Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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We've sold over 467 seagliders with a $7.9B order backlog spanning global aviation and ferry customers.

I would think this is pre-launch sales. It's probably hedged with "subject to certification" risk, but it's still pretty solid, and if it came with sufficient deposit fundings to bootstrap the assembly line, all to the good. But, my understanding is that both boats and aircraft (and this is a join over the two) incur pretty high compliance costs for insurance and regulatory certification. Its a long slow process, it is not as simple as "do it in the USA and it's done" by any stretch.

(their FAQ says: "REGENT’s seagliders are regulated as maritime vessels, not airplanes.")

Many transport manufacturing startups come unstuck with actually making product. Real-world consequences to advanced materials, the massive cost-suck of making the goods repeatably buildable without a huge tail-cost of remediation, digging out from development cost, it's a nightmare.

I'd love this to work, Having flown as a passenger on small aircraft island hoppers in New Caledonia to get to Isle des Pins and like places in other countries, There definitely is a niche for "get from A to B, with sea between" which this suits.

It's also possible there's a set of marine/air conditions this is better than aircraft for: it stays below 100m would make it much easier to "fly" in some conditions. Equally, if its really only coastal/lake waters and not when its more than 2m swell (arbitrary figure for example purposes) then its launch conditions could be highly variable.

Could this to Vancouver to the Island? The Island to The Olympic peninsula? Seattle into the sound? Could it make the Catalinas from California coastline? Or Baja Cali to the "mainland" of Mexico?

Seaglider entry to service is slated for mid-decade so you're spot on, all these are pre-launch sales.

We're one of the few companies in the space with firm, nonrefundable deposits and contractually obligated pre-delivery payments (that scale with milestones as you mentioned) on the full first year of these orders.

We take off at the periphery of harbors and fly over the open water in-between. Seagliders have 5ft wave tolerance on takeoff and landing, and 5 ft waves in a harbor is basically a hurricane. Flyover wave tolerance is more like 8-13ft, since any higher than that is likely the result of conditions where commercial aircraft arent flying anyways. We definitely designed the vehicle with wave tolerance in mind.

And all your routes are spot on! It's super exciting. 180 mile range with existing battery tech - and as batteries advance through the decade, we forecast that range growing to 500 miles. 40% of the world's population lives in coastal communities... this is a massive market!

> Seagliders have 5ft wave tolerance on takeoff and landing

But do sea glider passengers have a 5ft wave tolerance? That sounds like a wild ride.

But this is exciting... as someone who remembers taking the Hoverspeed SR.N4 from Dover to Calais, I know fast coastal transport innovation can be a game changer.

I also did the SRN 4 as a passenger and subsequently "cabbed" the flight deck when it wound up in a museum. Grandad of an offspring's schoolchum took us round the collection out of hours.

He used to fly them (and emphatically said they were flown and he was captain and captain-pilot. There was a turf war between the civil aviation authority and the maritime regulator over who had primacy, depending on if the skirt was lifting or it was floating on the sea) and wound up both volunteering at the museum, and driving end of life (normal) boats up onto cox's harbour mudflats for manual wrecking: a heartbreaking job for a seafaring man.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/gx6a7UPQX4CLfz7Q9 (scans from photos)

From memory, the hover was fast but very very bumpy. Sometimes they suggested timid people use a boat. It was aircraft style seating, not like a ship at all. And very noisy.

Taking the Hoverspeed is the only time I remember being sea-sick, and it wasn't even a particularly rough day.

If you look at the distance between the hydrofoil and the hull midsection, it looks to be about 5ft or so. I would suspect that up to 5ft of wave has very little affect on the ride smoothness.

This is the answer.

Depends on the period. 5 ft waves in the middle of the pacific ocean is different than an east wind off Milwaukee.

Wave heights in the 8-13ft range are common along the US west coast (Northeast Pacific Ocean) and that doesn't shut down commercial aviation at coastal airports.

https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=46042

But still there are many more protected waters where a WIG vehicle could be viable.

The specific tolerance within that 8-13ft range is driven by wave period. Long period waves lets us operate more towards that 13ft end because you can contour the waves.

Do you have plans for a larger next gen model? It would have even more clearance if it had a corresponding increase in wingspan, right?

I believe that max demonstrated wave height will have more to do with the height of the hydrofoil than the wingspan / ground effect distance.

Having said that, I'm pretty sure the much larger Monarch (their further future 50-100pax model) will probably have longer vertical supports on the foils.

Sure, that makes sense. The large swells in that region tend to be long period. Contouring the swells up and down is going to make some passengers motion sick, but probably not as bad as a regular ferry in the same conditions.

Ah I see the confusion - that overflight wave tolerance is defined by an emergency landing condition. In the extremely low probability chance that the seaglider needs to perform an emergency landing, the passengers need to be safe. That defines the 8-13ft window.

In no cases are we contouring waves in flight. We fly straight and level. Typical flight altitudes are 10-30ft above the wave peaks. The waves are well below us.

Having recently spent time watching many whales breaching well into your airspace, I wonder if you have any thoughts on avoiding right-of-way disputes with charismatic megafauna?

It seems intuitively like there would be potential for inland use along navigable waterways as well as coastal use-

Inland waterways often have very low speed limits (e.g. 5 knots). Typically to reduce the impact/erosion of the wash/wake of a vessel.

I could see potential in large inland such as the Great Lakes though.

Sold any for the San Francisco Bay Area yet? Half Moon Bay would definitely benefit from hosting some of these.

Where would you go from HMB on one of these? It's not like they would let it rip at 180mph under the Golden Gate Bridge.

Santa Cruz maybe? Monterey?

HMB has some tricky shoals/rocks near its entrance.

> Could it make the Catalinas from California coastline?

Yes -- but there is probably no business case where that makes sense. Presumably your launch points are San Pedro/Long Beach, Dana Point, or maybe Redondo. In all three cases, if you want to get to Avalon within 15 minutes, you're paying for the helicopter service. If you're okay with taking an hour, you're paying for the existing boat shuttles, which take a whole lot more than 12 people at a pop and you're able to experience the environment -- it is not uncommon to run into pods of dolphins, whales, etc, on the trip over to Avalon.

In theory, you could open up a shuttle service to Avalon from San Diego, or Santa Barbara. Maybe there's enough demand there, but again the 12 person limit makes it probably a money loser. You'd have to charge so much that people would just make the 90-minute drive to Long Beach and shuttle over from there.

Depends on the price. All electric means we operate for about half the cost of an aircraft (and about 1/10th of a helicopter). Combine that with similar speeds to aircraft, convenience of not having to use an airport, and zero emissions - and the use case becomes very attractive.

We have some prospective customers eyeing Catalina, but that's actually on the short end of our range at ~25 miles vs our 180 mile max.

Shuttle service to SD and SB is very much in the cards - and we can do it with existing battery tech!

If that became popular enough, would you eventually need something akin to air traffic control for those waterways? I'm not sure existing water navigation rules and protocols would be a good match for these gliders, because they might not be operated by experienced sailors, because their altitude is also a potential collision-avoidance factor, but most of all because of their speed.

I imagine other waterway users being frightened, but also having enough demand for coastal transportation in Southern California, specifically because of the speed, that you end up potentially operating dozens of these at a time in the same region.

(It looks like you answered part of that in a different part of the comments, but I'm still curious about the big picture.)

This is not much faster than existing high speed cats and way more visible to us sailors. It won't be a problem: they'll dodge us, and use 16 if they have to.

west LA (maybe SF?) to SB and central coast would make sense if this thing can deal with choppy waters.

I think you'd get people wanting to do that for the novelty, maybe once. Your departure "port" would wind up being Marina del Rey. Even if you lived down the street in Santa Monica, the time to get to the "port", board, etc, it's just a diminishing return of time investment. If you're okay with getting to Santa Barbara in 2 hours, you just make the drive. If you want to go faster, you're taking a helicopter. If you want the relaxing scenery for a longer duration without driving, you take the Surfliner.

The holy grail for this thing is SF-to-Marina del Rey, at a decent passenger load, without stopping. If it can pull that off, some enterprising company will buy 50 of these things and run a shuttle that competes with the San Jose to LAX commuter routes.

>If you want to go faster, you're taking a helicopter. If you want the relaxing scenery for a longer duration without driving, you take the Surfliner.

The cost difference between a helicopter and a shuttle is huge though. I can easily see this being closer to the shuttle cost, while also closer to the helicopter speed. Seems like a sensible middle ground to me.

It really should work for inner sound service. The waves in the sound aren’t that bad, it’s definitely not like going from Koh Phi Phi to Phuket (I get a stomach ache just thinking about plying the Andaman Sea).

I wonder if this is a better way to get from Seattle to Victoria, for example. We could really use an aerodrome for our water front.

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