Regional Air Mobility: Why we don’t plan to operate flights under 20km
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But the aviation market is one of the most heavily regulated - bureaucracy beyond comprehension.
Did you ever wonder why Piper or Cessna airplanes look EXACTLY what they did 50 years ago? And why the engines used in these planes (e.g., Lycoming) are referred to as “Lycosaurus”!?
If you go for a sightseeing flight with a local aeroclub - you will find the pilot spending 30min pre-checking the aircraft, checking the weather, reading NOTAMS etc. Not to mention the potentially pretty intensive communication with ATC et al. required to make sure everybody stays safe.
Getting a pilot license is magnitudes more work than getting a drivers license, proficiency has to be continuously demonstrated, maintaining airworthiness of an airplane isn’t exactly cheap either and pretty heavily regulated.
And all that should be “automated”, certified and approved?
Not saying things can’t be automated - but no shit, the spark plugs in a Cessna are like 50$ each for that “aviation certificate”...
Even if there ARE rules and guidelines how to certify autonomous vehicles like that - like how does anybody imagine that a novel aerial vehicle like this actually IS CERTIFIED within a lifetime?
Pilots still walk around a multi-million $ fighter jet or aircraft equipped with the most sophisticated avionics because “a bird nest in the engine intake is hard to detect and difficult to resolve mid flight”.
Investing in one of the most heavily regulated, difficult to scale and extremely expensive to operate industries is brave... Even more so when this industry is low margin and “kept dying every couple of years”...
It's not installed in the plane I fly, but Garmin's auto-landing system was recently certified for emergency use.
https://generalaviationnews.com/2020/05/19/garmin-autoland-c...
Oh and you'll have to fuel the airplane with avgas which costs $5/gallon and contains lead, and you have to wonder WTF??
There's no technical reason aircraft engines cannot be turbocharged, fuel-injected, fueled with regular unleaded gas, and cheap. Aircraft engines should have followed the innovation advancements that have happened in car engines, but they haven't. This is probably because of regulation, monopoly power, liability, and a host of other reasons, but as an engineer I find the situation ridiculous.
They're working on replacing leaded fuel. The challenge is mostly regulatory, since they won't certify any of the replacements until they're sure it's 100% safe. It's still a work in progress.
As for what you'd lose: Search and rescue, medical transport (both commercial and volunteer), transport of blood samples for lab testing, high resolution aerial photography on your smartphone, powerline inspection to prevent forest fires, crop dusting. I could go on...
Same is true of Medical Transport except possibly for Australia where light aircraft are used more frequently than turbine helicopters.
Same for powerline inspection, although there could be a couple of companies using Robinsons somewhere I guess.
The problem comes with flying in lower atmospheric pressure (high or hot environment) because the replacement chemical used in place of the lead-based additives makes fuel much quicker to evaporate.
BTW, the really rich don't use AVGAS 100LL except maybe for hobby flying - kerosene-based JET A-1 is used in all turbine engines, as well as the rare diesel.
A car engine has to be able to maintain peak power output for a few seconds while accelerating. maybe a few seconds, unless you're towing a load up a hill or something. On level ground you're using a small but variable amount of your available power.
An airplane engine has to maintain peak power for the entire climb-out, and a substantial fraction of that for cruising for hours at a time.
This reminds me of how a lot of people are surprised when they find out the engine of a typical semi-truck has "only" a few hundred HP but several times the displacement of a passenger car engine rated at almost the same power. The car engine will wear out quickly at continuous full load, whereas the semi engine is designed to run at full load continuously. Ditto for engines driving generators and pumps --- full load is normal load.
In order to complete the phase-out you either need to: force people to put a new $30K+ engine into a <$50K plane, totally replace the fuel system, and get a supplemental type certificate or: Require that the new fuel is a drop in replacement. One would have to show that the new fuel is 100% compatible with 100LL without modifications to the aircraft.
The FAA has been attempting the second route for some years, but to date has not been terribly successful. The first route has been done successfully in other regions such as the EU, but I would suspect there is far less legacy general aviation aircraft. I personally look forward to the mainstream introduction of diesel engines into the US market that are able to run on Jet-A
Grandfather in current planes and mandate new models to use new fuel only. Over time, perhaps lot longer than cars(planes do have longer life) you will have changed all of them.
Had they started it in 80's and 90's same time as auto-mobiles, most planes would have changed by now.
Every industry faces the same challenges to transform technology, they are able to move forward without as much difficulty as aviation ?
You're underestimating the age of the fleet.
The average GA aircraft is 50 years old, and that is likely to increase in the near-medium term as production of GA aircraft is practically zero.
Source: https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/business-aviation/20....
(Cirrus, mentioned above, produces about 300 aircraft a year - compare to the 100,000+ Ceessnas on GA fields, almost all of which are over 40 years old.
Seconded. 50 years ago diesel engines were too heavy for light aircraft, but the weight problem with diesels has been solved.
We pick up avgas (half the price) from the small airport near us if we’re doing strictly off-road activities in our vehicles (no fuel tax).
Less than $1.50 AUD across the ditch at the moment. And that's a bad day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Shilling%27s_orifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_carburetor
No autothrottle, no FADEC, and that plane new costs close to $1 mil. Short of the turbine world, its the best you can get but its still ancient tech. Following a magenta line on autopilot is not a hard problem to solve.
I don't think that's the reason we accept the higher death rate of cars. In cars, you feel like you have direct influence on whether you die, or at least you know the person in control. This might not be the actual case, but it's enough to make people save.
Compare this to planes: You're flown in big machines you don't understand by people you don't know and, if something goes wrong, you can do nothing but protect your head and hope for the best. Also, you have no way out - if an engine fails, prepare for quite some time of horror. Compared to a car, where you might have some unpleasant deceleration, but safety is always very near.
I'm pretty sure these factors are the main reason we are so wary of aviation deaths compared to car deaths.
No, it's the externalities. When you fly you don't just put yourself at risk, you put others at risk as well. Roads are designed to isolate faster-moving vehicles from people and property so the people who die are mostly the occupants of the vehicles and there is not much collateral damage. But it's not possible to isolate air traffic this way. So it's not just the occupants of aircraft who die, it's people sitting in their living rooms watching TV when a plane suddenly comes crashing through their roof.
Also, the limiting factor on air travel is not technology, it's takeoff and landing space. Even VTOL aircraft need a lot more room to takeoff and land than a car does because there's a blast zone.
They rely on a Continental that was developed in the 80s (so quite new) - but doN’t you still have to adjust the mixture manually (e.g., manually adjust the air to fuel ratio)?
I mean, the cool stuff you are describing can easily end up at 500k-2MM USD with a fully trained private pilot...
why not? the original post was that innovation can't happen in aviation because of regulation. if we're shifting the argument to innovation doesn't happen because it's expensive, that's a much more solveable problem.
And that innovation is “just” glass cockpit, and some more advanced avionics. Not changing the principles - you fly a bit faster, a bit safer but still need a license and do all the preparation and checks. But it’s a bit more fancy. From 200k to almost 1 MM.
The Garmin Autoland you described bumps up the sum to 3MM (https://www.piper.com/press-releases/piper-announces-new-m60...).
So factor 10 for something “that was already unreasonably expensive”...
My argument was around “innovation has a horrible ROI” in the aviation industry.
Building a startup in that space has to take costs into consideration... I mean, Musk initially didn’t shoot people into space, there was an inefficient market and the margins were enormous... That’s a different story...
Cirrus: "new aircraft deliveries for the piston SR Series reached 380 in 2018"
By way of comparison, Ferrari delivered 9,200 cars in the same year.
Part of the problem with aviation has been that aircraft are boutique items and priced accordingly.
I'd imagine even a Toyota Camry would cost $150k if it was a one-off design.
This may be so, but I don't think you've really substantiated it; you're just talking about part of the "I", without any reference to the dollars of "R". Sure, $1m puts a plane out of almost everybody's recreation budget. But for a piece of transportation infrastructure with high utilization, it might not be prohibitive. (I mean, a jumbo jet costs hundreds of millions to build, involves significant R&D budgets on each new model, and is still positive ROI, just.)
You said "you fly a bit faster, a bit safer" in a dismissive way, but how much is this actually worth? I could easily believe that making flights slightly safer is worth an extra $1m of capex; I think your original claim would be much stronger if you provided some more concrete numbers/analysis here.
Nah. Avionics, etc, and what goes into a plane is cheap compared to the purchase price. Even when you talk about G1000, G3000, etc, they are not the primary cost drivers.
What's killed the price of general aviation aircraft is that very few units are purchased. In turn, prices go up; in turn more old planes are kept flying and fewer units are purchased.
Four seat aircraft without glass cockpits and without notable innovation are a few hundred K.
It's the same with the first car you build. The first Tesla Roadster cost tens of millions to make. The second Tesla Roadster cost half that.
100+k is expensive, but even a 162 is likely to be flying for 40+ years.
Every car since the early 90s has done away with the choke, but for some reason in a 2020-built C172 I still have to do this... :X
I would argue that this insistence on safety certification makes actual flights less safe. Because it results in it not being done, leaving something to the pilot who is more error-prone than an automatic system.
I haven't heard of accidents in GA aircraft that were due to poor mixture (though I haven't looked, and it could technically cause one if you set it too explosive) but when I still flew there were several incidents reported by our maintenance company who complained about cylinder scoring due to overheting.
It would be much better to have this automatically managed, and more environmentally friendly too, because there is no need for 'full rich' settings during takeoff/landing, it would just adjust it to ensure sufficient cooling. The full-rich is just a precaution to avoid the pilot miscalibrating it during this critical flight phase (and to avoid overheating on the ground of course).
Rotax (Austrian company) actually builds great engines. They are heavily used in ultra-light airplanes with much more “relaxed” certification.
And you are right: in the ultra-light market, we see a giant boom because of lower certification hurdles and actually much safer systems: automated engine control, constant speed propellers, ballistic parachutes, etc. But Maximum Take-Off-Weight (MTOW) is 650 kg (Germany) that leaves you with a skinny wife/husband, some gas and light baggage...
Airplane engines are operating in tougher environments than car engines - hence bigger tolerances and less sophistication in some parts. They also must not fail. I mean, the engine has to be ok with starting up at 100 degrees F on the ground, climbing at maximum power to 10’000 ft, with below freezing temperatures within 15/20 min and descending down again with an urgy pilot pushing down the cylinder heat temperatures from 400 to 200 degrees fahrenheit within minutes (due to power reduction and increased speed cooling the engine).
I am training for a PPL(G) in the UK (G is for Gyrocopter). There two proper certified makes of Gyro in the UK (Magni and AutoGyro), and all of the engines are Rotax. The newest is the 915, which includes a FADEC and turbo.
That said highly recommend any materials from Mike Busch on this topic. Super knowledgeable and has moved the needle in getting people to understand how engines operate.
There is of course a minority religious sect within GA who follow lean-of-peak theory and mess with their mixture constantly for better mileage (and possibly better wear, but that can go either way).
Leaning is not only for better mileage. The engines usually do not like a fat mixture for prolonged periods of time... I can’t recall all the reasons, but I think a couple of mayor ones were: 1) lead in the avgas will foul the spark plugs for rich mixture settings which is a safety risk, 2) exhaust gas temperatures will be lower which can lead to a build-up at the exhaust valves which can lead to wear and failure and 3) you end up with more dirt in your oil which makes engine corrosion even a bigger possibility...
Lean if you love your engine. And read Mike Busch - because he has the facts better than I do...
Charles Lindbergh demonstrated to US pilots how to do it, based on his Atlantic crossing testing, and the result was double the range. This allowed the US to surprise and "outrange" Japanese island installations, and to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto at great range.
(I would argue that the full story hasn't been told of the latter, since the planning was literally perfect. Something like radio navigation would have been needed, or incredible luck.)
Outrange was a Japanese strategy to attack US ships without expecting a return attack because of the Japanese planes having greater range initially. ie. LoP disrupted Japan.
AOPA: Technique: Lean-of-peak engine operations Keeping your cool on less fuel
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2019/may/flight...
They are the only reason you can step into an aircraft with a reasonable expectation of making it safely to your destination. Disasters are generally not caused by obvious large issues, but a multitude of smaller compounding, seemingly benign causes that could otherwise be easily dismissed. The massive body of regulation around aviation is a direct result of this. Each one is almost always a direct response to a particular incident that killed people.
I could go on.
The answer to “why can’t we just” in aviation is “because people died.” The FAA doesn’t make rules just to make them. They make them because aviation is unforgiving and it will kill you and your passengers if you screw it up.
...in 1970.
Not saying that all aviation regulations are bad, but the fact that carburetors are still used in general aviation is pretty damning.
The engine needs to be able to run without electrical power, or you need to convince the FAA that your backup will fail with an extremely small probability. This is one of the reasons magnetos + carburetors are common in general aviation
In planes it’s called the “primer” - and starting up the engines can be quiiiite tricky if you don’t know your plane. Especially in cold weather. I know plenty of people that ignited a carburetor fire on startup and the planes were almost write offs...
I don't have much knowledge about engines, that's why I am asking you.
Carburetors are fiddly analog devices that require tuning by way of changing port sizes, needle valve sizes, float levels, mixture adjusters, throttle position adjusters, and more. Most of these require disassembly, and they clog and distort as the carburetor ages. Carburetors are highly sensitive to temperature and altitude. Tuning them is "more art than science".
Modern fuel injection systems have digital control and feedback loops using a variety of sensors. They provide optimal fueling in pretty much any condition. They may be more complicated, but (at least in vehicles) they're rock solid reliable compared to carburetors. They also have more graceful failure modes - if the O2 sensor craps out, the computer defaults to running rich and puts a warning light on the dash.
I'm pretty sure that if the carburetor was invented today, it would never be allowed to carry human traffic.
I once had carb icing in Hawaii at 2000' near Wheeler due mostly to humidity, and it was only thorough training that allowed me to figure that out fast enough to apply carb heat and save the plane.
A lot of inexperienced pilots just ride it down into the ground.
Dual fuel injectors prevent the icing problem (usually, unless your fuel actually crystallizes or freezes), but they have other failure modes like dirt or wear. Or forgetting to turn them on.
I know seven people who have experienced engine failures in general aviation airplanes. Not one had anything to do with the carburetor.
However, that is often compounded with "the plane was made in 1960s"
All of the aircraft in existence have been certified in what is (for a very old person) one lifetime. I think we’ll be fine.
Their schedule seems to have 5 years for development, and 5 more for certification.
That seems reasonable.
>That seems reasonable
That sounds laughable. Garmin, an established, well-funded, and well-connected company, spent multiple decades to certify one system with the FAA.
You know why Piper/Cessna airplanes look exactly the same and keep using 50 year old engines? because of safety.
You know why pilot spends 30min pre-checking the aircraft? safety
You know why getting a pilot license is magnitudes more work? safety
Everything in aviation works around safety. If you want to innovate, sure, go ahead. If you want to innovate and do it safety and reliable, oops, that's going to cost you a lot and that's the same reason why there are not many players in aviation, engineering an aircraft or new powerplant is a big up-front cost with probably little return.
At the current standards, apparently the only hard requirement is a pulse.
- Turn too early/late past an arbitrary point in space
- Turn the wrong direction
- Descend too early past an arbitrary point in space
- Use the wrong altimeter setting
- Failing to recognize and troubleshoot a failed instrument
- Failing to recognize signs of hypoxia
Not to mention dealing with emergency procedures while you don't do any of the above
Here is an example from a few years ago where a 777 missed a mountain by a few seconds after some non-standard instructions by ATC
I don't think the comparison between a regular driver's license and Instrument / IMC flight is reasonable. Perhaps more accurate to compare to a Commercial Driver's License with a HazMat load
Or driving a bus
Even in the aviation world, an IFR rating is largely considered the most difficult to get.
I would also add that in aviation, most accidents / incidents do _not_ result from a single error, but rather the stacking up of errors, which granted, are almost all variations of 'pilot error'
In a plane you don't have that single goto option. You have to know the correct response to every possible situation and it's different in each case.
Plus, many mechanical failures in an aircraft will kill you. Most things in a car won't. You need to learn how to look after a plane, and what to check for.
Some FAA regs and procedures are written in blood, but most are written in a way to prevent blood in the future.
I also like to echo the products Garmin is incorporating to increase the UX in the cockpit. They address some of the things you outline.
Remember, aviators aren't engineers, they are operators. The license requirement is there to ensure that pilots can do basic things like triage, malfunction diagnostic, ad hoc solution generation, energy management, communicate, etc.
(It is in German though).
A big German magazine did a rather intensive “how much sense does it make” story: https://www.aerokurier.de/elektroflug/flugtaxis-kein-markt-f...
So they do seem to be doing something right...
The lack of chaanges may just indicate that the current paradigm is a rather good one. If anvbody came up with a working scramjet, regulation would be a minor hassle.
It's really physics that are limiting here: supersonic travel is too inefficient both economically and environmentally. And personal autonomous local transport (i. e. "flying car") is impossible without some sort of breakthrough on noise.
Just like most 3rd world countries these days have better 4G coverage than supposedly 1st world countries like Germany, or rural US.
And guess the country :-)
I would never start such a business in the US or Europe.
Don't look at fighter jets, as they are basically jet engines with guns and little control surfaces added.
As for airworthiness - there's a good reason for that - these things literally fly over your head.
But the point is: even if politicians DO push that and even if the rules and regulations are written down - doesn’t mean that they will be granted a certification.
I mean, funnily enough, they don’t yet even KNOW what they will have to adhere to and achieve and start burning through 300MM USD in investor money...
Boeing, Airbus, Cessna, Cirrus and Piper have dozens of years of experience and KNOW how to get planes certified - and yet they essentially “re-use older certifications”...
Fun times when they get told they need two ballistic parachutes or they need at least 30 min safety backup for hover flight (e.g., each Cessna pilot has to make sure he has 30+min fuel reserve). Your engineers will commit suicide when you surprise them with “oh there was this ask...”
And then the weather - I mean, seriously, there are super strict rules about visual minimas for flights in the US and Europe. If you go instrument rated things get even more complex and bureaucratic. Not to mention that instrument flight is PROHIBITED in Germany below 2000+ft in uncontrolled airspace...
Ah, and I want to see that flying electric lawn-mower make his way across the Alps with 50kts headwind, freezing temperatures at cruising altitude. Pilots landing in Innsbruck need special training for “Foehn” Approaches and when the heavy winds roll over the city and airport you can hear the pilots pushing full throttle in final to counter the 2000+ft/min downwash.
Well, this is pretty much standard practice!
Edit: Ah I misunderstood your comment. So yes it is standard.
However I could see this not applying to these guys, because with vertical landing capability they should be able to support field landings with really minimal risk.
Nearly all existing planes operate with the same basic parts, thanks to the fuel. This dictates the possible drivetrains.
Reduced complexity can lead to drastic reconsideration.
While I don't expect change to be super fast, regulation tends to move faster than normal when major disruption starts showing up in practice (drones, self-driving vehicles, ...)
The world of atoms is harder than software, but it's awaiting disruptions like these.
I know the meaning may have shifted over the years, but i've always interpreted it as "audacious and unlikely to succeed", rather than any particular moral / altruistic content.
The Tesla company was started in 2003 to productionize the AC tzero. In 2005, the Roadster was conceived as the product it became and Tesla and Lotus tied up.
The Secret Master Plan arrived in 2006. So yeah, that's just how it goes. Because there is an army of people who lament things targeted at rich people, but that army does not participate in progress, either in money or in sweat.
The intelligent futurist always ignores them because they contribute nothing.
It is also not true. There are numerous innovations targeted for the betterment of us all. The three-point seat-belt is a quick one that comes to mind. The field of medicine has tax funded research innovating at a remarkable frequency, where the target beneficiaries is all humans who need it. Expensive infrastructures like roads, train networks, electric grids, and trash disposal systems are build around the world for everyone who needs, not just the once who can afford it.
But we do lament things that are target at rich people, because these rich people are literally destroying the world with their over-consumption. They certainly don’t deserve more nice things that the rest of the world is paying for.
All of the things you mention (except the 3-point seatbelt, perhaps) have a story just like this one with some guy saying things just like this guy and a veritable shower of lament with no effort behind it.
This sounds like an HN version of trickle down theory which I thought had been thoroughly debunked by economists.
It’s funny but, I’ve always been under the impression that the opposite were true in standard economics, the poor—with their labour—are the once who subsidize the rich. I find it hard to believe that the economics of progress are any different. Let me draw up some napkin economics:
Scenario A: The poor pay disproportionaly higher taxes then the rich. Taxes pay for infrastructure, education, etc. The rich uses the infrastructure and the higher skilled workforce to work on a thing. The rich get richer on that thing. The rich give them self a higher percentage of the profit then the workers or the state. The rich just got richer because of subsidy from the poor.
Scenario B: The poor pay disproportionaly higher taxes then the rich. Taxes pay for infrastructure, education, etc. A team of PhD students (the poor) and their assistance (the poor) spend thousands of work-hours to figure out how a thing can be improved. A company uses their findings free of charge to deliver a better product. The company does not give the students and their assistance a fair share of the profits. The company pays their shareholders (the rich) the majority of the profits. The rich just got richer because of subsidy from the poor.
In the mid-20th century, airline travel was an endeavor strictly for the rich. Today it is also accessible to those in the middle class.
Serious question.
The problem is probably nobody wants to pay for that.
But lets say that your right on your first point, and a general solution exists. Then your second point is most definitely false. It is not the problem that nobody wants to pay for it. It is a problem that the people who need it can’t pay for it, and that nobody is willing to give it to them. See it’s a problem of distribution, not of demand.
(Turns out a key problem is preventing shit from getting into the water)
Sure, perhaps your age may indicate a preference for that kind of project but DDE was 70 when he started the moonshot so it's less likely to be age and more likely to be a predisposition to that sort of thing.
Helicopters are really expensive to operate though, so perhaps this vehicle could fit in if frequent flights would have to be made to a place without a road connection, such as to provide an emergency relief after big disaster.
Where it could be a game-changer is transporting people and light cargo in rural communities with limited infrastructure, such as East Congo or Greenland.
Moonshots afaik are risky ideas/ventures that have the potential to "moon" i.e. make a shit-ton of money. Solving a problem with no funding can't be a moonshot by that definition.
As an air-taxi skeptic, I have to say I am refreshed to see a startup actually spend more than five minutes figuring out the market fitness problem. Focusing on bypassing geographic barriers seems to be a much better use case.
I am still pretty skeptical on the idea overall. Everyone drools over the travel times and not enough on the confounding factors. Getting to and from the taxi. Dealing with regulations. We can't even make public transit in dense urban cores work - why would this much harder idea work?
I find it amusing that one of their examples of bypassing noise ordinance restrictions is to follow existing infrastructure routes. The irony seems lost on them.
Yeah, I noticed this too in their depiction of a hypothetical Palo Alto vertiport. The caption “high-throughput vertiport with intermodal last-mile connectivity” made me think it would ideally be located by the Caltrain station, but the road in the illustration didn’t look like El Camino and there were no train tracks in sight. I later realized during their “low noise footprint” discussion that they were depicting a vertiport located towards East Palo Alto and using 101 as the flight corridor.
My guess is they recognize the irony but are trying to strike a judicious balance.
By contrast, getting approval to build a small footprint vertiport and use some unused or underutilized air rights seems easy.
This feels a lot like when everyone was scrambling to start helicopter taxi services which promptly crashed and burned... Helicopters were a mature and well understood technology then, but the realities of operating in urban areas under a variety of weather conditions just doesn't allow for these services to be A) safe or B) economical.
"It'll revolutionise personal transport but we estimate it'll kill 40,0000 people in a horrible way per year"
Like many things that are harmful in some way cars got grandfathered in (as did alcohol and tobacco) - if someone came out with an equivalent of alcohol with the same side effects it would be banned immediately as well.
In fact the UK did exactly that with the psychoactive substances laws - we didn't ban a particular drug we banned any drug with a set of side effects - largely because the chemists got really good at tweaking the underlying chemical structure enough to evade the law.
The word you are looking for is pleasure. The only types of drugs that are 100% illegal are drugs that have no purpose besides making you feel pleasurable sensations. Horrible side effects (e.g. chemo) and high chance of addiction (opioids, amphetamines, etc) and more are all allowed as long as the purpose of the effect of the drug is not (solely) pleasure.
Alcohol, and increasingly in some parts of the world Cannabis, are the exceptions (I understand both of these substances have real and potential uses in healthcare, but they are perceived as recreational). These are legal or quasi-legal only because they are both already in wide use and getting society on board to enforce a ban is difficult to impossible (depending on the society, a few do) . Tabacco is also on the list, but seems to be falling off somewhat.
I've no dog in the fight, I think people should largely be able to put whatever they want in their bodies but I choose not to.
There is an argument about individual harm vs societal harm but good luck settling that one.
Is that fair? Maybe?
Is that reality? Yes.
This isn't like the invention of cars. We have had all manner of airplanes for over 100 years and know how they work. This is like the NYC helicopter taxi boom in the late 70s and 80s where a number of fiery and high profile crashes put an end to the industry.
It seems to me price is the larger barrier for most people when it comes to air travel.
Generally speaking, even if cars crash into buildings the building itself is not immediately unsafe; injured people and a broken storefront, but the building is not on fire or collapsing. Unless something has changed dramatically, planes crashing into buildings generally start fires, and generally cause concern about the structural integrity of said building in the immediate aftermath.
As a result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_New_York_City_plane_crash
> On October 11, 2006, a Cirrus SR20 aircraft crashed into the Belaire Apartments in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City, at about 2:42 p.m. EDT (18:42 UTC). The aircraft struck the north side of the building causing a fire in several apartments,[2][3] which was extinguished within two hours.[4]
> Both people aboard the aircraft were killed in the accident: New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle[3] and his certificated flight instructor.[5][6] Twenty-one people were injured, including eleven firefighters. An apartment resident, Ilana Benhuri, who lived in the building with her husband, was hospitalized for a month with severe burns incurred when the post-impact fire engulfed her apartment.[7][8]
> On October 13, 2006, two days after the crash, the FAA banned all fixed-winged aircraft from the East River corridor unless in contact with local air traffic control. The new rule, which took effect immediately, required all small aircraft (with the exception of helicopters and certain seaplanes) to seek the approval of and stay in contact with air traffic control while in the corridor. The FAA cited safety concerns, especially unpredictable winds from between buildings, as the reason for the change.
Most car crashes do not result in 2 dead, 21 injured, and property damage to several residences.
The German LBA is literally Prussian Bureaucracy stuck in the 19th century...
Changing ownership of a plane took me 6! weeks with the LBA.
I guess that there are potentially 10+% of all planes in Germany operated with an American N-registration (owned by a trust) because the maintenance overhead and paperwork headache is so much lower.
Imagine registering your German car with a German license plate in the US and setting up a German entity so you could pull that off - how big would the difference in pain have to be?
Society will learn to tolerate 4-6 deaths at a time, but not on the 737 scale.
Lots of things in dense areas also are not necessarily on an easy route near a highway, so if that's the limitation you run into Concorde's old problem of "where can you actually fly this thing?"
1. not very wide in the first place. Any air vehicle could cross the width of your standard rail line or highway or river in seconds.
2. Surrounded by intensive land uses, because the transportation corridor itself provides valuable access. So vehicles don't have to go very far off the right of way to crash into something valuable where lots of people are.
Therein lies the problem with public transportation in the US. What do you do after you get to Tahoe, Santa Cruz, or wherever? Most of these places are devoid of functional public transportation, and rental car companies have long lines and routinely screw people over and overbook.
And will the FAA allow you with your tent stakes, hiking poles, bear spray, and camping stove with fuel on the Lilium Jet? (What else are you supposed to do in Tahoe?)
The air taxi is not on top of your house.
You need to actually go from your house to the Lilium jet starting point (at least 30 minutes or more in these complex urban setups) and you need to be in advance for the take-off, eventual security checks and security briefing (like any plane).
After air turbulences, then you are at the Lake Tahoe stuck in the middle of nowhere.
You can take your Instagram picture and wait for the next plane to go back.
Was that really worth saving 1 hour in your life ?
The alternative is to gather with friends on the morning, go get your friends with your car on the way, have a lunch picnic, have a tour around in the nature, discover unexpected places. Come home for dinner.
No stress, no schedule, quality time with friends.
That is a world of difference from Europe, China, or Japan, when you're usually thrown into a food court when you get off the train, and buses leaving every 10 minutes to everywhere you could possibly want to go. Planes replicate that drop-off experience in the US, and Lilium will need to as well in order for it to be a comfortable experience.
That goes for even for suburban trips. How do you get from wherever it drops you off in Palo Alto to say, Facebook or Google's offices? Or the thousand other companies that don't have company shuttles?
(eg in Japan, JR East makes 30-40% of its profits from the shops: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2010/12/30/business/jr-eas...)
Or in the case of Lake Tahoe the area ski resort, hotel or casino might provide shuttle service.
Shuttle service is not adequate. Most people do more than just visit a hotel or ski resort. I think the "easy" US-side solution to this problem would be for there to exist a better, more competent car rental service that doesn't require lining up or saying "no" 10 times to humans trying to offer you add-ons, is available 24 hours, is guaranteed, and is located within a 10 minute walk of wherever the Lilian drops you off.
Kind of like ZipCar, but ZipCar has zero cars in Tahoe, 2 cars for the entirety of Fresno (wtf), and cost twice as much as Enterprise for a daily rental despite the fact that they don't have to hire as many humans, which is backwards. ZipCar should be costing half as much as a place with brick-and-mortar and human agents.
If it's $100/flight I might use it once per month to get to Santa Cruz or Lake Tahoe.
If it's $20/flight I might consider LIVING in one of those places and commuting to work.
Edit: Oops, didn't see that they did. Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet, at a cost of around $250 at launch
Ok, so this isn't going to cause me to move.
> If we imagine for a moment that you work in an office in Palo Alto, you could now choose to live in Hayward (5 min flight, $25), downtown San Francisco (10 min flight, $50), or even San Rafael (15 min flight, $70).
> Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet, at a cost of around $250 at launch and less in the near future. It might not be something you’d do every weekend, but saving you three hours each way might well make it worthwhile for an occasional trip.
But for a ski weekend in Tahoe? Seems legit, assuming these aircraft have a great safety record.
Are they really that expensive?
I was paying 40$ on Lyft one-way to office earlier this year, which was a huge part of my transportation costs (economically speaking, I should've driven, but this allowed me to take the bullet back in the evening, which beat driving by a lot).
50$ for SF -> PA isn't that much more expensive than Lyft in 2019.
"Or maybe you want to escape to Lake Tahoe for a long weekend? That would be less than an hour on a Lilium Jet" ... ah, mountain flying with batteries, what could possibly go wrong.
Also, I find the lack of a vertical stabilizer this plane to be an odd choice. It seems like they have a ballistic chute for backup when the power fails, but it might be hard to deploy that when you cannot do any spin recovery.
>Also, I find the lack of a vertical stabilizer this plane to be an odd choice.
Not to mention any form of traditional aerodynamic control surface: "With 36 single-stage electric motors providing near-instantaneous thrust in almost any direction, control surfaces, such as rudders, ailerons or a tail, aren't required."
They've really doubled down on their VTOL shindig. Seems like a pretty big gamble making an aircraft that's entirely dependent on its propulsion system for basic aerodynamic stability and control (I'm also curious if the wings would make noticeably less lift in a glide). "Intrinsically simple design," huh?
Where I would really worry, of course, is the software driving all of that. It's very likely it will need some sophisticated control systems and may not even be inherently stable aerodynamically.
However engine failure can also occur on fuel-powered aircraft. And at least this thing has a whole lot of engines so it could afford the failure of a few. The batteries could be subdivided in sections.
This. Why would a battery powered aircraft be more susceptible to failure than another engine type?
Running out of fuel is, unfortunately, not as uncommon as it should be. Most aircraft glide quite well (10:1 glide ratio). I really cannot tell with this plane, but the lack of control surfaces make it a meteor.
Not just no... fuck no. I absolutely do not want what is an already awesome place to be fucked up even more by someone installing an airport (vertical or not) in the middle of the valley floor.
That said, it is so light that maybe it would be in range of consumer cost.
It shouldn't need that; you can already forgo all that for a private jet/helicopter flight today. You're not going to take down a skyscraper and a few thousand people with one of these; it's more like crashing a car.
You spend hours and hours in a car you buy. Most small AC have a TTAF of 300 hours or less. And they are YEARS old. Literally nothing is wrong with a carb engine. The planes get fairly good efficiency compared. People also seem to think that planes are being bought at sold in the volumes of cars. Most AC are fairly older. This is why innovations like avionics are up while airframe and engines are low.
I get it that it feels like there's less innovation but I would gather to say there's more. Especially when you get out of the turboprop market. It's essentially the motorcycle industry versus the cars in the road.
The Lilium jets also have a lot of small engines, allowing for multiple failures in flight.
A lot of commenters are also missing the fact that Lilium plans to use pilots initially, until regulations allow for autonomous operations. (it's not mentioned in the article)
I'm sure there will be plenty of problems, but it will be interesting to see if the idea is viable.
I think one of the biggest deal-breakers will actually be noise. Those things are loud.
It took UCSF 5 years to get their helipad. They had to spend tens of thousands of dollars on noise studies.... for exclusively emergency flights
In my career I've worked in both mechanical and software engineering and IMO the mechanical engineering involved here is daunting. Caveat: when I was in that industry 3D printing was just around the corner and you could print a part per day and the machine cost $80k, so probably creating and testing prototypes is far more pleasant now.
This looks like a truly fun project to work on that's full of frustration, waiting, scrapped parts, broken CAD models, regulatory bs, good regulations that save lives, tons of changes in direction, mercurial investors, endless naysayers, and all done while considering that chances of success are small. Honestly it looks fun as hell.
As someone who's been on and off involved in moving-people-technology, it's two-fold: it's "in the physical world" so you have all of the attendant problems (objections from people around the proposed construction, overlapping government bodies, cost, and that "the real world" isn't "sexy" for investment).
And second, if you make something that's very efficient but looks too much like public transport, there's a whole market of people, at least in North America, who simply won't ride it. Where I live, I had several coworkers who lived next to a bus route or train line that went directly to our offices and they'd still pay for a daily Uber.
The tricky part is the well designed and well run part and as you alluded to they run into a lot of real world issues during construction.
They also really need to be state run at break-even or even subsidized since the benefit is the general increase in economic productivity across the whole region rather than an opportunity to make a lot of money.
So politically they don't really fly in the US.
You can get an R44 with better range and payload for a couple hundred thousand. This will be an electronic nightmare requiring extensive certification and maintenance efforts. Cessna can't even sell ridiculously old designs for reasonable prices due to certification overhead.
https://www.aneclecticmind.com/2010/12/28/the-real-cost-of-h...
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/05/10492-tesla-model-s-mai...
https://www.tesloop.com/blog/2018/7/16/tesloops-tesla-model-...
edit: I thought looking at entire lifespan of the Tesla might be unfair since that includes a much longer period when it's significantly higher mileage than my car, but taking only an equivalent post-warranty period is even worse, it's about $0.24/km in maintenance over that time frame.
https://www.truedelta.com/Tesla-Model-S/repair-frequencies-1...
It’s a bit like “soon to be plane owners” that don’t quite pay attention when they are told the spark plug for their Cessna is 50USD, they need 8 for 4 cylinders and replace them rather frequently ;-)
Changes when they realize that those companies chartering out planes for less than 200 USD/h probably don’t make loads of cash but just keep track of actual expenses, have a high utilization and capable maintenance staff...
That's supposed to be the promise of electric aircraft: almost all serviceable parts go out the window, just as with electric cars. Construction and maintenance costs are reduced to a fraction of what they are for mechanical systems. And because these are VTOL, ground expenses are likewise reduced.
Batteries are still rather expensive, though, and energy density sucks. The advantages may not be able to compensate, at least not sufficiently to hit a price point that appeals to a wider, non-millionaire market.
I don’t want to sound like an aviation cynic, but for pilots (even in the non-commercial sector) spending 50 USD for a spark plug or 500 USD for a battery is “normal”.
Tiny bit of innovation and disruption = very very expensive in aviation.
Of that $1200/hr, $150/hr is fuel, $50/hr is engine maintenance, and maybe $100/hr airframe maintenance. These scale linearly with time. For fixed costs, a new helicopter is ~$3 million, so figure $300k per year in depreciation, taxes, insurance, and finance costs. Add another $150k/year for pilot salary and training. If you find lots of customers and keep the helicopter busy, say 1000 hours a year, there's $450 an hour for fixed costs.
The real key to reducing costs is increasing utilization, this keeps the fixed costs reasonable. Batteries and motor will likely improve fuel+engine cost, but also hurt utilization because charging takes more time than refueling. A large network improves utilization. But building a network, with various types of demand (leisure on weekends, business commute during weekdays, cargo during off-peak periods?), is the real challenge.
Uber, Lyft, Musk's Boring Company, and all their variants... there are tons of people working on improving commutes.
But IMO there isn't a technical problem to solve. It's social and political. We shouldn't be asking about improving commuting, but reducing its necessity and distance.
Not that it would be easy, I'm just surprised something so ambitious doesn't also include automation.
At first glance I would have thought automating a small plane would be easier than automating a car - for one thing there are fewer things to crash into.
FAA has lot of restrictions to allow a planes to fly with pilot in it. Imagine convincing them that without pilot.
Does that kind of regulation inhibit progress in some domains, sure - is the cost of the loss of that progress worth it against the likely outcome of de-regulating it absolutely.
Safety regulations are written in blood and when organisations like the FCC, FDA etc fall down on the job people die.
I want my cyberpunk aircar as much as the next geek but not at the price of having them fall out the sky because some programmer made an error at the end of a 70hr work week to make a deadline for shipping.
4 people per aircraft reduce the number of lives at risk from any particular issue. That doesn't mean the FAA can be 100x as cavalier as they are with an A380, but it does mean the worst possible likely outcome is not as bad.
Short flights - easily predictable weather patterns.
Elimination of pilot error - obviously replaced with computer error, but still.
And as I said elsewhere, the ability to test to destruction.
And you can much more easily demonstrate the limits of an automated aircraft. Simulated bird-strikes, thunderstorms, power-outages, emergency landing in fields, blinding by laser-pointers, stray bullets or whatever scenario the FAA throws at you can be done without the risk to the (non-existent) human pilots, just the cost to VCs.
Whether that argument would work on them is a different matter, but I find it quite convincing.
Autoland has achieved FAA certification. It’s now available on select G3000® flight deck-equipped aircraft. And it’s coming to more soon.
Driver/Pilot less is not approved anywhere in US
If anyone at lilium is reading. Please contact our firm. Would love to contribute to this moonshot and allocate some of ouwr UI/UX firm’s resources to contribute and help simplify the software side of things. (See bio)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Tables_of_energ...
Hilly terrain makes it hard to make straight roads. Quite a lot of big cities don't have direct road connections.
In a relatively flat USA, you don't have a lot of similar spaces.
I remember seeing a row of houses built along a grassy strip that operated as a runway. Like their combined backyards were literally the airstrip.
Switzerland has 8.5m people on 41k km^2, while Alaska has 0.7m people on 1500k km^2.
Considering the prospects for decreasing availability of fossil fuel, and questions of climate impact, it seems to me that this is not sustainable on a mass scale, at all. I would guess this initiative will either become an alternative for the very-rich to using helicopters, or not get off the ground.
(... ok, that pun was a little underhanded, I admit.)
Self driving is something that may be solved and can become practical for popular use with current and near-term foreseeable technology. Everyday mass use VTOL is not. Sorry, the Jetsons lied to you.
The modifications probably required huge trade-offs in cost/performance and might still not be quiet enough for daily use in urban/residential areas.
Lilium boasts: "As well as a customized electric motor, it contains innovative liner technology which means the aircraft will be inaudible from the ground when flying above 400m and will only be as loud as a passing truck while taking off." https://lilium.com/the-jet
Many companies are working on this problem currently. I would say consumer accessible, piloted electric VTOL is closer than fully self driving vehicles.
They're working on nullifying gravity? Cool.
No kidding. They promised Rosie and we got Roomba.
> The Lilium Jet engine has been fully developed in our in-house sound lab where we have used proprietary acoustic modelling software, simulated on high-performance computing clusters, to optimize its design. As well as a customized electric motor, it contains innovative liner technology which means the aircraft will be inaudible from the ground when flying above 400m and will only be as loud as a passing truck while taking off. On the ground, the aircraft will move to and from parking bays using separate electric motors, allowing it to be as quiet as a typical electric car.
The usage of future tense (will be) makes me somewhat skeptical
I don't really want to experience what Kobe Bryant experienced though.
This strikes as quite an odd thing to do and my bet is that either one of the big guys (Airbus, Boeing, etc) will launch a competing aircraft and kill them, or they will be acquired. Even if they continue as an aircraft manufacturer I am doubtful about the mix with being a taxi company.
It also seems an awful lot of money to develop one small plane.
I live in South East London and it can easily take over an hour to get to Heathrow, which really eats into a weekend if travelling for work. I'd love to be able to go to a more local vertigo, check my luggage and just have to clear international security at the main airport.
Joby Aviation, Kitty Hawk Aero, Wisk, Terrafugia, Opener, Lillium, probably more.
Its already been mentioned here how regulated this industry is, and they aren't going to be able to pull the Uber model of asking for forgiveness instead of permission.
Guessing some consolidation is coming up.
The ultralight Gyrocopter can fly with unleaded 95 Octane and with strong wind of more than 40 knots (see circumnavigation of of Iceland) and its wonderful technology [1],[2].
This is a strange example to include in here – that's a pretty expensive (one-way?) commute.
With sufficiently-enlightened regulation (for which I wouldn't hold my breath), these could run, for example, from the rooftops of Google buildings in Mountain View to the rooftops of their Embarcadero-SF building. Or downtown Palo Alto to a downtown SF pier. Etc.
If physically possible, safe, & available for the prices they're claiming, this would have a big market. And, competitors, like the Larry Page-backed 'Kitty Hawk': https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/06/04/larry-pa...
The case for VTOL in particular becomes a lot less convincing when you're primarily looking at the kind of regional travel Lilium mentions here--why not just electrify an existing FW aircraft and operate out of existing infrastructure (https://www.harbourair.com/harbour-air-and-magnix-announce-s...)? Small airports are pretty ubiquitous, and going through an FBO largely eliminates long waits for security and boarding (not to mention alleviating some of the last-mile transportation issues).
I can't stress enough that nothing is simple about VTOL--even if this aircraft lacks complex hydraulic, fuel, and oil systems, any failure in the (electromechanical?) control actuation systems will likely prevent transition to/from hovering flight. It looks like the control surfaces may be designed to have multiple, independent segments (hopefully with redundant actuators) to mitigate these kinds of failures (aside: it's fascinating to see a GA aircraft designed to be dependent on TVC for basic stability and control), but a loss of even one of these segments might not allow a safe power margin for a vertical landing near max gross weight, and it doesn't look like the wheels were designed at all with roll-on landings in mind.
All that said, I wish the engineers working on this thing the best. The current demonstrator is a great-looking machine, and it'd be awesome to see this kind of thing succeed.
What's the hardest thing for them? Regulation? Else?
There are helipads all over the city and none of them can be used with the specific exception of flight-for-life helicopters landing in Mission Bay.
Yet the market always has solutions up its sleeve! Short range flight!
Or maybe transit from one airport to another within a city.
And then be economically justifiable.
Most people taking the plane everyday hate it.
It's a so-so idea.
This aircraft proposal will not be able to negate the effect. Think small boat on a lake - even with azimuth thrusters, still bobs up and down back and forth with the waves. Larger boats don't experience the effect as much, due to mass - same with large airliners.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rCWnI8r_EQ
It would take a LOT to keep you precisely in the same 6-axis position - and there's no way a system could react quick enough because it would first need to detect the movement, accounting for normal wind-speed, etc. Any solution here would be heavy, induce drag, eat through batteries/fuel, and introduce a lot of new failure modes that don't exist with traditional aircraft and could be unrecoverable in the event of a failure (stuck appendage or azimuth thruster-like propeller in wrong direction, destroying lift).
Things are quite different just 1,000 feet off the ground, and even worse 5,000 ft or 10,000 feet. The wind speed can get extreme, averaging 100mph at 10,000 ft[1].
For people accustomed to flying in these small aircraft, you get used to it. But for people already nervous about flying, or not familiar with small aircraft, the sudden movement can be very disorienting and scary.
People often underestimate the aviation industry. It's incredibly safe, and very stable. A lot of innovations were paid for with blood during the early days of aviation, which led to it's maturity. Innovation, at this point in aviation's history, is very challenging and requires very deep understandings - even mature organizations like Boeing struggle with this from time-to-time, and they have a ton of experience in developing extremely reliable aircraft for not just transport, but combat and more.
Unfortunately, far too often, things like this startup's solution are dreamt up by people that don't understand the problem domain and don't have a lot of experience in the field. They look from afar, and confidently state they know a solution no one else has thought of or tried, and the entire industry is simply doing things so obviously wrong. Fortunately, they often find out why things are the way they are within a reasonable time frame and don't blow all of their investor's money or get people killed. Time will tell here.
This is only half true. Legally, Amtrak has priority, and railroads are required to cede right-of-way to passenger trains. In practice, the railroads don't cede priority nearly as much as they should. This is an ongoing fight. Amtrak has a whole site about it here: https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance
The interesting thing about American railroads is that unlike all other forms of transportation in the US, railroads pay property tax. Therefore, to reduce tax bills and improve their books for mergers, many railroads tore up their improvements.
Now consider viewpoints like this Economist article: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2010/07/22/high-speed-rai... "America’s system of rail freight is the world’s best. High-speed passenger trains could ruin it" and you get why passenger rail is discouraged.
1: As in a single track for both directions, meaning there are limited places where a north-bound and south-bound train can pass each other.
Additionally Amtrak doesn't have right-of-way on those rails, so delays due to freight trains are super common on that section of track.
This means the tracks are not graded for high-speed relative lightweight passenger rolling stock. Also, the passenger trains need to fit into the schedules dictated by the freight traffic.
Which is really a shame. The track from SF through Lake Tahoe runs just past Sugar Bowl and into Truckee, and is about 180 miles. A ski train would be really easy.
I was also surprised at train travel in Norway on my recent visit; I hoped to book a ticket from Oslo to Bergen but it was basically impossible. Only a couple of trains a day, all sold out. I drove instead, which was also a shock, since I spent virtually my entire drive at or below 80kph. The train would have been roughly the same speed -- so, not as bad as your Tahoe example, but not great by continental European standards either :)
Also the commuter/long distance tracks are all owned by the freight liners, so passanger trains have to yield for them. There are also hour+ stops at some stations.
Furthermore, an amtrak will only hit a top speed of 79mph, and only a few times during the journey, while a car can stay at 75mph for most the journey.
You've never driven to Tahoe on a holiday weekend, I see
Train routes don't exist. Outside commuter routes long distance rail basically don't exist in the US, outside a few connectors between major cities.
This is IT: https://trn.trains.com/~/media/files/pdf/map-of-the-month/tm...
Keep in mind the scale here... see that small-looking gap between Flagstaff and Tucson? That's 400km... you could fit most European countries in there.
But still, here with a really fine train grid, the train is much less efficient due to the many stops and many changes you have to make to get somewhere :( It can take up to 2-3 times as much time to get somewhere by train than by car.
The costs of acquiring land for rail projects are also higher, because of very strong property rights.
Basically there are a lot of reasons, some of them are not mere political disagreements.
But I really hope some day the EU will standardise this too, and get more tracks built. I'd love to take a train between Barcelona and Amsterdam. But right now it is 2 hours by plane or 14 by train with 2 changes. And the price has a similar ratio in favour of the plane, which makes the train simply nonviable.
Kind of a lot of problems on top of each other from construction costs to land ownership to right of way to city layouts that make trains rough to work in the US. (which stinks, I LOVE trains. had a nice train commute in Chicago, but those are rare in the US)
Allegedly.
> But there is an enormous amount of reflexive opposition from NIMBYs, Conservatives, and Libertarians.
The greatest obstacles to California's high speed rail project are vote-buying politicians and the voters who do not pay attention or understand what they are doing.
Conservatives and libertarians may have a lot to say about it, I gather that's because it has been such a colossal money pit boondoggle affair; but you may have noticed that conservatives and libertarians don't exactly hold a political majority in California, so I doubt that their objections are a major obstacle to its completion.
The plans they actually began to build with won't even produce much of a service, the target speeds are disappointing and there are so many detours from any meaningful corridor; and we haven't even seen the reality of it yet, which will probably be even more disappointing than the low expectations.
> ...Republicans have killed the projects to replace them _twice_ simply because they are rail projects and passenger rail is 'bad'
Well, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that was probably not why they excluded that project from the budget.
> Allegedly.
Not allegedly, it's actually being built right now. 119 miles of it in fact. It's not the whole system, but it's the IOS that they promised that they would build.
> the target speeds are disappointing and there are so many detours from any meaningful corridor...
The target speed is 220 mph between Gilroy and Burbank which is in line with the current highest speed HSR systems in the world. The route actually makes a fair amount of sense given that the cities in the central valley are not that small, especially since the stations in those cities are designed for trains to express through them. Rather, it makes more sense compared to the I-5 corridor which would have required branch lines to be built, not to mention the other fundamental issues that proposal had.