.
The elephant in the room is the weight of the batteries (a few 100 Kg at least) and the range / max flight duration given those specific batteries. That's a dealbreaker with a design like this if it doesn't work out.<p>Wonder how heavy the demo was and what part of the weight was batteries. Everything else is just along for the ride. Short wings -> needs lots of speed to get any advantage from the wings.
I give them kudos for getting past the Moeller air-car stage and actually having <i>something</i> flying. I think if they had been a bit more plugged into the typical fraud patterns from this sort of pitch they might have shot that video a bit differently. In particular it has exactly zero frames where it is in an environment that can authenticate its scale. Consider that this airbus380 (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rt9zX1rZFU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rt9zX1rZFU</a>) is a really big model but when it is in the air and there are no scale references you could believe it was full size if you had seen a static mock-up of one on the ground. To avoid this you need the unit to fly by, or operate near items that set its scale accurately. A good one is to have people near it when it takes off or lands.<p>That they flew it without a person is understandable (its a new aircraft after all and who wants to kill a test pilot really?) but the cockpit area was <i>completely empty</i> and that is a problem. Test flight data is really only valid if you're testing actual flight conditions. So they really should have had crash test dummy and enough ballast to at least simulate the mass of a pilot in command. The thing that was even more challenging was that the lift moment of the vertical fans in the rear of the wing are <i>behind</i> the center of mass for the pilot. So all of the pilots mass is going to create a pitch down moment on the much smaller front fans. There are really good engineering reasons that most flying car prototypes put the weight over (or under) the wing. They could of course be counter balancing the weight of the batteries that are all located behind the wing, but that would make carrying the weight in the pilot seat even more important.
This is cool... and let me say I am no aerospace engineer. I am a flight enthusiast... mostly R/C quadcopter and plane as real planes are $$$.<p>It looks like an extremely large ducted fan R/C plane with VTOL. Calling it a "jet" in the parlance of today seems like a stretch. Are ducted fans "jets"? I guess the argument could be made. I would think the people buying these would very well think of a jet as propulsion from combustion. Also, the FAA and turbine (jet) rating... I could go on...<p>The VTOL is awesome, and something I think we'll see more of as quadcopter technology scales to more robust .gov missions. The applications for this tech are limitless...
Many people are failing to appreciate the "tesla for the skies" model that is coming. Uber is actively pursuing the acquisition of companies like Lilium. Long term, roads aren't a great solution to increasing populations. The Ubers of the sky which land in your front yard or the top of your building and whisk you anywhere within 200-300 miles is coming... fast. And by making the eletric VTOL aircraft autonomous with waypoints, no one has to be a pilot. You simply hail a plane with your app, hop in, fly to your destination and depart. Many companies are testing full-size models like Lilium... for example, <a href="http://www.jobyaviation.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jobyaviation.com/</a>. No one has carried a human passenger yet, and none with autonomous waypoint flying. But soon... within a year.
Biggest problem, given they're German: these things won't fly in Germany outside of airports.<p>In Germany, it's not even allowed to do agricultural aircraft flying based on anything but a licensed airstrip - the only kind of aircraft permitted to start and land anywhere are SAR and military aircraft, and gliders can only land anywhere (simple physics) but have to be started from a licensed airstrip. Helicopters (SAR/military excepted) also may start and land only on licensed helipads, which won't be licensed in cities.<p>And to those imagining a future of living in rural countryside and flying to work... no way cities are going to permit random people flying over it, not after 9/11.
They didn't mention any battery specifications. Chemistry, capacity, weight, nothing. Just a wistful "300km'.<p>That's a bad sign. Battery technology is <i>the</i> gating factor for electric planes and not even calling that out suggests they have not solved it.<p>Great design, great prototype, now give us the power consumption specs. Show me where that 300km is coming from.
So, putting huge numbers of small electric motors on your wings has big efficiency advantages. But is there any reason this has to be stricktly battery powered? This seems like a situation very well suited to hybrid electric power with a internal combustion generator providing the power for level flight.
Hi Hacker News,<p>Several people in this thread have pointed out the major reason that this airplane design is not viable, which is the weight of the batteries.<p>I have developed an alternative that I would like to patent. I asked for an introduction here:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/65cazg/i_need_an_introduction_to_an_engineer_who_has/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/65cazg/i_need...</a><p>But I did not receive responses. Subsequent to this, I reached out directly to patent attorneys I thought would be qualified. Here I ran into a big problem. I will quote my reply email:<p>>"After speaking with the partner who handles our firm’s major aviation client, we have determined that taking you on as a client would likely result in a conflict of interest. This is more than just a matter of potentially overlapping subject matter. The fact that you wish to license your IP to other aviation companies would actually mean we couldn’t represent both you and our other client in those negotiations. In effect, we’d be on both sides of the discussion, which is by definition a conflict of interest."<p>This is actually an issue with any qualified patent attorney who might take on this case.<p>I would therefore like to work with an aviation engineer. I believe we could draft the patent language ourselves.<p>I don't want to include a terrible amount of information here, but I want to list one benefit of the invention:<p>- Solves the distance issue.<p>jacquesm's analysis in this thread is absolutely correct. This is what motivated me to ask if there were any aviation engineers in this thread. The cost to entering the aviation market is extremely high and the only viable means of doing so is via the patent approach, so I would like to work with someone who has had patents in their own name.<p>Please let me know if you would be someone who might be able to collaborate with me on this project, and I will get in touch with you. Thank you!
Anyone interested in the <i>actual</i> future of electric powered flight should check out Pipistrel <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiADDbeFanU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiADDbeFanU</a>
These folks are doing exactly what I've been saying for ages that someone should do once battery tech gets good enough. With a couple of brilliant additions like making the engine pods part of the lifting body, and using many smaller engines instead of a few larger ones. You can't use powered lift for long-distance travel, it isn't energy efficient enough for batteries to work. But you need to use electric motors because you get away with much lower mechanical complexity.<p>This is a disruptive concept regarding where people will choose to live, assuming that the details can be solved.
> The system can still do a vertical landing with a loss of up multiple engines.<p>I'm more than skeptical about the quality of the safety features if there are glaring mistakes in the language describing it.
Here's Aurora Flight Sciences, contracted by DAPRA, flight testing their similar but smaller prototype a year ago:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgWSuZbGh0s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgWSuZbGh0s</a><p>This is part of DAPRA's VTOL X-Plane program:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTOL_X-Plane" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTOL_X-Plane</a>
This seems way too good to be true. Seeing as the timeline on their mission page puts the first manned flight at some time in 2019 and their technology page states that the vehicle is built primarily with aluminum and carbon fiber, I'm guessing that this thing is incredibly light, maybe even under 500kg. The video seems to back this up with how easily the craft drifts side-to-side in the air with cross-breezes.<p>That low weight is an impressive feat of engineering, but it's also a big disadvantage for any real world applications because passenger and cargo weight is going to be a huge problem. You can't build passengers out of aluminum and carbon fiber. Even combustion-powered, light aircraft have serious problems with weight, and their pilots frequently have to work passenger weight into their fuel calculations.<p>My guess is that this technology will do wonders for aerial photography, scientific research and maybe even military reconnaissance, but transportation and any kind of serious shipping are still a very long way off.
I could easily imagine it picking me up from the top floor of my apartment building, taking me to the heliport at the top floor of an office building.<p>My current commute is 10 km of horrendous traffic.
Driving time on rush hour = 1.5 hours
Flying time @ 100kph (average of speed up, slow down and cruise) 6 minutes!<p>Then it would just fly on it's own to pick up the next customer.
While there are reasons to be skeptical it is worth noting that this effort is carried out in the south of Germany which is where there is a cluster of high tech resources within driving distance <2h<p>- BMW<p>- Mercedes<p>- Audi<p>- Porsche<p>- Airbus suppliers<p>- Military aerospace companies<p>- Key tech universities (Munich, Stuttgart) including aerospace oriented engineering<p>- World class glider manufacturer Schempp-Hirth
I'm curious on how they get "less noise than a motor bike". There are plenty of <i>quad copters</i> that i feel are more loud than most bikes, let alone the weight this thing has to put out some significant thrust requirements...
From the bottom of their mission page..<p>First full scale prototype has already been flown.<p>First manned flight planned for 2019.<p>On demand air transport planned for 2025.<p><a href="https://lilium.com/mission/" rel="nofollow">https://lilium.com/mission/</a>
Looking a bit more at this, here (at the bottom) are two more videos of earlier prototypes. All appear to be extremely light.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/LiliumAviation" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/LiliumAviation</a>
I do expect to live to see the day that such things are ferrying people around. But I also do think that it'll take a major breakthrough in energy storage technology. And if that happens, then all kinds of things become possible.
Fun coincidence I was just reading about SuperCar <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercar_(TV_series)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercar_(TV_series)</a>
It's been a while since my jaw dropped when I saw a video. Even if this goes nowhere I'm impressed with what they've done so far. Best of luck Lilium!
When I read the part about "Order your air taxi to the nearby landing pad," I immediately thought of the old Commodore 64 game SpaceTaxi.<p>`Pad 1 please` :)
Who cares? Once batteries can get as much, or more energy density than fuel, those types of machines will appear naturally.<p>I'm not really impressed by this project to be honest, I'm more interested by cost and energy density of batteries. Can't wait to see how the giga factory impacts the price of batteries.
This looks like cars all over again. Massive energy waste for transporting single persons. Looking at this reminds me of people driving alone on heavy massive gas consuming 4 seat vehicles to drive the same way everybody else is driving. Except that now its in the air and for rich people only. I don't see flying cars happening, well at least not like this. There probably will be flying shuttles that take people to different places like buses or metros that would make way more sense then this.