Are eVTOLs the “mother of all aerospace bubbles”? | Hacker News Reader

Are eVTOLs the “mother of all aerospace bubbles”?

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17 pointsthearn412 comments

The real money maker here will be the heliports if they're privately owned. Because you own the bottleneck, you run the auction to determine who gets to take off and land. If the cost of the vehicles drops, more of the money that end users are willing to pay ends up in your pocket. Vehicle manufactures will be in a cut-throat race to reduce costs but ticket prices would never drop because $1 saved in vehicle cost would just be $1 in the pocket of the heliport operator.

That is unless the government can actually step up and set this up correctly: with a license auction. You bid on the right to operate the heliport every two years. License auctions work extremely well as demonstrated by radio frequency spectrum auctions and hot dog vendor location auctions.

  > work extremely well as demonstrated by radio frequency spectrum

You are definitely not a USA resident! Thanks to those auctions we have an oligopoly of carriers who charge per GB like it is a gallon on Nobel Prize winners' sperm, while delivering service that compares unfavourably with a 56K modem on a bad line.

$3.33/GB. Fairly middle of the road. No sperm required.

https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/

They can be bungled, but they demonstrably can be made work, a bit like aircraft...

(Though there is oddly little critique about the tight control of airwaves, and having only microscopic slices for free individual use like wifi and p2p links)

You'll find somepeople in Govt will get bought and then the goal posts will be moved. Its std democratic practice.

In most of the US opening a heliport is incredibly simple; take your parking lot or other land and paint some markings on the ground. Shoot off a letter to the FAA. Done.

That said, rotor-craft are not even required to land at a heliport; they can land anywhere that is safe unless doing so is trespassing or forbidden by a law.

A license auction would only restrict access and stifle competition.

Was thinking about how I would use these eVTOLs, and realized that everywhere I would want to go, there was a Costco relatively close. Costco to Costco throughout a metro might make sense. If the eVTOL could go 100 mph, it would cut my travel time in half, at 200mph, Dana Point to LAX in 20min during rush hour would be revolutionary.

It's definitely a bubble, not sure of the "mother of all aerospace bubbles". Small launch might be the "mother of all aerospace bubbles". Another aerospace sector that is not credible is the current batch of commercial supersonic companies.

eVTOLs are just helicopters powered by electricity. They are still susceptible to all the same things that cause accidents with any other type of aircraft. Imagine a loud drone but scale it up 100x and then picture thousands of these flying over city streets. It's insane and impractical.

Does your opinion change if they weren't really audible except for at the ports? There's actually been a lot of research into making them quieter. It could end up quieter than street traffic, except for at the ports where they're taking off and landing.

Hard disagree. Helicopters are much less safe and not have redundant batteries or propellers. Joby recently provided acoustic results with NASA that show magnitudes less dB, you can look it up and hear for yourself. Having witnessed hundreds of Joby flights I can say from experience that it doesn’t seem any louder than a distant vacuum cleaner, I could hold conversations nearby without strain. Living by a highway with motorcycles was worse. I learned a lot about aviation lately and having also been in a helicopter and I sometimes think back that it was a stupid risk to take without having my affairs in order, never mind the aviation fuel, what disgusting fumes!

yes

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