A ride in Kitty Hawk’s flying car | Hacker News Reader

A ride in Kitty Hawk’s flying car

money.cnn.com

55 pointstomcam37 comments

I like how they are coy about how fast it can go, the max speed is reached when the combined rotational speed of the rotor and the forward speed of the vehicle result in the leading edge of the rotor going supersonic. At that point of max dynamic pressure the rotor propellers will self destruct :-). Because the rotors are small, they have to rotate quickly in order to achieve the necessary lift and that means it will be unlikely for you to go 100MPH in this thing.

But that should not take away from the fact that they have a decacopter[1] than can carry a person around for 20 minutes. It would be awesome to park a car on either side of San Francisco (or Seattle) with a charging station and one of these, you hop out, zip across the annoying city traffic jam, and then get into your next leg car on the other side. :-)

And eventually we'll crack the charge storage system with either better batteries or super capacitors or something which will make it easy to use electricity as the fuel of choice for transportation.

[1] And unfortunate that spelling correct wants to make that decapitator :-)

It's illegal for it to go faster than 55 knots.

They're certifying this as a Part 103 Ultralight, and under the regulation, it: "Is not capable of more than 55 knots calibrated airspeed at full power in level flight." Since this is a multicopter with ostensibly some sensors, it's quite possible they're limiting this in software, but it is extremely disingenuous to say this can do 100 mph. It cannot, because that's illegal.

Additionally, the previous version of the Kitty Hawk Flyer, basically a decacopter with a seat, weighed 220 pounds, per reports. The new version of the Flyer has significantly more structure, and the weight limit for Part 103 ultralights is 254 pounds. I would hazard a guess that there's more than 34 pounds of chassis and fiberglass on the latest version. It's questionable if the 'floats' count toward that weight, in which case I would like to congratulate the Kitty Hawk team in engineering around the regulations.

But a Part 103 'flying car' is just about the dumbest idea ever. It can't be used to commute; you can call your local FSDO and confirm that yourself. You're also not going to fly it in San Francisco between Hunters Point, Pacifica, and San Mateo; there's an airport in the way. To say this is a 'flying car' is disingenuous and goes along with the SV philosophy of, 'screw laws and regulations, we're innovating'.

I honestly can't believe this got funding. I'm not surprised CNN is lapping it up; they're traditionally terrible with aviation-related news. I would guess that's why they were given the exclusive.

Okay, while I agree with it being extremely disingenuous to say it can do 100mph, I have to temper a bit...

The world is larger than San Francisco and this thing or something like it could be useful in lots of other places in the world.

> "Is not capable of more than 55 knots calibrated airspeed at full power in level flight."

Law is a funny thing. "Level flight" is used because if you go down then obviously you can go faster and it is assumed that when ascending you'd be slower.

If you have software limiter that kicks in only when the flight is level then you can ascend 100mph and descend at 100mph and still be incapable of more than 55 knots in level flight. So legal.

I read an awesome comment on HN the other day that I think applies here: something to the effect of, “some seem to think that the law is a simple robot that is easily bamboozled by specious arguments.”

In other words, it’s probably unwise to think that going 100kts in a part 103 certified ultralight will meet with regulatory approval because the VSI reads +1 fpm.

In Germany a judge can rule by the law's intention, I'm not sure if the US system is as robust. Many laws have been engineered around before.

>And eventually we'll crack the charge storage system with either better batteries or super capacitors or something which will make it easy to use electricity as the fuel of choice for transportation.

Bunch of years ago the Volocopter guys were talking about using serial hybrid. Looks like it hasn't happened yet.

I can't be the only one who thinks flying cars are a bad idea? More traffic in the air means more chances of collisions, which are much more likely to be fatal even for a small midair "fender bender". It also means far more energy usage to get from A to B than pretty much any other mode of transportation, at a time when we should be trying to reduce energy usage on this planet. The view will be ruined, with things flying across the sky day and night. At least with drones they're small enough not to be an eyesore. You won't be able to fly near an airport which most cities with traffic problems have, and they're going to be a lot harder to sell second hand, since no one wants a flying car that might fall out of the sky because the previous owner didn't service it enough. Furthermore, the quiet, scenic places outside our cities will suddenly be at the whim of every asshat rich enough to own a flyer, buzzing over lakes and forests and disturbing the peace. But hey at least Jeff Bezos won't have to wait in traffic.

> Thrun hopes the training will eventually take about five minutes.

I look forward to the many reports of controlled flight into terrain, and flying when the weather says don't fly.

I'm actually astonished to learn the FAA will let you fly anything powered without a licence and basic training of flight, weather and nav.

To achieve "5 minutes training" interface, they'd have to simplify it to the level of point-and-click operations. That is: fasten your seat belts, place the destination marker on Maps screen (or select from a list), press "Start", enjoy the view.

It seems they might have had an embargo on the audio of the aircraft fan noise: all clips of the flight have noise repressed and have talk-over audio.

So it's probably super loud or annoying?

Yes, and it cannot not be so - a rotating pressure-dipole generator is a very effective radiator of sound. Helicopters are noisy for what they can lift, and scaling down the size and multiplying the number of rotors makes it worse. It is a hard problem to solve because there's not much that can be changed, and a lot fewer that haven't been exploited yet. I think this will remain the last problem after all the control and power issues have been solved.

All the flying-car makers are coy about how noisy their machines are.

Eight leaf blowers is probably a good comparison.

With the exposed (horizontal) propellers, how can that ever be made safe? You would have to have something surrounding that or it would be very unsafe, automatic cutoffs. Not to mention the way someone could use it to attack people by flying down into a crowd.

The most common of transportation in the US also kills people when it is driven into a crowd.

Yes, but a running engine in a car, parked on the parking lot is seldom dangerous.

An open propeller is a safety risk, no matter how you put it.

When touching ground, something could automatically cover it. I don’t think it’s final yet.

I'm sure its not final. But I'm kind of surprised they show it in this form, cause it's crazy dangerous. And I'm not even talking about the "escape from an upside down craft in the water" training (it's like top gun's pool scene!). Of course in real life it won't be used to fly over the water in ordinary conditions.

It is the unavoidable phase of flight where it is in the air near the ground that is the problem.

If it would even be legal to fly around with this drones aren't we just moving the traffic from the ground in the air?

Simple crashes or driving mistakes will cause more deaths. So we would have to remote control them and synchronize everything and have some fallback software in case of connectivity issues.

But using this drones could be very useful in other scenarios but piloted by people with a bit more experience/training then a beginner driver.

Compared to roads, air has vertical space, as well as much more horizontal space. Also, you wouldn't need remote controlling if drones can sense and avoid each other.

You have the horizontal and vertical space but you don't travel between random points, say most of the traffic will head to the same N destination points so you have many vehicles converging at the same landing zone, or many leaving that zone.

The problem with drones sensing each other is that the data is not enough, the AI would need to predict where all the other drones are heading , otherwise we have the same cases like with Tesla and Uber where the AI will ignore many objects including stopped trucks and big concrete walls.

So a solution could be to force the drones to broadcast the location and velocity vector and other information , that is also a complex topic, bad actors, bugged drones, privacy issues, so many things can go wrong.

Also about the vertical space, you don't want to fly to high either, you would waste energy so many vehicles would fly as low as possible so you would have a big number of vehicles at a similar altitude.

There are additional problems related to landing space. A flying car is inevitably going to need much more space than a car of the same capacity, and when, as often happens, a lot of people want to be at the same place at the same time, there would probably have to be end-to-end traffic control where you cannot start your journey without a guaranteed place to land.

Being in an electric flying car looking for a parking space would add a new dimension to range anxiety.

It will work as long as people are not in control of the machine.

Or limited control - something like how you can control Pac Man. You could switch it between "tracks" in the air and go pretty where you want and whichever way you want, but invisibly the computer would keep you away from other craft, away from certain landmark features (lakes, large buildings, electrical pylons etc). It could even give you freedom to fly within your "lane" if you wanted the thrill of bio feedback.

In more remote areas it could give you more freedom to fly yourself.

"so it can be flown without a pilot's license due to an FAA regulation that requires these types of aircraft to weigh under 254 pounds" does this apply to Airships?

I am sure it is based on mass not weight.

If it's this, the language used is "weighs" https://www.eaa.org/en/eaa/aviation-communities-and-interest...

There are separate regulations for lighter-than-air vehicles.

Scientifically, weight would be the force of gravity on the object, not affected by buoyancy. So "weight" would be fine here. The legal definition might be different.

Yes, but pounds can be used to measure either weight or mass, and as the previous commenter indicated, it's mass we really care about.

"Flying car" seems like a misnomer. It doesn't even drive on roads? Am I missing something or is this just an ultralight multirotor aircraft?

"Flying bathtub" is more correct:)

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

You linked a pirated video. Original is by the Real life guys.

it was result of a search on mobile. Was lucky to be able to copy the link at all :) Anyway, the guys made their place in the history of our civilization, and whether a link is pirated or not it will be just a footnote at best - hundred years later nobody would care who posted that video, while the content of it and the people in it will be revered.

ingenious design when it comes to protection during blade off events

It's a flying car in the Jetson's sense of the word.

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