Why is it of interest to AWE? Because it’s mostly autonomous (does not require a pilot) and has a lot more redundancy compared to for instance a helicopter. This makes it (presumably) easier to achieve sufficient mean-time-between-failure for mass civilian adoption.
I believe these are some qualities that AWE, in particular the rigid wing variants, also need to be looking for.
If the Lilium succeeds, it would set a precedence that these things are possible, thus indirectly advancing rigid wing AWE to a great extent.
Based on historic timelines for aerospace revolutions to unfold, do not be surprised when it takes several decades for Lilium’s business model to succeed, by more solid players with better technology.
There is a rush of competitors in the autonomous personal e-VTOL aviation sector. Three with strong AWE affiliations are Joeben Bevirt (Joby Aviation), Damon Vanderlind (Makani), and Dr. Mark Moore (Uber flight research). Bivert naively started taking preorders a few years ago, Damon walked away from a sinking Makani, while NASA veteran Moore warns the “flying taxi” going will be slow.
Given urban safety and noise problems, plus luxury-market costs, a reverse talent migration from vanity aviation to AWE R&D seems likely.
lilium (Lilly dear) (ilium and the odyssey?) appears to be one more overly-optimistic vaporware rendering to me.
If this is not apparent to you, maybe you need to live another 25 years or so. It will last as long as the attention-span of the promoters, in my opinion. Or as long as whatever money they can raise from renderings will last. Wouldn’t place too much faith in this concept. For me anyway, this one doesn’t pass (sniff sniff) “the smell test”.
3 points if you can place the Lilly Dear reference…
Remember about 5 years ago Moller’s “flying car” made a press-release vaporware comeback - once again it was “about a year away”. It was like when you forget your phone: you feel like you’re back in the 1970’s! I love it when I forget my phone. A feeling of freedom. Which I guess means it will soon be illegal…
By the way, “talk to your doctor, to see if Lilium might be right for you.”
Well you can go back to my post of 5 years ago, above, and see that someone with common sense was able to flag Lillium as a wasted effort from the very beginning. These people were “idiots” in the sense of aircraft design where light weight (not batteries!) is the main thing, in rotorcraft, where high swept rotor area is most efficient, and in transport, where range is required for most applications. Low range of distance limits them all to fighting over a supposed use-case of “getting a pilot and 4 passengers to the airport”.
Excerpt from the article: “All eVTOL concepts, even the most efficient ones, struggle with the limits of energy storage”.
Gee, ya think???
It’s one more case of otherwise-rational, well-meaning people succumbing to “the derangement syndrome”, where facts don’t matter, only slogans revolving around, of course, “climate change”.
Watch the rest of them also go bankrupt after they are done fooling themselves and their investors!
I think its not touching the real issue that even if they had made a battery after spending billions, they are still far from production ready. Real insight would have been; could we have spent less to get some results? Eg reduce range, redesign the consept or whatever. Spend another 1.5 billion and probably the result would be more or less the same.
I agree, Tallak:
I saw “Lilly Dear” (from “The Munsters” old TV show) as flawed from the beginning.
The rows of small, ducted fans seemed too numerous, without sufficient swept area to be efficient. Moving more air, at lower speed is more efficient than moving small amounts of air at high-speed. Today’s jetliners’ high-bypass engines have huge diameters compared to the original cigar-shaped engines, and they travel at slower speeds than the original jetliners, but are way more efficient. Helicopters usually have one large, pitch-controlled rotor, for a reason - efficiency - moving more air at lower speed than a small propeller blowing a small amount of air downward at high speed.
Of course, i was willing to be wrong, and wondered if it was just me missing the big picture or something, but that was my honest take.
The whole idea of electric aircraft powered by heavy, onboard batteries, starts out at a major disadvantage, as a start.
but we’re supposed to iignore all the science and engineering facts learned the hard way over the last century-plus, and pretend some artificial reality along the lines of “Believe us, NOT your lying eyes”.
I love exploring new ideas in engineering, but how much in resources can we put toward falling for multiple, redundant, slow-motion engineering trainwrecks that don’t even pencil out on paper, let alone if properly scrutinized?
