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Comment by mark242 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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