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Comment by JSR_FDED | Hacker News Reader

I think I’m not fully getting the significance of this.

It seems such a niche thing to celebrate - electric power + VTOL but flying as a traditional plane + flying in new airspace…

Please can someone explain?

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I think this is in competition to the EV air taxis. The vertical take off and landing is for dense urban areas. Basically the Uber of the sky. Like Uber Helicopter but electric.

Not sure it’s the future or anything like that. I just noticed they’re in the news more in the last few months. There’s some in CA, Texas, Las Vegas.

https://simpleflying.com/evtol-air-taxis/

Off airport flight implies a lot of tech maturity, including command/control radio, rudimentary flight planning, flight termination, etc

This was piloted, not autonomous. But yes, the maturity is the big thing here - the CAA was happy for Vertical to fly in open airspace meaning that they were satisfied with the reliability of the craft.

ah missed that

In the US it just means an experimental type designation from the FAA.

It didn't even VTOL. What's the point?

Strange video, i guess we are free to assume that the vtol function is so inefficient your flight time is down 75% or something if you use it

Developer to PM: yeah so uh, we’ll add the vtol thing after launch in a hotfix, it’s sitting on Dave’s local branch and he’s working on just one bug

PM: Sounds good to me, I don’t shit about the industry I work in

Dev: perfect perfect, okay send out the press release

PM: Should we mention the VTOL thing ….

Dev: Don’t say shit, I’ll see you next week

It's the first time ever in European aviation history that an electric VTOL aircraft has taken off non-vertically.

In other news, we're also planning to boot the first smartphone in European telecommunications history that doesn't have a radio.

> It's the first time ever in European aviation history that an electric VTOL aircraft has taken off non-vertically.

For the first time in history a new revolutionary fusion power plant was demonstrated to run on coal.

Have to keep those coal mining jobs, even after the switch to fusion.

Miner's Unions are a thing to fear.

It’s advertising so that if someone puts a nice comment here they can link to it from their marketing page, and maybe some HN scraper will magnify its reach, or some user will post on their social media.

Here’s the real headline: Electric aircraft with experimental type designation makes piloted flight using wings for lift.

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