I am really excited to se electric aviation start to enter the market. A lot of people point out the battery density / jet-A difference and it is valid, but it isn't the whole story. Jet-A has a much lower conversion to useful work than a battery, an electric power train (minus the batteries) has a lot of opportunity to shed weight (no bleed-air, fuel plumbing, less need to safety systems). There are a lot more opportunities to explore interesting airframes because electric can be placed in unique and more efficient ways (hence the eVTOL in this story). The basic physics change a lot too. We will see how high altitude flight shakes out but there is a big potential to go higher so that more efficiency can be gained, again needing less energy. The big point here is you can't simply compare electric to gas turbine and only swap the fuel for batteries. It is a totally different set of design parameters and it has so many amazing opportunities to be better.
Comparing battery energy density to fuel energy density usually ignores the fact that combustion engines aren't that efficient. A great counterpoint is that if you apply the logic to a 60kwh EV, it should have the range of a 2 gallon petrol car. Which of course is not the case. Most medium sized petrol cars would have at least 8-10x that for a similar range to that 60kwh EV.
A more useful metric is $ per mile of range. Because if the vehicle can do the miles, that's all that matters. With the first generation of passenger drones their range isn't amazing. But their cost per mile is. And these Joby things have a useful enough range to do JFK to down town Manhattan.
I've been following the market a bit. There are a few interesting vehicles moving through certifications. Beta Aviation was touring all the airshows last summer with their ALIA CX300. It's a simplified ctol model of their vtol where they kept the pusher prop but removed the other props to speed up certification. So it's more like a conventional plane. It has a range of around 300 nautical miles depending on the battery configuration (modular). They flew it coast to coast in the US and all around Europe. It should get through certification by 2027 or so. Their vtol version has been flying for a while as well but will take longer to certify. It has less range because landing and taking off vertically just eats a chunk of battery. But once it is up in the air it flies pretty much the same as the ctol.
Of course the arrival of solid state batteries is going to shake things up. Everything that is close to being certified is flying without those. A potential doubling of energy densities is going to be a big deal. But certifying the batteries is going to take years.
> Because if the vehicle can do the miles, that's all that matters.
Unfortunately that's probably going to stay fossil for a while. What might matter is things like local ordinances prohibiting it on AQI grounds (especially things like leaded fuel in Cessnas!), as well as more dramatic questions like shortages.
(we're probably never going to get a carbon tax on jet fuel, too much coordination required)
Hydrogen has a volume problem, though. A 1st generation Toyota Mirai contains 5 kg of H2, equivalent to 197 kWh. That would take up 55 m3 at atmospheric pressure which is why the Mirai stores it at ~700 atmospheres. That's still a 78 liter tank. AFAICT 200 kWh of petrol takes up 25 liters, i.e. a third. On top of that the high-pressure tank in the Mirai weighs 87 kg.
Actually my first thought for something like this was places like Orkney that have a surplus of wind powered electricity (there is a connector to the mainland being built) and short flights between the islands - including the shortest scheduled commercial flight in the world:
> Joby also insisted that the high levels of redundancy built into its four-passenger eVTOL design obviate the need for a parachute. The company, which recently lost one of its two prototype aircraft during a flight test accident, said that the vehicle can safely operate after failures to the motors, batteries, or electric propulsion units and also has the option to land vertically or glide to the ground on its wing.
This so inefficient it’s painful to watch. It’s about 14 miles to go from jfk to manhattan. A train could do this in 20 minutes or so. A train could ship thousands of people in one go, supports millions of ordinary people in their daily lives, and doesn’t cause excessive noise pollution at street level (not to mention the climate, safety, and infrastructure benefits)
In London a new train line was built deep underground from Heathrow all the way through central London and out the other side. It stops all the way, travels further (19 miles) and still only takes 25 minutes, so don’t pretend it can’t be done.
Instead of supporting people we solve problems for the 0.001% who will give us a quick buck, while we pretend we’ll one day be rich enough to ride these things
Op's example was underground. Moses built above ground, thereby requiring the ruthlessness. Not sure the same ruthlessness would be needed with tunnels.
It would be expensive to build a new train to JFK. The unions and regulations in NYC make those projects very long and very expensive (look at the 2nd Ave subway line). There is an "AirTrain" to JFK but you have to take other trains to get to it first. There was supposed to be one to LGA but it got cancelled.
We used to have a really nice water shuttle to LGA but that also stopped many years ago. People didn't want to travel to the water shuttle and pay $20 to get to the airport in 15 minutes. I'm hard pressed to see how a cheap quadcopter ride is going to be anything other than a novelty unless the FAA allows the heliports to be built inland -- we've had a bad history with blades flying through the streets.
One thing that some cities have done where awkward infrastructure is required to get a train to the airport is to, essentially, borrow money to do it, and make the fares to the airport very high to compensate.
Notably, getting to Brussels airport, which takes about 15 minutes from Brussels Nord, costs about 15 euro. For a 15 minute train journey. Hands-down the most expensive train per minute (or per km) I've ever been on. But, at least in theory, it's paying for this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabolo_project
(That's by no means the only one; lots of airports are in awkward places so running rail to them is expensive, and it's common for it to be paid for by special, more expensive services. And people use them.)
I guarantee France have stronger unions and regulations, and still managed the GPE. 3 years late and with 20% cost overrun, sure, but to be fair, they had to deal with floods twice, which wasn't planned and broke equipment and reseted some tunnels.
I don't see how unions cause any of those problems. Corruption and incompetence comes through administration and management not the average worker wanting a decent pay and 2 weeks of vacation.
There’s already a train that does this. It’s the express A train, which gets you to the AirTran. And as someone who has taken the train from Manhattan to JFK on multiple occasions, it most certainly does not take 20 mins or so. It takes at least an hour and that’s not including the highly likely delays.
I think it would be inefficient to have a dedicated train take up the line just for JFK.
Stockholm with a bit over 1 million people has an express train from Arlanda airport to the center of the city, it goes at ~200km/h making the transit of ~40km in 20-25 minutes.
I don't understand why it would be inefficient for one of the busiest airports in the world to one of the largest cities in the world to have a similar setup.
Interestingly enough, I posted this as a follow on to a comment I made on yesterday's derailed Waymo-in-Portland discussion, where I wondered when will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S. I'm could see it happening within my lifetime.
> where I wondered when will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S.?
I had a similar thought a few days ago in respect of Waymos specifically: "Americans take about 34 million public-transit trips a day. Assuming 25 rides per day, that's about 1.4 million self-driving cars to rival public transport's impact. Waymo has "about 3,000 robotaxis deployed nationwide." Doubling fleet size annually–Waymos and non-Waymos, though currently they have no peers–would get us to parity in less than 10 years. (A more-realistic 35% growth rate puts us around 20 years.)"
I'm very much in agreement. All of the pitches for more passenger rail have a for-the-greater-good tint to them that glosses over the fact that point-to-point private vehicles are better in every other conceivable way, more so if they're autonomous. I'd be comfortable betting that any serious passenger rail projects breaking ground right now today are going to be legitimately antiquated by the time Waymo and/or Flying Waymo and their equivalents are commonplace and cheap. More desirable, more convenient, easier infrastructure build out, less disruptive maintenance, better capacity allocation. I hope I live to see the day I can summon a car to my house, hop inside, and it travels automatically to a designated VTOL zone, docks into a fixed-wing harness and takes me anywhere I'd like to go. I'd get fat as hell.
The infrastructure requirements to get a train into operation, let alone travel to a destination twenty minutes away, takes decades of development and billions.
I haven't done the math, but I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains, and that's before you consider that people developing and building a train line get to eat and put their kids through schools.
I can't believe seriously arguing for oversized quadcopters as a mass transport alternative.
This argument always comes up. "Why not public transit? It's so efficient, look at country X". Well, country X has people who respect public property and are orderly, so they can have nice things.
The US is filled with people who don't. And who do drugs. And who rob. So people retreat to places like a Joby aircraft or self driving Waymo, which don't have those issues.
Other countries with good systems also have such people. America’s crime rate is far lower than the 1990s; the impression that you live in a crime-infested world is likely increased media coverage.
I think the real reason the US has poor public transit is that its transport landscape has been shaped by years of planning and funding decisions that have put the car first, and cities rebuilt accordingly.
America’s enormity also makes nationwide PT more difficult (but not impossible).
Then add the meritocratic attitude that if you can’t afford a car it’s somehow your fault, and you end up with little political and societal interest in a good public transit system.
> It’s about 14 miles to go from jfk to manhattan. A train could do this in 20 minutes or so
I used to live on 30th & Madison. Blade was about 30 minutes door to door. LIRR was 50 to 55 minutes. Car 45 to 120 minutes. Helipads are cheaper to build and site than train stations; for most people, eVTOL will almost always be faster than the train. (I mostly take the train.)
> Instead of supporting people we solve problems for the 0.001% who will give us a quick buck
Blade cost $200 a trip. Assuming that's only affordable for someone making $50k a year or more, that covers the top 80% of Manhattan, 30% of New York City and America and about 5% of the world.
I'm not arguing we don't need better rail (and ferry) connectivity between our airports and urban cores. But you're always going to have a need for time-efficient travel options. And eVTOL has significant applications outside luxury transport. This complaint lands like someone complaining that the original Tesla Roadster was "inefficient and painful" as it was only affordable to the rich.
People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent?
This suggestion lands like someone suggesting that people making $25 an hour in the most expensive city in America are going to consider throwing away $190 to save 15 minutes. In other words: incredibly out of touch with reality.
As a side note: the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it was a complete flop of a car that didn’t even appeal to impractical rich people or anyone else. 2,450 sold for the entire production run. A failure for any purpose except publicity. The model S is the one that changed things, and it was never widely criticized as impractical or only for rich idiots.
> Helipads are cheaper to build and site than train stations
Is that still true once you control for capacity? A modern single-line station is handling, what, 150 people alighting every 2.5 minutes? How many helipads would you need to match that?
> $200 a trip. Assuming that's only affordable for someone making $50k a year or more, that covers the top 80% of Manhattan
Someone making $50k isn't going to spend $200/trip regularly. They might spend it occasionally for an urgent trip, but how often is that going to be to/from an airport? For someone making $50k any flights they're taking will have been planned and booked months in advance, they can't afford to fly spontaneously/last-minute. (And if 80% of the population did want to use it, would it even be possible to build enough enough helipads? There isn't room for anything like 80% of the population to park in Manhattan, and these things look to be bigger than cars and I don't see anyone putting them in a multi-storey garage).
People making $50K a year are not dropping $200 to save even 2 hours of time, not to mention 15 minutes. Even if they paid zero taxes $200 is an entire working persons day at $50K a year.
> The five-bladed propellers have a low tip speed, with twisted blades designed to reduce the “whop, whop, whop” of a helicopter to the volume of leaves rustling in the wind
I think they must mean when it’s high overhead. Based on the video, it’s still pretty loud up close.
Propeller noise is largely a function of rotation speed, blade size, and radius.
Electrical motors have high torque and are basically silent. Torque limitations constrain the blade size on a helicopter. The whop whop comes from the relatively long blades. And because of the large diameter that happens at a relatively low RPM. So, the frequency of the noise is low as well. Hence the whop whop sound.
Higher torque electrical motors enable higher RPM with smaller diameter and more blades. So, you get a higher frequency noise. Higher frequencies carry less far than lower frequencies. So, a lot of drones are measurably more quiet than helicopters when they fly overhead because they have lots of smaller propellers spinning faster. There's plenty of footage of electrical planes and drones taking off and landing at airports, air shows, etc. Some youtubers also use decibel meters. This has long stopped being a matter opinion / debate, you can just go out and measure it.
The short version of it is that these things are quieter, as the physics suggests.
Seems awfully tiny for any real total capacity. Should scale it up to size of say large railway car size so dozens if not hundreds of people at one time. This would also cut down cost and allow wider range of population that is no limited from use to use it.
What you are describing seems outside the scope of this particular aircraft model.These are meant to land on existing helipads in NYC. From the article, the business model is to cut down 1-2 hour commutes to and from the JFK airport to seven-minute flights. Never mind the helipad space, just boarding hundreds of passengers and their luggage would cut severely into that time saving.
But it is fundamental issue. Unless you have extremely large number of helipads. The throughput is limited to capacity of landing, deboarding, boarding and lift off. Is the 7 minutes from lift off to landing or just travel time in air? How long does boarding and deboarding take, especially with luggage? Can this system reach more than low dozens passenger per hour by pad?
Or perhaps take that large railway car, put a few together, and run then on or through the ground direct from the airport to a few downtown locations every couple of minutes. The efficiency per person would be ridiculously high (20,000 an hour), and I suspect the individual end-to-end speed would be faster than by air
15 minutes for JFK to West 34th Street is just 14 miles. That doesn't include any boarding/off boarding process, which are far faster in a train than anything, including in a taxi.
That's about the distance from Heathrow to Paddington which also takes 15 minutes.
Awesome! Joby needs trained pilots so that may be a bottleneck to scaling. I am guessing they would have to create autonomous air taxis like EHang to scale.
Ehang had a scaled-up multi-rotor drone that could carry one person. They're a drone company. Worked, but max flight time was something like 17 minutes. Their new model has both lift props and wings, plus a pusher prop for horizontal thrust. Range about 200km.
Joby is more like an Osprey. It takes off and lands hanging from its props, then tilts the props horizontally to operate in airplane mode.
This potentially offers more range with less power consumption. They've tried running on hydrogen, and claimed 524 miles of range.
There's also Archer Aviation (https://www.archer.com/) which has a roughly similar vehicle.
Test flights since 2021. Was supposed to be in service in 2025. Didn't happen.
They supposedly have an air taxi contract for the 2028 Olympics in LA.
Owned, or at least heavily financed, by Stellantis.
There seems to be convergence on something that transitions to airplane mode, as opposed to the previous round of giant quadrotor-type drones.
It's now clear that this can be done, but not clear that there's a business in it.
> [...] but it does generate a significant amount of noise when it takes off and lands. The company didn’t share information on that, but it was certainly enough to make one wince – even if it nowhere near approaches the sensory assault of a regular helicopter.
The venture money behind some of the larger and more prominent electric VTOL air taxi/helicopter-plane things seems to be betting that by the time they get the hardware design, software, user interface and general safety systems to 100%, battery technology will also have become a lot better.
I'm referring to Joby, Archer, Wisk and similar.
The range is not really good right now with batteries at 255Wh/kg and much worse energy density than Jet-A fed into turbine(s). None of the evtol companies are big enough or vertically integrated enough to come up with some miracle 500Wh/kg battery on their own, so they're relying on market pressure generally to cause their battery subsystem vendors to make some significant breakthroughs.
More directly related to the PR, I saw the video of the JFK to Manhattan test flights and they're being done with only the pilot on board.
The venture money is betting that the e-VTOL technology can be weaponized. Small, disposable drones have been getting all the attention lately due to the war between Russia and Ukraine. But longer term there are a lot of potential missions for larger VTOL combat aircraft — both drones and crewed.
I would guess that a military version would be a hybrid: electric motors as in all the e-VTOL prototypes, enough battery power to comfortably take off, land and maneuver in combat conditions, and a small hydrocarbon-fueled engine to recharge the battery while cruising.
I don't see how these style of drone like aircraft could possibly be better for personnel or gear transport over a collective rotor helicopter. A bigger rotor is more efficient, can lift more, and can autorotate to a safe landing after taking the inevitable battle damage and losing power.
I mean I could be wrong, im certainly not an expert in future military design and strategy, but I just don't see any advantages once you start scaling these to the size needed to move humans. The only potential I can see is multi-rotor designs being easier to learn to pilot over a collective rotor design, but I don't see any modern military considering a few weeks off a pilot's training being worth the trade off in range, capacity, and safety.
The 'final' decision was recently made to go ahead with the massive project for this, which is eventually intended to replace the UH60/Blackhawk type platform. Traditional big money defense contractor stuff.
I'm skeptical that air taxis could ever meaningfully reduce traffic congestion to / from JFK. Compared to cars, these would seem to require a significantly larger landing pad and passenger unloading space and need much more safety margin in-between drop offs. Maybe this is competitive vs the private helicopter market?
JFK and city is a relatively niche and regionally unique market compared to how short/medium range aircraft are used in general. For instance the Joby or Archer product right now wouldn't have the range to fly from a helipad on the Seattle waterfront to somewhere in the San Juan Islands. Or for a flight from Vancouver harbour to Victoria.
I'm not sure I agree that they're making that bet (there's lots of market at current ranges IMHO), but even if they were it would be a great bet to make. We're talking about jumping to 375 [1] or even 400 Wh/kg in production cars this year [2] (with prototypes long since shown off). And there's every reason to believe that there's a lot more headroom in this space to improve, and that we will improve rapidly since we're making so many more batteries now.
Isn’t the comparison against helicopters for regional and urban transit where EVTOLs hold an edge because of the drastic energy reduction that fixed wing has over helicopters?
I mean sure long term the goal may be to wait for battery density to increase to keep moving upmarket and eat longer and longer flights from traditional aviation, but I don’t think better batteries are a requirement for the initial batch of vehicles.
Joby actually claims their business is viable without significant advances in battery energy density. We'll see. I think this will be closer to an Eclipse Aviation business case than SpaceX.
I am really excited to se electric aviation start to enter the market. A lot of people point out the battery density / jet-A difference and it is valid, but it isn't the whole story. Jet-A has a much lower conversion to useful work than a battery, an electric power train (minus the batteries) has a lot of opportunity to shed weight (no bleed-air, fuel plumbing, less need to safety systems). There are a lot more opportunities to explore interesting airframes because electric can be placed in unique and more efficient ways (hence the eVTOL in this story). The basic physics change a lot too. We will see how high altitude flight shakes out but there is a big potential to go higher so that more efficiency can be gained, again needing less energy. The big point here is you can't simply compare electric to gas turbine and only swap the fuel for batteries. It is a totally different set of design parameters and it has so many amazing opportunities to be better.
Comparing battery energy density to fuel energy density usually ignores the fact that combustion engines aren't that efficient. A great counterpoint is that if you apply the logic to a 60kwh EV, it should have the range of a 2 gallon petrol car. Which of course is not the case. Most medium sized petrol cars would have at least 8-10x that for a similar range to that 60kwh EV.
A more useful metric is $ per mile of range. Because if the vehicle can do the miles, that's all that matters. With the first generation of passenger drones their range isn't amazing. But their cost per mile is. And these Joby things have a useful enough range to do JFK to down town Manhattan.
I've been following the market a bit. There are a few interesting vehicles moving through certifications. Beta Aviation was touring all the airshows last summer with their ALIA CX300. It's a simplified ctol model of their vtol where they kept the pusher prop but removed the other props to speed up certification. So it's more like a conventional plane. It has a range of around 300 nautical miles depending on the battery configuration (modular). They flew it coast to coast in the US and all around Europe. It should get through certification by 2027 or so. Their vtol version has been flying for a while as well but will take longer to certify. It has less range because landing and taking off vertically just eats a chunk of battery. But once it is up in the air it flies pretty much the same as the ctol.
Of course the arrival of solid state batteries is going to shake things up. Everything that is close to being certified is flying without those. A potential doubling of energy densities is going to be a big deal. But certifying the batteries is going to take years.
> Because if the vehicle can do the miles, that's all that matters.
Unfortunately that's probably going to stay fossil for a while. What might matter is things like local ordinances prohibiting it on AQI grounds (especially things like leaded fuel in Cessnas!), as well as more dramatic questions like shortages.
(we're probably never going to get a carbon tax on jet fuel, too much coordination required)
>Comparing battery energy density to fuel energy density usually ignores the fact that combustion engines aren't that efficient.
>>Jet-A has a much lower conversion to useful work than a battery
There's a hydrogen fuel cell version too that has been demonstrated.
This is one potential pathway towards cleaner aviation.
Hydrogen has a volume problem, though. A 1st generation Toyota Mirai contains 5 kg of H2, equivalent to 197 kWh. That would take up 55 m3 at atmospheric pressure which is why the Mirai stores it at ~700 atmospheres. That's still a 78 liter tank. AFAICT 200 kWh of petrol takes up 25 liters, i.e. a third. On top of that the high-pressure tank in the Mirai weighs 87 kg.
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Clearly no Scottish people with oversite on naming! Loads of wee jobbies flying around!
Actually my first thought for something like this was places like Orkney that have a surplus of wind powered electricity (there is a connector to the mainland being built) and short flights between the islands - including the shortest scheduled commercial flight in the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westray_to_Papa_Westray_flight
So maybe one day people will take a joby to Papa Westray ;-)
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Jobby This is what the parent meant.
Can it glide in case of a prop/motor failure? Or something resembling a helicopter's autorotate? Or is the passenger just SOOL if that happens?
I believe the entire aircraft has a parachute that can deploy in the event of engine failure.
Edit: I'm wrong. https://www.ainonline.com/news-article/2022-04-08/developers...
> Joby also insisted that the high levels of redundancy built into its four-passenger eVTOL design obviate the need for a parachute. The company, which recently lost one of its two prototype aircraft during a flight test accident, said that the vehicle can safely operate after failures to the motors, batteries, or electric propulsion units and also has the option to land vertically or glide to the ground on its wing.
"The air taxi can continue flying with up to two motors out" says the article.
Probably safer than a V-22 Osprey.
It actually flying: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DXrvm_LAAR8/
we cant view without a login anymore? i dont have a instal login but used tobe able to watch single videos shared directly with just a login nag
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/D_k8Tx7GCqo
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This so inefficient it’s painful to watch. It’s about 14 miles to go from jfk to manhattan. A train could do this in 20 minutes or so. A train could ship thousands of people in one go, supports millions of ordinary people in their daily lives, and doesn’t cause excessive noise pollution at street level (not to mention the climate, safety, and infrastructure benefits)
In London a new train line was built deep underground from Heathrow all the way through central London and out the other side. It stops all the way, travels further (19 miles) and still only takes 25 minutes, so don’t pretend it can’t be done.
Instead of supporting people we solve problems for the 0.001% who will give us a quick buck, while we pretend we’ll one day be rich enough to ride these things
If you’re interested how some of these things got build in New York in the past I recommend the books of Robert Caro about Robert Moses.
Building new massive infrastructure requires a level of ruthlessness that is not socially acceptable these days.
Op's example was underground. Moses built above ground, thereby requiring the ruthlessness. Not sure the same ruthlessness would be needed with tunnels.
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It would be expensive to build a new train to JFK. The unions and regulations in NYC make those projects very long and very expensive (look at the 2nd Ave subway line). There is an "AirTrain" to JFK but you have to take other trains to get to it first. There was supposed to be one to LGA but it got cancelled. We used to have a really nice water shuttle to LGA but that also stopped many years ago. People didn't want to travel to the water shuttle and pay $20 to get to the airport in 15 minutes. I'm hard pressed to see how a cheap quadcopter ride is going to be anything other than a novelty unless the FAA allows the heliports to be built inland -- we've had a bad history with blades flying through the streets.
Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.
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One thing that some cities have done where awkward infrastructure is required to get a train to the airport is to, essentially, borrow money to do it, and make the fares to the airport very high to compensate.
Notably, getting to Brussels airport, which takes about 15 minutes from Brussels Nord, costs about 15 euro. For a 15 minute train journey. Hands-down the most expensive train per minute (or per km) I've ever been on. But, at least in theory, it's paying for this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabolo_project
(That's by no means the only one; lots of airports are in awkward places so running rail to them is expensive, and it's common for it to be paid for by special, more expensive services. And people use them.)
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I guarantee France have stronger unions and regulations, and still managed the GPE. 3 years late and with 20% cost overrun, sure, but to be fair, they had to deal with floods twice, which wasn't planned and broke equipment and reseted some tunnels.
I don't see how unions cause any of those problems. Corruption and incompetence comes through administration and management not the average worker wanting a decent pay and 2 weeks of vacation.
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There's a free bus to LaGuardia from the subway.
> A train could do this in 20 minutes or so.
There’s already a train that does this. It’s the express A train, which gets you to the AirTran. And as someone who has taken the train from Manhattan to JFK on multiple occasions, it most certainly does not take 20 mins or so. It takes at least an hour and that’s not including the highly likely delays.
I think it would be inefficient to have a dedicated train take up the line just for JFK.
Stockholm with a bit over 1 million people has an express train from Arlanda airport to the center of the city, it goes at ~200km/h making the transit of ~40km in 20-25 minutes.
I don't understand why it would be inefficient for one of the busiest airports in the world to one of the largest cities in the world to have a similar setup.
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I always counted 50 minutes from midtown to JFK, taking the E train to Jamaica station and the air train.
But I think GP's point is that it could be done in 20 minutes. The A train is a subway, it's nowhere near the speed of the Heathrow Express.
Interestingly enough, I posted this as a follow on to a comment I made on yesterday's derailed Waymo-in-Portland discussion, where I wondered when will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S. I'm could see it happening within my lifetime.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943360
> where I wondered when will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S.?
I had a similar thought a few days ago in respect of Waymos specifically: "Americans take about 34 million public-transit trips a day. Assuming 25 rides per day, that's about 1.4 million self-driving cars to rival public transport's impact. Waymo has "about 3,000 robotaxis deployed nationwide." Doubling fleet size annually–Waymos and non-Waymos, though currently they have no peers–would get us to parity in less than 10 years. (A more-realistic 35% growth rate puts us around 20 years.)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47915937
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I'm very much in agreement. All of the pitches for more passenger rail have a for-the-greater-good tint to them that glosses over the fact that point-to-point private vehicles are better in every other conceivable way, more so if they're autonomous. I'd be comfortable betting that any serious passenger rail projects breaking ground right now today are going to be legitimately antiquated by the time Waymo and/or Flying Waymo and their equivalents are commonplace and cheap. More desirable, more convenient, easier infrastructure build out, less disruptive maintenance, better capacity allocation. I hope I live to see the day I can summon a car to my house, hop inside, and it travels automatically to a designated VTOL zone, docks into a fixed-wing harness and takes me anywhere I'd like to go. I'd get fat as hell.
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The infrastructure requirements to get a train into operation, let alone travel to a destination twenty minutes away, takes decades of development and billions.
This needs a 20x20ft approximately flat surface.
I haven't done the math, but I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains, and that's before you consider that people developing and building a train line get to eat and put their kids through schools.
I can't believe seriously arguing for oversized quadcopters as a mass transport alternative.
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You state that like decades and billions is a long time.
You have 10000 people who need to do this trip every hour, how will you manage that with this? It can’t scale.
In the end normal people will be stuck without proper transport, while a tiny majority will fly around in comfort.
They are not mutually exclusive you know?
I don’t get it. Did they use the MTA budget or something? If the train is better then just build the train. Certainly these guys aren’t stopping you.
This argument always comes up. "Why not public transit? It's so efficient, look at country X". Well, country X has people who respect public property and are orderly, so they can have nice things.
The US is filled with people who don't. And who do drugs. And who rob. So people retreat to places like a Joby aircraft or self driving Waymo, which don't have those issues.
Other countries with good systems also have such people. America’s crime rate is far lower than the 1990s; the impression that you live in a crime-infested world is likely increased media coverage.
I think the real reason the US has poor public transit is that its transport landscape has been shaped by years of planning and funding decisions that have put the car first, and cities rebuilt accordingly. America’s enormity also makes nationwide PT more difficult (but not impossible).
Then add the meritocratic attitude that if you can’t afford a car it’s somehow your fault, and you end up with little political and societal interest in a good public transit system.
*https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates
Yeah but I don’t want to travel on a train packed with randoms, some of whom are unpleasant or dangerous.
Have you taken public transit? Either it is good or it is awful.
The only country whose public transit was actually good is Japan, and why is deeper than just having a good transit system.
The privacy convenience and comfort are why I prefer Waymo over a bus/rail or even uber.
I will pay for an air taxi if it’s a good service.
> It’s about 14 miles to go from jfk to manhattan. A train could do this in 20 minutes or so
I used to live on 30th & Madison. Blade was about 30 minutes door to door. LIRR was 50 to 55 minutes. Car 45 to 120 minutes. Helipads are cheaper to build and site than train stations; for most people, eVTOL will almost always be faster than the train. (I mostly take the train.)
> Instead of supporting people we solve problems for the 0.001% who will give us a quick buck
Blade cost $200 a trip. Assuming that's only affordable for someone making $50k a year or more, that covers the top 80% of Manhattan, 30% of New York City and America and about 5% of the world.
I'm not arguing we don't need better rail (and ferry) connectivity between our airports and urban cores. But you're always going to have a need for time-efficient travel options. And eVTOL has significant applications outside luxury transport. This complaint lands like someone complaining that the original Tesla Roadster was "inefficient and painful" as it was only affordable to the rich.
People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent?
This suggestion lands like someone suggesting that people making $25 an hour in the most expensive city in America are going to consider throwing away $190 to save 15 minutes. In other words: incredibly out of touch with reality.
As a side note: the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it was a complete flop of a car that didn’t even appeal to impractical rich people or anyone else. 2,450 sold for the entire production run. A failure for any purpose except publicity. The model S is the one that changed things, and it was never widely criticized as impractical or only for rich idiots.
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> Helipads are cheaper to build and site than train stations
Is that still true once you control for capacity? A modern single-line station is handling, what, 150 people alighting every 2.5 minutes? How many helipads would you need to match that?
> $200 a trip. Assuming that's only affordable for someone making $50k a year or more, that covers the top 80% of Manhattan
Someone making $50k isn't going to spend $200/trip regularly. They might spend it occasionally for an urgent trip, but how often is that going to be to/from an airport? For someone making $50k any flights they're taking will have been planned and booked months in advance, they can't afford to fly spontaneously/last-minute. (And if 80% of the population did want to use it, would it even be possible to build enough enough helipads? There isn't room for anything like 80% of the population to park in Manhattan, and these things look to be bigger than cars and I don't see anyone putting them in a multi-storey garage).
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People making $50K a year are not dropping $200 to save even 2 hours of time, not to mention 15 minutes. Even if they paid zero taxes $200 is an entire working persons day at $50K a year.
> The five-bladed propellers have a low tip speed, with twisted blades designed to reduce the “whop, whop, whop” of a helicopter to the volume of leaves rustling in the wind
I think they must mean when it’s high overhead. Based on the video, it’s still pretty loud up close.
Propeller noise is largely a function of rotation speed, blade size, and radius.
Electrical motors have high torque and are basically silent. Torque limitations constrain the blade size on a helicopter. The whop whop comes from the relatively long blades. And because of the large diameter that happens at a relatively low RPM. So, the frequency of the noise is low as well. Hence the whop whop sound.
Higher torque electrical motors enable higher RPM with smaller diameter and more blades. So, you get a higher frequency noise. Higher frequencies carry less far than lower frequencies. So, a lot of drones are measurably more quiet than helicopters when they fly overhead because they have lots of smaller propellers spinning faster. There's plenty of footage of electrical planes and drones taking off and landing at airports, air shows, etc. Some youtubers also use decibel meters. This has long stopped being a matter opinion / debate, you can just go out and measure it.
The short version of it is that these things are quieter, as the physics suggests.
Is it any louder than driving on the highway with the windows down? I imagine when air hits ears at a high speed, it's going to be loud.
Aren't air traffic controllers already overworked and understaffed? How does adding hundreds of tiny helicopters fit in that picture?
Also civilian air control needs to be handed over to Skynet
Seems awfully tiny for any real total capacity. Should scale it up to size of say large railway car size so dozens if not hundreds of people at one time. This would also cut down cost and allow wider range of population that is no limited from use to use it.
What you are describing seems outside the scope of this particular aircraft model.These are meant to land on existing helipads in NYC. From the article, the business model is to cut down 1-2 hour commutes to and from the JFK airport to seven-minute flights. Never mind the helipad space, just boarding hundreds of passengers and their luggage would cut severely into that time saving.
But it is fundamental issue. Unless you have extremely large number of helipads. The throughput is limited to capacity of landing, deboarding, boarding and lift off. Is the 7 minutes from lift off to landing or just travel time in air? How long does boarding and deboarding take, especially with luggage? Can this system reach more than low dozens passenger per hour by pad?
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I say the same about ground taxis - buses are much more efficient
Or perhaps take that large railway car, put a few together, and run then on or through the ground direct from the airport to a few downtown locations every couple of minutes. The efficiency per person would be ridiculously high (20,000 an hour), and I suspect the individual end-to-end speed would be faster than by air
15 minutes for JFK to West 34th Street is just 14 miles. That doesn't include any boarding/off boarding process, which are far faster in a train than anything, including in a taxi.
That's about the distance from Heathrow to Paddington which also takes 15 minutes.
I wonder what it's like flying in one. People are scared of planes, but flying in helicopters is way scarier.
> People are scared of planes, but flying in helicopters is way scarier
Genuine question: do eVTOLs flip over in the water like helicopters do? Or is the battery place low down.
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Awesome! Joby needs trained pilots so that may be a bottleneck to scaling. I am guessing they would have to create autonomous air taxis like EHang to scale.
Ehang had a scaled-up multi-rotor drone that could carry one person. They're a drone company. Worked, but max flight time was something like 17 minutes. Their new model has both lift props and wings, plus a pusher prop for horizontal thrust. Range about 200km.
Joby is more like an Osprey. It takes off and lands hanging from its props, then tilts the props horizontally to operate in airplane mode. This potentially offers more range with less power consumption. They've tried running on hydrogen, and claimed 524 miles of range.
There's also Archer Aviation (https://www.archer.com/) which has a roughly similar vehicle. Test flights since 2021. Was supposed to be in service in 2025. Didn't happen. They supposedly have an air taxi contract for the 2028 Olympics in LA. Owned, or at least heavily financed, by Stellantis.
There seems to be convergence on something that transitions to airplane mode, as opposed to the previous round of giant quadrotor-type drones.
It's now clear that this can be done, but not clear that there's a business in it.
Will this be any less ridiculously loud than the conventional helicopters that fly over Brooklyn all day ferrying people to JFK?
Sound comparison here: https://youtu.be/IX7rdJm5v6s?t=104
According to the guardian’s report[0], yes. 45dB compared to 100 dB for a heli.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/28/electric-air...
> [...] but it does generate a significant amount of noise when it takes off and lands. The company didn’t share information on that, but it was certainly enough to make one wince – even if it nowhere near approaches the sensory assault of a regular helicopter.
Could be worse, I guess.
Notably that's 45dB when it's 500 meters away.
Apparently nobody with Scottish heritage was involved in selecting that name.
The venture money behind some of the larger and more prominent electric VTOL air taxi/helicopter-plane things seems to be betting that by the time they get the hardware design, software, user interface and general safety systems to 100%, battery technology will also have become a lot better.
I'm referring to Joby, Archer, Wisk and similar.
The range is not really good right now with batteries at 255Wh/kg and much worse energy density than Jet-A fed into turbine(s). None of the evtol companies are big enough or vertically integrated enough to come up with some miracle 500Wh/kg battery on their own, so they're relying on market pressure generally to cause their battery subsystem vendors to make some significant breakthroughs.
More directly related to the PR, I saw the video of the JFK to Manhattan test flights and they're being done with only the pilot on board.
The venture money is betting that the e-VTOL technology can be weaponized. Small, disposable drones have been getting all the attention lately due to the war between Russia and Ukraine. But longer term there are a lot of potential missions for larger VTOL combat aircraft — both drones and crewed.
I would guess that a military version would be a hybrid: electric motors as in all the e-VTOL prototypes, enough battery power to comfortably take off, land and maneuver in combat conditions, and a small hydrocarbon-fueled engine to recharge the battery while cruising.
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I don't see how these style of drone like aircraft could possibly be better for personnel or gear transport over a collective rotor helicopter. A bigger rotor is more efficient, can lift more, and can autorotate to a safe landing after taking the inevitable battle damage and losing power.
I mean I could be wrong, im certainly not an expert in future military design and strategy, but I just don't see any advantages once you start scaling these to the size needed to move humans. The only potential I can see is multi-rotor designs being easier to learn to pilot over a collective rotor design, but I don't see any modern military considering a few weeks off a pilot's training being worth the trade off in range, capacity, and safety.
Can we settle in the middle and trial them for cargo first? Seems obvious for deliveries.
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Why are larger drones better than smaller suicide drones that can have bombs attached to them and built by the thousands per day in a dark factory?
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The 'final' decision was recently made to go ahead with the massive project for this, which is eventually intended to replace the UH60/Blackhawk type platform. Traditional big money defense contractor stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_MV-75_Cheyenne_II
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you don't need crazy range to fly between jfk and city .
it's doable to do it today, economically, and solve tons of problems .
in a similar to ev rollout:
solve problem for wealthy people, get the premium, scale cheaper options. Nothing new. Technology of today is ready.
> solve tons of problems
I'm skeptical that air taxis could ever meaningfully reduce traffic congestion to / from JFK. Compared to cars, these would seem to require a significantly larger landing pad and passenger unloading space and need much more safety margin in-between drop offs. Maybe this is competitive vs the private helicopter market?
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JFK and city is a relatively niche and regionally unique market compared to how short/medium range aircraft are used in general. For instance the Joby or Archer product right now wouldn't have the range to fly from a helipad on the Seattle waterfront to somewhere in the San Juan Islands. Or for a flight from Vancouver harbour to Victoria.
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I'm not sure I agree that they're making that bet (there's lots of market at current ranges IMHO), but even if they were it would be a great bet to make. We're talking about jumping to 375 [1] or even 400 Wh/kg in production cars this year [2] (with prototypes long since shown off). And there's every reason to believe that there's a lot more headroom in this space to improve, and that we will improve rapidly since we're making so many more batteries now.
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/04/28/jeep-dodge-maker-validates-so...
[2] https://www.evlithium.com/lifepo4-battery-news/calb-solid-li...
I think Beta's CTOL has better economic prospects, if less useful as an air taxi.
More like in a similar (but smaller) role as the Cessna 408 Skycourier, which is short to medium range, unpressurized.
Isn’t the comparison against helicopters for regional and urban transit where EVTOLs hold an edge because of the drastic energy reduction that fixed wing has over helicopters?
I mean sure long term the goal may be to wait for battery density to increase to keep moving upmarket and eat longer and longer flights from traditional aviation, but I don’t think better batteries are a requirement for the initial batch of vehicles.
The upcoming solid-state batteries are around 500 Wh/kg.
But batteries have an advantage over turbines, especially small turbines: specific _power_ density.
Joby actually claims their business is viable without significant advances in battery energy density. We'll see. I think this will be closer to an Eclipse Aviation business case than SpaceX.
Reminder that New York Airways used to operate helicopter flights to the top of the Pan Am building until a 1977 accident killed five people.