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Comment by epups | Hacker News Reader

Embraer makes some very interesting mid-sized commercial planes. This piece is light on details and the price range seems crazy optimistic - can you believe you would only pay 2x or 3x what an Uber charges to fly over a city? Nevertheless, seems like a promising concept.

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Sao Paulo is the city with the highest number of helicopters. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/20/brazil

They probably know where the costs are. Maintenance and fuel I guess... And electric VTOLs are far cheaper on these two.

That remains to be proven. In theory, maintenance might eventually be cheaper. But there are still a lot of mechanical parts which will require periodic manual inspection every certain number of cycles or operating hours. Electric motors are simpler than combustion engines but eVTOL designs tend to have a lot of them for control and reliability. Crew expenses will be similar (autonomous operation with passengers is still many years away). Electricity may be cheaper than fuel, but recharging times will be critical for profitable operation.

Battery swap probably makes more sense here.

I was at a talk given by the president of Embraer-X (that's an Embraer subsidiary that looks into these riskier ventures), and he got into the details of how they validated their business plan of using these vehicles for urban transportation.

They offered helicopter rides to one of Rio's major airports and charged R$100 per passenger (according to him, that's an accurate estimate of future prices once they make their eVTOL) at a loss just to see if there was demand. They got booked the entire year in advance.

That is mostly because Brazilian traffic and public transport is atrocious given the city size.

Rio de Janiero is a bit larger than Moscow, Paris and Guangzhou yet each have at least 5x the metro infrastructure.

São Paulo traffic is so bad that even Uber had an Helicopter option here for a brief period.

https://flyflapper.com/stories/uber-air/

Brazilian guy here: Embraer is in deep trouble ever since before the pandemic, when their merge deal with Boeing went south after the Max debacle. I would really like to believe otherwise, but I can only see this as vaporware intended to pump the stock price of Embraer. Flying taxi drones as an economic viable alternative, on a 3rd world country nonetheless, is a hard nut to crack. If even their helicopter taxi venture proof of concept was not being profitable, using a proven technology. How in hell will they make this drone experiment be profitable then?

As far as I can tell, they experienced a dip during the COVID period but they have a healthy financial outlook right now: https://airinsight.com/embraer-improves-operating-profit-aft...

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