Menu Sign In Contact FAQ
Banner
Welcome to our forums

Lilium electric VTOL jet

All these anecdotes are just that – anecdotes. You can write a book of them. None of them apply to a specific project with specific technological challenges which need to be actually solved by engineering. The fact that somebody in 1902 thought that computers will never work is irrelevant to this discussion. The Nokia case was a mixture of overly-confident management coupled with external factors beyond their control, and irrelevant to this discussion too. Obviously there is a market for automated air taxis; nobody doubts that. The issue is whether they can ever work usefully.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I’m 99,9999% percent confident air taxis will ‘ever’ become relevant. It’s just such a long time horizon.

But that’s just the point. Things happen much faster than experts assume. It’s a fact, not anecdotal. In autonomous aerial vehicles many emerging technologies are coming together. Personally, I don’t believe in self-driving land taxis replacing cars either. I just don’t get the logic behind it in places other than hugely populated mega cities. Same for air taxi. But this technology in itself is interesting and will come. And yes, we’ll see these things falling from the sky.

EFHF

ToniK wrote:

I’d bet my pension that these Lilium guys don’t give a damn about the air taxi concept as such. It’s needed for publicity and to get the funding. These guys are driven simply because they want to develop something really cool that flies. After all, what’s the last big thing in aviation before this?

The sad part here, is that they are serious about the taxi concept, which is why I lost interest.
They ‘pivoted’ to try to beat the Silicon Valley teams to the punch at making an air-taxi company work.

Germany != Silicon Valley

They’re great engineers, not great global businesses and certainly don’t have the IP edge wrt scalability (that’s what’s driving this lame air-taxi idea btw).
These guys will win, even though their design is less-than Lilium’s.

Point-in-case about the biggest challenge of the Air Taxi concept is “making it fly autonomously” (from here)

Lilium is an A&P design firm. That’s not the hardest part of an air-taxi…
They have a novel combination of airframe and propulsion system design.
Those, an autonomous taxi, do not make.

They’re taking too large of a leap.
My bet is that they fail the air-taxi concept, but succeed at designing a revolutionary aircraft and are bought by some bigger fish in the sea…
Investors get their money back, but only after a longer-than-expected timeframe.

Oh let us count the ways they can fail…
1. Crash
2. Crash
3. Crash
4. Crash
5. Crash
and so on…

Last Edited by AF at 17 Sep 13:34

The argumentation went well… and then Daily Mail.

Oh, sorry, didn’t realize the Daily Mail was so reprehensible.
Here’s the same quote from businessinsider.de
Very similar, but a bit more technical from Fortune Magazine

Notably, 6 months later, Fast Company provided a different “biggest challenge” which was landing sites and ground support

In any case, I’ll keep it in mind that the Daily Mail = Pulp (I’m not British, so I didn’t care prior to this…)

Last Edited by AF at 19 Sep 14:02

The basic concept hasn’t changed much in the last 60 years:

It is plain physics. The VTOL carplane needs a lot of energy. This energy needs to be stored somewhere, so lots of weight.
It doesn’t help to use a storage medium (batteries) that has a bad volume/weight ratio compared with the stored energy.
The idea of a mini nuclear reactor in the 60s was closer to achieve the goal to a lithium battery in this approach.

This is a fantasy and nothing else.

United Kingdom

The whole idea of the Lillium is that it has airplane efficiency in flight due to airfoils. Future helicopter designs are also going in that direction.

Of course this is feasible. Nobody said that the first version will fly from San Francisco to New York.


It’s reassuring to know that my arrival in July 1957 didn’t change anything of significance

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Dubai has performed the first official test of an autonomous taxi drone using the Volocopter 2X

http://www.zdnet.com/article/dubai-begins-testing-drone-taxi-service/



Dubai officials said, they expect this to come into widespread service within 5 years during which the technical and legal challenges will be addressed. They are working on the required regulation.

Looks like a very realistic approach to me.

Last Edited by achimha at 26 Sep 10:02

So AEROKURIER talked to some serious aviation experts that made some sums that would point to a hover capability of the machine of about one minute. That’s a little different from the goal of transporting 5 persons at a speed of 300 km/h over a distance of 300 km.. So they sent a list of questions and got some answers. Basically, Lilium is annoyed at the negativity of the magazine and does not take into account that we are talking about hundreds of very innovative engineers doing their magic.

https://www.aerokurier.de/elektroflug/lilium-fragen-an-das-unternehmen/

Last Edited by aart at 17 Jan 17:15
Private field, Mallorca, Spain
Sign in to add your message

Back to Top