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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

Feels like billionaires solving billionaires problems - this doesn’t scale.

It's actually kind of weird to default to whether or not it scales. It doesn't shoot laser beams either, but that doesn't doom it. Mostly I'm concerned about whether it can get my snowboard and I to the top of a back country mountain for 1/3rd the price of hiring a helicopter pilot and his machine.

How can you say that when you don't even know the price of the service?

Well, if you base the costs off of a traditional aircraft (around which this is based), they'll be in the $100+ an hour range, minimum. The cost to buy will be in the $2-300,000 range, minimum. They will require yearly maintenance, not counting any maintenance required on the electric props and batteries. This is based off a production aircraft, the Cirrus.

I'm also not immediately seeing how this would not require a pilots license - more likely a helicopter license, though this is easily debatable.

So perhaps not billionaires, but millionaires to be sure.

It already costs me 100+ an hour to transport 4 people from San Jose to San Francisco. This would be cheaper and faster.

Via what method? Iirc, there are many economical methods of transportation between those two cities... Also, that $100 per hour is pure cost with no markups to provide for revenue or growth.

I could easily be wrong, but the aircraft they were displaying looked like a 2 seater, not 4.

Uber X, or 4 Caltrain tickets gets us close to 100.

WRT Caltrain, I remember using it for commuting, and certainly don't remember paying $50 a day to do so. But perhaps the times have changed and the prices with them. Still, $25 per ticket one way seems ridiculously high.

Throw in a couple jet ski style tow ropes and you're golden.

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