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Comment by ukulele | Hacker News Reader

> Use that expertise to build a tilt-rotor commercial plane.

They have, it's called the AW609. And like its predecessor V-22, it has crashed and killed the occupants early on and is nowhere near commercial readiness.

Uber's estimates of commercial VTOL flight on an untested airframe by 2023 is total garbage, and they have to know it. The US military has sunk $50 Billion dollars into this problem over the last 30 years and still aren't there.

My guess is that Uber simply wants to maintain some hope of future growth, particularly with their autonomous car program in shambles.

PS I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

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> My guess is that Uber simply wants to maintain some hope of future growth, particularly with their autonomous car program in shambles.

They also benefit from future free advertising. Everytime you'll see a bit of news talking about autonomous drones, flying taxis, or the like, you can bet that the writer will mention Uber, thus giving them free Brand recognition. The same happened with Amazon's delivery drones, or Uber self driving cabs.

I missread that as "self driving crabs" and now I want to see that. :-)

You jest, but cybernetic implants to remote control cockroaches and flying beetles is a thing, and even normal people can buy the former (RoboRoach Bundle is about US$160), so I wouldn’t be very surprised if someone makes a crab-based delivery cyborg.

Wow. That's actually mind blowing... I never would have thought that neural interfacing could be so cheap and affordable

Neural interfacing is not that complicated. It's just a microcontroller with two of the GPIO pins connected to antenna nerves, at most $5 worth of hardware.

In similar fashion, you can "mind control" a cat with a laser pointer.

Um, all crabs are self driving when alive.

Not only is it an untested VTOL airframe that'll be commercially available in 5 years, it's an electric plane that will have 60 mile range and 5 minute recharge time. I'm shocked that the articles writing about this thing take all these ridiculous claims at face value.

Came here to say exactly this. I'd add that of the non-aerospace tech companies that have tried to build planes, I'm not aware of any that have launched commercially and I can only think of one that has ever flown.

Turns out that building commercial aircraft is still hard.

making flying things is easy these days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQK9m_OBVgY

>The US military has sunk $50 Billion dollars into this problem over the last 30 years and still aren't there.

Bell X22 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arXpHn9DPYo ) was technically pretty successful from the start. The only disadvantage vs. V-22 is the speed - that speed though comes at the cost of lesser stability and safety and higher complexity of V-22. For commercial application the priorities would be different, and thus i think the multirotor, being more easy to develop, would come cheaper and sooner than that while any commercialization of V-22 is doomed from the start.

The X-22 was in no way more stable or safer than the V-22 it had just as much problems at start and unlike the V-22 which was based on the XV-3 and XV-15 those problems were not mainly in manufacturing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_XV-3

> The US military has sunk $50 Billion dollars into this problem over the last 30 years and still aren't there.

And that's not the whole cost and time; they've been working on tiltrotors since the 1940s.

Haha, yes. Glad you said this. I don't know the exact requirement on FAA approving a new airplane / VTOL whatever, but I do know it takes a lot of time... Same reason I thought the supersonic company was a bit ambitious on their timeframe as well.

Development of a new airplane takes a long time. Trying to certify a plane by similarity usually takes 4-5 years, clean sheet design would take even longer.

Dassault's Falcon 6X (largely derived off the 5X that was cancelled due to design issues from the engine supplier Safran) was only just announced and isn't scheduled to go on sale until 2022, and a good portion of its design work has already been completed.

> The US military has sunk $50 Billion dollars into this problem over the last 30 years and still aren't there.

I suppose by "this problem" you referred to tilt-rotor technology. If so V-22 is combat ready, and has been deployed since 2007. Not sure what "still aren't there" means.

The next generation, Bell V-280 is in active development and already made the first flight [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_V-280_Valor

Bell is also currently working on the V-280 Valor which is more of a direct successor to the V-22.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_V-280_Valor

Uber's new slogan: We can kill you on the ground, we can kill you in the air.

It sounds like the typical corner-cutting Uber.

Sarcastic humor, but the fact of the matter is that Uber has a history of ignoring inconvenient laws, and the FAA really doesn't approve of "move fast and break things" in their jurisdiction.

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