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Comment by lmetro | Hacker News Reader

[I've been an engineer working on this vehicle for the past 2 years.]

Hi HN! It's great to see lots of interest.

One big reason we went public with the project is to help with recruiting, as we're starting to scale up our hiring for lots of positions, including testing, manufacturing, and every sort of engineering that you can think of.

The team is super strong technically, and is full of people with interesting backgrounds, from former Tesla execs to competition wingsuit jumpers (Seriously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk1ChndsN8Y).

The whole "flying car" industry has a high hype-to-substance ratio, but I think we're the real deal. The jobs page is here: https://kittyhawk.aero/heaviside/

I'd love to talk technical details on here, but we're still keeping pretty quiet about specifics. All I can say is that our test video is real footage, and not a render ;).

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It'd be nice to have emergency vehicles. But, don't build hanging parkways with good views, for the privileged, please.

We've been there before - https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2003/putting-pleasure-... - with Robert Moses parkways, "bridges instead of tunnels" and the likes. And we've now learned - it's a mistake to put mass transportation system into the air.

(Love flying, private pilot, airplanes, sailplanes, paragliders, had been flying half of my life. Yes, really cute bird. Yes, shiny. It's a mistake to put mass transportation system into the air. It is even worse to put a private road there.)

Couldn't the parking be organized by just putting roboticized "air garages" to the top of sky scrapers? Carriers operate a fleet of aircraft in a very constrained space. With purely VTOL craft there is no need for that to be horizontal, it all could be put to vertical.

So you would have

1. Landing bay (helicopter pad or an enclosed bay).For enclosed bays those could be stacked on top of one another.

2. Robotic parking

3. Air control system to facilitate traffic and parking.

I'm not saying this is a necessarily a good idea. But I would love to know why it would not work.

I think you'll find building sufficient parking on top of skyscrapers will run into cost and weight issues.

Cost, because much parking is currently on street or in dedicated low cost parking structures.

Weight... For obvious reasons.

I don't think those are valid arguments. Just because current urban design is built around a specific transport mode does not mean it could not be rebuilt to facilitate another.

Not remodeling. Redesigning. It's very straightforward to move and redesign urban centers. Lot of countries do it all the time. The proble.s are not related to human nature or engineering, but to purely finances.

Parkway is not parking. Wiki: The term has also been applied to scenic highways and to limited-access roads more generally. Many parkways originally intended for scenic, recreational driving have evolved into major urban and commuter routes.

The mistake that would be great to avoid is "private parkways in the sky" in the urban areas.

Privileged? Would you call shuttle buses employed by tech companies as privileged too? What about using these planes instead of shuttles to mass transport people?

I guess this is the video he means: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7mc3C19kE4

I hope we see a vid with a 100kg test dummy in the chair soon.

I look forward to electric airplanes, this looks like an impressive contender, and I would like to know more about it. For one thing, I see this is being flown without an occupant. Is it carrying ballast equal in weight to a person, or is it merely carrying sufficient ballast, mounted well-forward, to put the CofG within limits? And is it carrying sufficient batteries to give the quoted 100-mile range? What is its operational ceiling?

This looks really exciting but I'm curious about the intended market. Is this a "level 5" vehicle in terms of autonomy? What sort of license would be involved for an owner and operator? Do you foresee people having these in suburban driveways or operating them between small airports? Willing to comment at all on target price (brackets)?

Love what you're doing and hope it's a success! That being said, how do you answer skeptics with questions similar to "What makes you believe your version will be different from the myriad of vaporware or lab-demo-only competitors?"

Mind linking us to a some of the myriad of vapourware please? Just haven't seen that many EVTOL aircrafts successfully fly, like the heaviside shows, but maybe I have not been paying attention.

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