Joby started working on its eVTOL more than 14 years ago, collaborating with NASA in the early years on electric flight projects and eventually receiving financial backing from companies including JetBlue Airways and Toyota — the latter being a key helper in planning the eVTOL’s factory layout and overall manufacturing process.
Wow, 14 years ago! And they still having nothing flying on a regular basis?
Today’s “latest news” in EVTOLS is they are getting rid of the E and the V.
So this one company, out of maybe 50 - 100(?) has orders for 8 times the annual revenue of Cessna, a real airplane manufacturer. M’kay…
“In all the buzz around eVTOLs, there’s still plenty of appetite for more conventional electric planes – especially, it seems, if they make ludicrous amounts of lift, and can take off and land at incredibly slow speeds, using absolutely tiny runways.”
Electra’s hybrid-electric STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft is one such plane. When it hits the market, it’ll carry nine passengers, and a pilot, plus luggage, up to 500 miles (805 km) at a cruise speed around 200 mph (322 km/h).
Suddenly, we’re back to STOL (short takeoffs and landings) and a fairly conventional airplane with flaps, using distributed propulsion featuring electric motors driving propellers, but powered by an onboard hydrocarbon-powered combustion engine.
Seems like the next step might be dispensing with the electric generators and motors, and just using two engines mounted on the wings, and some flaps, for a STOL aircraft.
Now even with cars, I’ve always been an advocate of electric drivetrains, but it seems like the EVTOL world is slowly seeing the realities that aviation has always known about, and that the market for “getting people to the airport faster” will be limited.
Quote: “Currently sitting in fifth place on the [AAM Reality Index] ("Reality Index" cuts through the eVTOL air taxi hype – and with a bullet – Archer is making steady progress in its mission to get fully certified electric air taxis into commercial service by 2025.”
OK, so if EVTOLs are really “a thing”, then why do they need a “reality index”? When have you EVER heard of a “reality index”? Maybe we need one for AWE! (Oh no, NOT A REALITY INDEX!!!)
Of course, one might point out, what is the actual reality factor of the reality index? “Reality Factor” - is that a new term? Perhaps a good one for AWE! I’m pretty sure a lot of AWE people view reality as a mere annoyance…
Lots of gliders have engines or even electric motors to get up to an altitude where they can then find thermals to get up higher. As a means of transportation, however, you need planes with a smaller wingspan to fit better in airports, and they need to fly independently of wind conditions, in order to stick to a schedule. Additionally, small aircraft are preferentially flown in the morning before thermic activity makes the air “bumpy”, and a main reason jetliners fly at 30,000 feet is to be above weather, so as to be more safe, more comfortable, and keep a schedule. Wherever this writing by “Brad Ideas” comes from, it’s a typical amateur impression, not worth anyone’s attention as far as I can see.
Keyword: “could” - as far as their understanding goes.
Anyone who knows anything about aviation knows the main concern is weight.
Next is efficiency.
The reason Joby still has nothing flying regularly after the 15 years of trying since they gave up on AWE efforts and “pivoted” to EVTOL is, like so many “press-release breakthroughs”, the fundamentals are ignored. Same with all the rest of the “flying taxi” attempts.
Since batteries weigh so much more for the amount of energy they contain, they are not a good candidate for aviation.
Can they be made to fly? Barely. With very short range and questionable safety. Have they shown any use, anywhere in the world, after all these years? Not that I’ve noticed.
As with AWE, “regulations” and lack of “certification” provide an ongoing excuse for having nothing in regular operation. Yet there are so many locations in the world where certification would not even be an issue, and use cases could potentially exist, that it seems these companies would rather bask in their endless excuses than ever get anything actually working, anywhere, anytime.
Do they make a compelling story? Apparently, since everyone is familiar with propeller-flown drones so it “seems” that they could just be enlarged and carry people. But the fundamentals are just not there. Even if the entire battery could be composed of reactive “fuel” molecules, it would still be missing the “free” extra power from the oxygen in air, which provides half the fuel for existing aviation. Just because a battery works well for a phone or a laptop doesn’t make it a truly viable candidate for aviation.
Funny how the rendering shows it in a dry, sandy desert. Don’t get anywhere near it unless you want your face and eyes sandblasted. Reminds me of a time I was at band practice in Huntington Beach when a police helicopter landed on the beach, sandblasting a few hundred people. It started the now-famous “Huntington Beach Riots” where people flipped cop cars over and lit them on fire! We watched in on TV from our “band-house”, a few miles inland! Wow, now those were fun times!
Anyway, the article starts out announcing this “memo of understanding for that start-up to purchase up to 116 Archer Midnight aircraft, which could be worth up to $580 million to the supplier.”
But of course, like AWE, it’s all “in the future”, since, the elephant in the room is that Archer can’t actually produce the aircraft, and the aircraft really does not exist, except in a very limited “wannabe” “hoped-for” semi-functional form. There is no reliable final product - still - after years of empty talk and hype.
And of course it is not a real purchase agreement, but a “memo of understanding” which is typical for fake “press-release-breakthroughs”.
Laughably, the naive promoters even cite:“This new agreement grows our prospective order book to nearly $6 billion” - Yeah, sure: “Prospective” order book. The all-talk format. It never ends…
But take heart - Two articles below it appears an actual deal, for Poland to buy many aircraft from a real aircraft manufacturer.
OK, this is the first big-money, big name EVTOL effort to go the way of Makani.
As I’ve been saying, this EVTOL fad, like the AWE fad (same people in the case of Joby), is mostly just a lot of “hot air”.
We had a hang-glider killed near here many years ago, by downwash from a helicopter filming a commercial. We had a riot in Huntington Beach when a police heck-of-a-lopter (hell-of-a-copter?) landed on the beach, sandblasting the crowd, at which point the crowd started flipping over police cars and setting them on fire.
How many dollars have gone to “air-taxis” to “get people to the airport faster” so far? More than the $billion+ that has gone into AWE attempts. Well, just as we were given a deadline of 2015 as the last date children in the DC area would ever experience seeing what snow looked like (they just had another blizzard a few days ago), we’ve all been told the EVTOL “air taxis” would be bringing people to the airports by 2025. So here we are: 2025. Have fun on your EVTOL ride to the airport!
UK hospitals have almost all had to find a new place to land their emergency helicopters in the last year. It’s after an incident where a woman was blown over and died.
