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.
You are ignoring the second variable on the consumption of energy dense materials.
Weight.
It correlates to the energy density of course, but, weight directly goes into the power consumption calculations for vehicles. Efficiency is just a multiplier afterwards.
You can only ignore weight in non-mobile battery applications, i.e. grid applications.
It is a multi-variate problem and petrol currently wins out by a wide margin.
> 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)
> Because if the vehicle can do the miles, that's all that matters
You conveniently forgot about climate change.
It also very much matters that my grandchildren will be able to breath, will have food to eat, won’t have to live underwater and won’t depend on wars in faraway lands.
1. Carbon emissions - not a problem if you synthesize the jet fuel out of carbon dioxide in the air. https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/06/18/e-saf-jet-fuel-... it's expensive today but with cheap-enough energy, such as with abundant solar and wind power, it won't always be.
2. Air quality - If energy is so cheap that you can literally make jet fuel, it follows that we'd stop "burning stuff" for any other reason. No more coal or natural gas plants, gasoline or diesel engines, heating with natural gas or propane. Jet planes' air pollution is a tiny fraction of all those sources. I could live with that.
But at the same time you had to design an aircraft to be able to shed that much weight and handle a load that sloshes around. That has cost. Again though, the core point is you can't compare directly. It is more about the final design and final purpose. eVTOL to NYC shows this. We may see quieter, less polluting cheap taxi service, basically a superior ability to function, because of being electric. If you only look for reasons it is worse, you will find them and not progress.
Given the current state of battery technology, this is probably the only possible commercial use case. Even then, you have serious limitations like low passenger capacity, takeoff/landing still requires a helipad, recharge time, and the questionable safety in the event of motor or hinge malfunction.
And once this gets in use improvements will lead to bigger, longer range, etc etc etc. Batteries too are rapidly improving and this will push more emphasis on that. The first Write flyer couldn't do much either.
I'm much less optimistic. Even when factoring in the poor thermal efficiency of gas turbines (~30-40%) compared to electric (>90%), the usable specific energy gap remains immense. Jet-A still delivers roughly 14 times more useful work per kilogram than modern batteries. Removing fuel plumbing and tweaking airframes won't overcome that fundamental physics. Also the issue with the high-altitude efficiency argument is that batteries, unlike liquid fuel, don't lose mass during flight meaning the aircraft to haul its maximum takeoff weight from departure to arrival. It's a double whammy.
Well, in this case, we don’t need to argue about theory. The Joby has a tested range of 150 miles. They also tested it with hydrogen fuel cells and got >500.
Right, so when you factor in the legally required reserve flight time the battery powered Joby is only capable of very short hops. And that's fine, it's still potentially useful on a few routes and newer models will improve over time.
This isn’t meant to slot into the role of other planes, though, it’s meant for rideshare. It can take off and land on my suburban lawn. There’s a lot to figure out before we can get to that point, so they’re just displace helicopters for the moment, but it can be a lot more. It’s basically the long awaited flying car, in nascent form.
No, it can't take off and land on your suburban lawn. The wires and trees overhead would make that ridiculously dangerous, a last resort only for emergencies. Plus they need to recharge for the next flight. These e-VTOL aircraft will operate from dedicated pads.
Just talking about what they've talked about as goals in interviews. And I'm surprised you're willing to make definitive statements about my lawn, we have a large enough area with none of those obstructions you're talking about, we live on a few acres. And if it's running 20 miles here and there, it can do a few trips before it needs to go somewhere to charge or battery swap. That would cover our trip to our nearest international airport.
If these e-VTOL aircraft get used for air taxi service at all it's going to be for short hops in denser urban areas. Not in rural areas where people have acres of open land.
Go watch one of JoeBen's interviews. His original inspiration for the company was making something that could make where he grew up in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains more accessible. His stated long term vision is vertiports embedded in communities. In the short term, I agree that they're going to start in denser areas.
Heh it doesn't have to be literally on one's own lawn, it could just be a little helipad per community. And my understanding is that the vast majority of private helipads don't have air traffic control - your hospital's roof doesn't have its own air traffic control. Pilots operate under "see and avoid" rules.
Use your imagination a little. So much status quo bias here.
Who would want to privately own a community helipad? Sounds like an insurance and liability nightmare.
This is an impressive enough achievement, but let's not kid ourselves this is going to revolutionaise suburban or semi-rural transport. Its maximum payload weight (450kg) barely covers 5 passengers with no baggage. It's for hopping from the country club to the golf course.
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.
Hydrogen also sucks in that it puts you in your own scaling lane. Relying on batteries means EVs, grid storage, et cetera drive down your costs for “free”.
Bertha Benz faced a similar problem in 1888, and had to refuel the Patent-Motorwagen by seeking out pharmacies. Drivers of the steam cars that were popular in France could just pick up a bag of coal from anywhere. (Wait, that doesn't sound right. A bottle of kerosene, then.)
I like the idea of fuel cells, but hydrogen's going to have an image problem as soon as people see the failure mode, if it's just being stored as H2 in compressed tanks. Liquid fossil fuels and electric batteries burn with a gradual flame. Hydrogen suddenly detonates, with a supersonic, shattering shockwave, if it's mishandled.
Even with Cold War money, Lockheed's famed Kelly Johnson couldn't make the logistics work for the CL-400.
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.
What problem would a hybrid solve for military? Military doesn't care about emissions and this doesn't offer resilience like fully electric does (recharge anywhere, reliability).
The same problem that a hybrid architecture solves for ships: the ability to use physically small electric motors with very high power density that are mechanically decoupled from the rest of the vehicle. This lets a bunch of designs pull off neat thrust vectoring tricky with much simpler and lighter components than a mechanical thrust vectoring system would need.
(Electric azimuth thrusters are becoming common in large ships for roughly this reason, too.)
The military cares a lot about range, signature reduction, and especially fuel efficiency. Reducing fuel usage reduces the logistical train necessary to sustain units in the field.
Oh, you’re talking about a hybrid system. I thought you meant all electric like the aircraft from the article. My mistake.
That’s a ton of weight penalty (the most consequential tradeoff in aircraft design) so the design gains of being able put motors in weird places has to be significant.
Once we have higher density batteries it becomes compelling since you can store power for bursty operations like VTOL while using an ICE engine that otherwise wouldn’t have the power, but currently it doesn’t pen out. You need an order of magnitude more energy density from batteries before you can come anywhere close to what combustion engines can do.
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.
Different configurations are better for different missions. Small suicide drones have very limited range, weak sensors, and can't carry much cargo or a large enough warhead to take out hardened targets. Hopefully we'll never get into a conflict with China, but if we do the platforms will have to be much larger just due to the greater ranges involved.
> Can we settle in the middle and trial them for cargo first?
There is an existing market for passenger eVTOL to and from airports. Using that as a beachhead makes way more sense than trying to develop a de novo niche.
The tradeoff is you have to build a cargo business. That costs money and leadership attention. Racing for the beachhead, given sufficient access to capital, is the more focused strategy. (This is a good example of how bootstrapped versus financed companies can be radically different in their technical debts, time to market, culture and discipline around validating hypotheses.)
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.
One large rotor is obviously more efficient than multiple smaller rotors. Where e-VTOL aircraft at least have the potential to win for certain missions is more with cost and availability. Helicopters are extremely expensive and require constant maintenance, and tilt rotors like the V-22 are even worse. But an e-VTOL could potentially eliminate transmissions, clutches, drive shafts, swashplates, etc. Long term we'll see a mix of both technologies being used.
As for survivability, we'll see. Any significant damage to the rotor systems will send most helicopters straight into the ground.
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?
I wonder what % of traffic is to/from JFK. The subway decently connects much of the city to the JFK air train, but it's a fairly inconvenient journey. Toronto's UP express has made travel to YYZ significantly easier, but I doubt it's possible to construct something similar in NYC.
I love aviation, but I also don't see air travel as being a scalable/affordable solution to this problem. Then again, it's only meant to alleviate traffic burden for a certain segment of the population.
the problem with train it stops ... on every train stop. New york specifically, there are several networks(new jersey, mta, there are lines that are 100+ years old.
In general if you have an affordable enough option you'd never walk into subway, with your several luggages, to travel longer. Train is a decent plan b.
> if you have an affordable enough option you'd never walk into subway, with your several luggages, to travel longer
I'm moderately wealthy and lived in New York for a decade. I take the train between JFK and Manhattan. (Specifically, the LIRR.) It's faster, more reliable and–for me–more comfortable than taking a car. (It's also safer.) If I have my cat with me or I feel like having fun, I'll take a Blade, but that's realistically only shaving like 20 minutes off the travel time.
LIRR is not a dirty MTA train :) Noisy shaky helicopter is not an electric taxi with 6+ motors that gives you more stability with way less noise that flies after take of using wings.
> LIRR is not a dirty MTA train :) Noisy shaky helicopter is not an electric taxi with 6+ motors that gives you more stability with way less noise that flies after take of using wings
I've also taken the A from Harlem to JFK once. It was fine. Tougher to read a book, like I can on the LIRR, mostly because the frequency of stops means having to constantly be aware of your belongings.
And agree on helicopters. We already have helicopters. Switching them to eVTOLs is a move forward.
How many people do you think enter/exit JFK arrivals and departures every hour? Where are you going to land all those air vehicles? Is this a shuttle service with many seats? How do you plan for the air traffic for that many people?
About 7000 on average, but let's say 10000 since demand varies. And let's consider doing 10% of them with helicopters. If we average 3 people per helicopter, that's 170 groups in and 170 groups out. If each landing needs 5 minutes of pad time, that's 14 pads. Make it 20 to handle variation.
Wow, that makes it sound significantly more feasible than I would have guessed.
Those are all reasonable questions, but if some entity would be able to answer them, of all things, I think JFK, an airport, would be well equipped to handle them.
Well it's 5-10 minutes once you get to the west 30th st heliport, which can easily take 20 minutes within Manhattan. Plus getting loaded in, cleared for takeoff, and potential for backups at the landing pads, I suspect the gains are much less in practice.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Wouldn't the city be better when the wealthy have to deal with the same services and quality of life as everyone else -- not (literally, in this case) elevating themselves above others, while making everyone else's life worse?
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
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.
Every country says this about every other country. The UK has HS2, and we point to Germany. Germany has Stuttgart 21 and they point to Spain. Spain has the Sagrada Familia. Spain points to China, and China has the HZMB [0]
This stuff is really really hard, and standards have evolved hugely. The london underground would never be built today, because of the ignored costs. HS2's massive problem isn't that we spent £100m on a Bat tunnel [1], it's that nobody was willing to say no because that decision is pinned to you but the blame absolving is "someone elses problem".
I'm not exactly sure the point you're making about each country pointing at another as a positive example. The chain you've listed (US->UK->Germany->Spain->China) is a pretty good list of countries in descending order of cost to build infrastructure (it's not a straightforward analysis, but see https://transitcosts.com/new-data/ for example). There are always boondoggles, but the scoreboard is pretty clear -- each country in that list is better than the country before at building rail infrastructure.
Your analogy is like saying that everyone thinks someone else is a faster runner: amateurs point to collegiate athletes, collegiate athletes point to elites, elites point to Olympians. You can find someone in each of these categories who has run a bad race, but that doesn't invalidate the existence of the differences in ability.
> Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.
I picked a handful of absolutely colossal overspends on massive infra projects to point out that no, not every other western country is doing so. All countries have their success stories and mega disaster projects
I mean, I'm not sure that the Sagrada Familia is a good example. It taking a long time to build was arguably part of the _point_, and was planned from the start.
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.)
Oh, yeah, and it can and does handle a scale of traffic that a helicopter service obviously couldn't. I think each train takes about a thousand people and they're every ten minutes or something.
The "use helicopters for airport access" thing seems, at best, extremely niche.
Joby plans to expand way beyond airport access, it’s meant to be basically flying rideshare. The key enabler is they designed it to be quiet enough to not annoy everyone around like a helicopter, so that it would be reasonable to have this thing taking off from residential neighborhoods. JFK access is just a very visible first test run.
This thing will not be taking off from residential neighborhoods. Regardless of noise, like any manned VTOL aircraft it requires a large open area free of overhead obstructions (trees, wires).
And the notion that landing pads will be installed on the roofs of tall buildings is mostly a fantasy. Commercial or high-rise roofs are mostly already occupied with other machinery, and aren't designed to support the extra weight.
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.
20% cost overrun is nothing if you look at the typical cost overrun of a US infrastructure project. UES extension in NYC a prime example of that. And 3 years late? How about 50 years late?
So your unions and regulations have nothing to do with it, but it has everything to do with corruption and the way US public command is arbitraged. You probably need _more_ regulation to avoid the former, and have unions involved in the review process (construction workers usually know when a construction company is full of shit).
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.
NYC unions are not your average worker. In my north of NYC town the labor rate for a union worker is 3x that of non union..and state laws mandate govt projects must pay that rate.
Yeah, that is what unions are for, protecting worker wages from the ever tightening noose of greedy capitalists that would otherwise use slave labor if they still could.
unions are often a form of corruption themselves. If, as is often the case, there's only one union that can do a job, that means that that union is a monopoly.
I don't see how that is corruption. Unions can be corrupted when the union leader's goals diverge from the average union members, but the whole point of a union is to collectively bargain as one to try and make up for the inherent power imbalance that capital holders possess. If workers were being treated well and not taken advantage of a union wouldn't form in the first place and people wouldn't want to join it.
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.
Do you know where JFK is? JFK does not sit outside the city like Arlanda. JFK is in the NYC Queens borough surrounded by highly dense urban sprawl. That setup makes sense for an airport that sits far outside the city.
No track to JFK can support anything near a 200km/hr train and building a track for such a train is a nonstarter.
It'd likely have to go largely underground. This is the approach being taken for Dublin Airport (again, a far, far smaller city than NYC); it'll be served by a largely underground metro line, running every 3 minutes each direction, taking about 20 minutes from the city centre.
Now, the catch there is that this metro isn't going to the airport, it's going _through_ the airport. Even without the airport it would be justifiable, so the airport kind of gets it for free. That's probably the only scenario where you can justify this sort of thing; it would be comically overkill if it was just to serve the airport (it will be able to move 20,000 people per hour per direction, which is... a lot more than the airport can move.)
That said, you'd think something along these lines might be justifiable; as you say, the area surrounding JFK is dense.
You can only pick up the LIRR from midtown and the Jamaica endpoint is the AirTrain which requires a separate fare and another 10-12 minutes to get to the terminal. Having said that, AirTrain/LIRR is my preferred route into Manhattan on business travel, but I always take an Uber out to the airport unless I've got a late night flight.
Op's example was underground. Moses built above ground, thereby requiring the ruthlessness. Not sure the same ruthlessness would be needed with tunnels.
According to Bloomberg[1] construction of the first phase of the second avenue subway cost about 2.5B USD per mile.
At that rate, even if you just look at extending the A/C/E from Jamaica to JFK, you're talking about 15B or so USD. And compared to today's [subway|LIRR] -> airtrain system, you probably only cut about 25% of the travel time (from 60 minutes down to 45 minutes)
Compare that to, for example, the Gateway Tunnel, estimated to cost about 16B USD and double the daily commuter capacity from NJ to NYC (including traffic to and from EWR!), and it's hard to justify new infrastructure to make it easier to get to the airport.
> Not sure the same ruthlessness would be needed with tunnels
Still requires lots of cut and cover due to buried power and water mains being poorly documented. And stations will require razing buildings, as well as gentrifying neighborhoods.
I live two blocks form the Rockaway A station, two stops from the Howard Beach/JFK station that hooks you into the Air train. It's at least 30 minutes on an express A to Fulton St, the first stop in Manhattan. Takes me about 45 minutes to get to Penn station from my house, an hour or more with delays. Unsure of what the Air train to LIRR Jamaica then to Penn in Manhattan takes, might be faster then the A depending.
15 minutes to fly from JFK to lower Manhattan is at least a 3x speed up, likely closer to 4-5x.
Back in the time when I frequented NYC I took the train to JFK, is that no longer a thing? the LIRR brought me a'clackity-clacking (haven't you Yanks learned about that new thing called welded rails?) past Rockaway to where those driverless shuttle things took over the ride. It did take a while but I rather liked the trip. I use public transport wherever I can, certainly over overpriced taxi 'services'. Once when in London I let myself be convinced by the press rep who insisted I take a taxi with her to the airport instead of the tube as I intended. Well, let's just say that if this were all part of her plan to corner me for a few more hours it worked because the non-unexpected traffic jam kept us from catching our flight. Great job, miss press rep, drinks are on you. In other words yay for public transport in those places where it is more or less reliable and not suicidally unsafe to ride.
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.
> 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
You must not live in a dense city. Rail doesn't have traffic and is usually faster, and much faster in heavy traffic, including rush hour, sporting events, airports, bridges/tunnels across the river, parades, marathons, etc. etc.
Also, there's no advantage to Waymo that doesn't apply to rideshare and taxi. I doubt people will care that Waymo vehicles autonomous, beyond the initial novelty (and despite SV's attempted marketing that their robots are better than people).
Finally, despite SV trying to ridicule any attitude that threatens their profits, most people like the greater good.
I do live in a dense city with rail and it's slower, especially accounting for last-mile transit. Rail does have traffic, they just sit next to you and you have to navigate around them on foot.
It's also not true that there's no advantage to Waymo; I take rideshare and taxis everywhere, and it will be a massive draw turning that into a pure transaction with a robot instead of it being a potentially social experience based on the whims and social malfunctions of the driver you get that day. As soon as Waymo or equivalent is available everywhere I will never choose to take a human-driven car again. And that's before getting into the many traffic advantages afforded to a fleet of cars that act as a collaborative swarm.
To me that does describe the greater good. For all its real benefits, passenger rail is inflexible and bulky in comparison.
> Rail does have traffic, they just sit next to you and you have to navigate around them on foot.
Obviously not what I'm talking about. It does not increase travel time in a significant way, and I'm including NYC subways. It's not like traffic jams for cars.
> it will be a massive draw turning that into a pure transaction with a robot instead of it being a potentially social experience based on the whims and social malfunctions of the driver you get that day
You're entitled to your personal preferences, of course, and I hope you find what works for you. Assuming your preferences are globalized is not factual: Most humans generally desire social interactions with other humans. We are naturally social animals that live in groups.
> To me that does describe the greater good.
Antisocial behavior is not 'good', it's just what you like. The pandemic was a major negative for society on a social level.
> Obviously not what I'm talking about. It does not increase travel time in a significant way, and I'm including NYC subways. It's not like traffic jams for cars.
It's still relevant. Waiting for the next train, finding a seat, these are still jams. Travel time is also increased when you are required to be on the transit schedule instead of leaving at any time.
> Most humans generally desire social interactions with other humans. We are naturally social animals that live in groups.
This is a silly leap. Taxi and ride-share drivers are service workers. You don't shoot the shit with the cashier at McDonalds; he is doing his job and is literally forced to politely entertain you if you decide to trap him in conversation. When you are paying somebody to do a job it is not a social interaction anymore and has no bearing on whether one enjoys real social interaction. There are Uber drivers who falsely identify themselves to the app as deaf or hard-of-hearing specifically because they'd rather focus on driving than be a performing clown for chatty riders at the same time.
> Antisocial behavior is not 'good', it's just what you like. The pandemic was a major negative for society on a social level.
It's not antisocial to want privacy; it's not antisocial to want a predictable experience during transit. A Waymo is substantially less likely than a human stranger to rob or kill or rape you; Uber added a feature where women riders can set a preference for hiring women drivers to avoid tension and danger. The human element of taxis is a downside unless you fancy yourself Miss Daisy.
> except for being like 10x more expensive, of course
Expense is largely fake when we're talking about transit. Amtrak specifically is directly federally subsidized; most bus lines run at a substantial loss. At scale there's no specific reason a fleet of cars has to be more expensive to the rider than either of these things.
> lol yes we should just replace Amtrak with 40 lane highways full of waymos. great idea
Didn't suggest replacing what's already there, there's just no justification to start building more in the US in big 2026. The time has really passed for that to be a good investment.
Buses are cars, buses can be self-driving, and they use the same infrastructure as other cars. Cars can also be made to be much smaller for the average trip, 1-2 passenger seats only, if you don't need a driver. They can go faster and stop less if you aren't subject to human reaction time. These changes are obviously future tech, but it seems nearer every day, and if we achieve genuine full self-driving at scale all assumptions and constraints about travel by car have to change.
> 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.
> 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?
Regularly? No. Most people aren't regularly taking helicopters anywhere, in part because their ability to fly around New York usually requires VFR conditions.
Occasionally? Yes. If you live in Harlem and need to get to JFK, you're paying an outsized time tax to get to and through Grand Central or Penn Station compared with taking the West Side Highway down to the 30th Street heliport. If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel.
(I'm ignoring the outer boroughs and New York's surrounding suburbs, for whom this could actually be a game changer.)
> the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it is a dumb car for rich people
Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.
> Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.
... Eh? The very successful Nissan Leaf (for quite a long time the best-selling electric car in the world) came out the year after the Tesla Roadster. The Renault Zoe (again, quite successful) came out about a year after that, if you're really hung up on the 'west' thing.
> 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.
Tesla never meant to sell it in large numbers, and they probably couldn’t have made many more anyway. And this still represented around $3bn if revenue and helped get Tesla off the ground.
> 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).
> Someone making $50k isn't going to spend $200/trip regularly
They don’t fly regularly. I picked that number because it puts $200 into the reasonable splurge bucket, and that’s the lowest income of a friend I know who has taken one more than once.
If $50k doesn’t do it, take it to $80k and still understand that covers quite a bit more than half of Manhattan. Plugging these services as top 0.1% is wrong—that’s private jets.
Right, which is why it makes no sense for them to pay extra to get to the airport slightly faster. (They might splurge $200 occasionally to get home from a late night out or something, but this isn't serving that route). They're not doing last-minute spontaneous trips or trying to cram a city break into a weekend. They're not cutting it close on the timing knowing they can always buy a replacement if they miss their flight. They probably don't even have precheck, which tells you how much saving 20 minutes the rare time they fly is worth to them. This is absolutely not a product that fits into a $50k or $80k lifestyle.
I live in NYC and make quite a bit more than $80k and would still never splurge $200 for a trip to the airport. JFK by car (when I'm in an emergency) is already $100 and I get irrationally angry at it. Not to mention I'd have to actually get to a helipad, which are only on river fronts, an basically no train goes to those either, so I'm still in a cab.
> would still never splurge $200 for a trip to the airport
Would you splurge $200 on anything? There are 8.6 million people in New York and 1.7 million in Manhattan. Some fraction of those can call this their cup of tea.
Like, I will never splurge for curbside bag check. That doesn't make it a plutocratic privilege. eVTOLs have lots of downsides that are worth debating. Only solving "problems for the 0.001%" is not one of them. That designation belongs to private jets.
I'd absolutely splurge $200 on a lot of things (a date just the other day for instance) but there's many options at least as convenient, remembering you still have to get to the helipad, as this.
As a New Yorker I don't want these things with zero failure ability anywhere near me. At least a helicopter can autorotate.
I think many people reflexively assume that this in the same cost tier as a private jet. I wonder if it could eventually get to somewhere on the order of uber per mile, since a mile takes much less pilot time, and the maintenance requirements are presumably lower on these than on traditional single engine piston aircraft.
> Like, I will never splurge for curbside bag check. That doesn't make it a plutocratic privilege.
Doesn't it? It feels like it to me, like that $70 coffee with gold flakes that was doing the rounds a year or two back - sure, it's technically an amount of money that a regular person could spend, but it's absolutely not a product for them.
> why it makes no sense for them to pay extra to get to the airport slightly faster
“Slightly” faster from where they live is like an hour.
> They're not doing last-minute spontaneous trips or trying to cram a city break into a weekend
I’ve taken Blades quite a few times. This describes zero of their clients. It’s folks who want to fly out of EWR without having to deal with New Jersey’s infrastructure, those splurging and a very small number of regulars.
> This is absolutely not a product that fits into a $50k or $80k lifestyle
Agree. But it can and does on occasion. That makes it categorically different from purely plutocratic services. Also, use $80k if that works better for the example. That’s half of New Yorkers and a commanding majority of Manhattan residents.
Helicopters and eVTOLs are relatively accessible in a city as rich as New York.
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.
Multiple trains. You can take LIRR to Jamaica and transfer to AirTrain. Or take the A subway line. LIRR is faster but still like 45 minutes to either Brooklyn or Manhattan.
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.
You’re probably right on crime. But I will say that both SF and Chicago(most of my experience) local train systems are constantly filled with homeless people with severe mental health issues. Generally , without fixing that a large segment of the population are never going to want to ride public transport.
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.
Do the people who run the helipads not also get to eat and put their kids through school though? Where are you that makes the parents pay directly for school such that not having a job at the train station means their kids go hungry and unschooled? What horrible place is that? (Wait, don't tell me, is it the USA?)
I don't know how the economics in the electric VTOL era works out, but the thing about air travel vs train travel is that in order for the train to be useful, you have to build tracks from every train station to every other train station to have perfect routability, which is expensive. However, for a helipad, once you've built the helipad it automatically connects to all other helipads in range.
People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time. Manhattan is hardly a purely reasonable place, in fact it's far from it. All kinds of nonsense takes place in nyc all the time. If nyc was driven by cold economic reason it would be boring and lame compared to what it is today.
> People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time
This isn’t in the same category as burying a new train line. I lived around just the Hudson Yard water and electric expansions when those happened. It was years of increased noise, traffic and litigation.
> it didn't seem to cause the city to collapse into itself
Straw man. Nobody claimed these were existential threats.
OP said "I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains." I'm saying I wouldn't be surprised if the opposite came out–take the costs of the disruption and time value of money into account, and building a new train line anywhere in Manhattan is a worse use of resources than (a) increasing capacity on existing lines, a veritable forest of low-hanging fruit or even (b) eVTOLs.
Strawman: yes, but the point stands in its milder form that noise etc isn't substantial economic disruptive.
But yeah the reality is that no one is going to be digging in NY substantially soon/ever because if you look at precedent that's been the case for the last 100 years. And building a tunnel to JFK would be huge
NYC already have a functional mass transit system. Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus? Why it's so hard to understand there still is the need for other modes of transportation. At the very least, tourists want to view the city from above, or those who wants a quick hop from JFK to Manhattan. This is not a replacement for mass transportation.
At least try to show curiosity about what they want to solve.
> Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus?
Hypothesis: people aren't familiar with New York's trains. It's a world-class network the likes of which we don't otherwise have in North America. (Sorry Toronto.) So when they see eVTOLs, they emotionally map it to their local trainless context.
Both of those cities are not in North America. In North America, New York City is by far our best example of a transit system. It is terrible by world standards, but is still the best example we have in North America.
... I mean, no. It's more that it is weird that there is no train to the airport (it looks like you can take ~3 trains from Manhattan). New York is likely the only really big city in the developed world where this is the case.
In Ireland, everyone thinks it's pretty ridiculous that there's no train to Dublin Airport (all going well, it will finally have one in 2036 or so, after _many_ false starts). Dublin's a city of about 1.5 million people. It's pretty incomprehensible that a city ten times the size wouldn't have one.
Airtrain opened in 2003 [1]. It connected to the subway system and, through Jamaica, Penn Station. The novel bit in 2023 was also linking into Grand Central.
I'm very dubious. Primarily because this goes from landing pad to landing pad. You'll still need transportation from the pad to wherever you're going. A taxi goes door to door. And what's an extra 20 minutes if you're sitting the whole time?
> 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.
Collective rotor based helicopters don't scare me at all, but drone based multi-rotor designs definitely do. A regular helicopter can safely land even with catastrophic engine failure or complete electronics failure thanks to its auto rotation capabilities, a drone platform just becomes a falling rock with zero control or stability. Plus a drone's control system is way more complicated which leaves more room for failures and problems.
The main difference I read is that those airfoils actually come into play when it's not taking off and landing. That still doesn't make it nearly as cool as the air cars in Blade Runner but it's slightly better than just a helicopter too.
> [...] 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.
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.
> 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 is a powered lift aircraft. There is no ability to autorotate or glide. It has redundant rotors and power systems so should be pretty reliable, but if there's a catastrophic failure then it will immediately go into a spin and crash.
Got it. If anything in this high tech state-of-the-art machine causes more than 2 motors to stop motoring then I'll most likely die in a crash. But it's not very likely that'll happen.
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.
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.
You are ignoring the second variable on the consumption of energy dense materials. Weight.
It correlates to the energy density of course, but, weight directly goes into the power consumption calculations for vehicles. Efficiency is just a multiplier afterwards.
You can only ignore weight in non-mobile battery applications, i.e. grid applications.
It is a multi-variate problem and petrol currently wins out by a wide margin.
> 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)
> Because if the vehicle can do the miles, that's all that matters
You conveniently forgot about climate change.
It also very much matters that my grandchildren will be able to breath, will have food to eat, won’t have to live underwater and won’t depend on wars in faraway lands.
If we can synthesize jet fuel cheaply with renewable electricity it's carbon neutral.
You honestly think “If we can just invent a magic solution cheaply we can keep burning stuff”
Is the answer?
The problem with "burning stuff" is twofold:
1. Carbon emissions - not a problem if you synthesize the jet fuel out of carbon dioxide in the air. https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/06/18/e-saf-jet-fuel-... it's expensive today but with cheap-enough energy, such as with abundant solar and wind power, it won't always be.
2. Air quality - If energy is so cheap that you can literally make jet fuel, it follows that we'd stop "burning stuff" for any other reason. No more coal or natural gas plants, gasoline or diesel engines, heating with natural gas or propane. Jet planes' air pollution is a tiny fraction of all those sources. I could live with that.
Yes, that's the answer. If we want to have long range air transport then we're going to keep burning stuff no matter what.
>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
Jet-A that has been combusted doesn't require any lift.
Edit: Since I have an aerospace engineering degree, I'll post the 100 level concept. https://web.mit.edu/16.unified/www/FALL/thermodynamics/notes...
But at the same time you had to design an aircraft to be able to shed that much weight and handle a load that sloshes around. That has cost. Again though, the core point is you can't compare directly. It is more about the final design and final purpose. eVTOL to NYC shows this. We may see quieter, less polluting cheap taxi service, basically a superior ability to function, because of being electric. If you only look for reasons it is worse, you will find them and not progress.
Given the current state of battery technology, this is probably the only possible commercial use case. Even then, you have serious limitations like low passenger capacity, takeoff/landing still requires a helipad, recharge time, and the questionable safety in the event of motor or hinge malfunction.
And once this gets in use improvements will lead to bigger, longer range, etc etc etc. Batteries too are rapidly improving and this will push more emphasis on that. The first Write flyer couldn't do much either.
I'm much less optimistic. Even when factoring in the poor thermal efficiency of gas turbines (~30-40%) compared to electric (>90%), the usable specific energy gap remains immense. Jet-A still delivers roughly 14 times more useful work per kilogram than modern batteries. Removing fuel plumbing and tweaking airframes won't overcome that fundamental physics. Also the issue with the high-altitude efficiency argument is that batteries, unlike liquid fuel, don't lose mass during flight meaning the aircraft to haul its maximum takeoff weight from departure to arrival. It's a double whammy.
Well, in this case, we don’t need to argue about theory. The Joby has a tested range of 150 miles. They also tested it with hydrogen fuel cells and got >500.
Right, so when you factor in the legally required reserve flight time the battery powered Joby is only capable of very short hops. And that's fine, it's still potentially useful on a few routes and newer models will improve over time.
Sounds about right. A plane of comparable max take-off weight, a Piper Malibu, has a range of ~1500 miles (with reserve remaining).
This isn’t meant to slot into the role of other planes, though, it’s meant for rideshare. It can take off and land on my suburban lawn. There’s a lot to figure out before we can get to that point, so they’re just displace helicopters for the moment, but it can be a lot more. It’s basically the long awaited flying car, in nascent form.
No, it can't take off and land on your suburban lawn. The wires and trees overhead would make that ridiculously dangerous, a last resort only for emergencies. Plus they need to recharge for the next flight. These e-VTOL aircraft will operate from dedicated pads.
Just talking about what they've talked about as goals in interviews. And I'm surprised you're willing to make definitive statements about my lawn, we have a large enough area with none of those obstructions you're talking about, we live on a few acres. And if it's running 20 miles here and there, it can do a few trips before it needs to go somewhere to charge or battery swap. That would cover our trip to our nearest international airport.
If these e-VTOL aircraft get used for air taxi service at all it's going to be for short hops in denser urban areas. Not in rural areas where people have acres of open land.
Go watch one of JoeBen's interviews. His original inspiration for the company was making something that could make where he grew up in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains more accessible. His stated long term vision is vertiports embedded in communities. In the short term, I agree that they're going to start in denser areas.
I don't understand how that would be possible with the lack of anywhere to land in denser urban areas. This is a toy to hop over to the golf course.
Does your lawn come with an air traffic control tower?
Heh it doesn't have to be literally on one's own lawn, it could just be a little helipad per community. And my understanding is that the vast majority of private helipads don't have air traffic control - your hospital's roof doesn't have its own air traffic control. Pilots operate under "see and avoid" rules.
Use your imagination a little. So much status quo bias here.
Who would want to privately own a community helipad? Sounds like an insurance and liability nightmare.
This is an impressive enough achievement, but let's not kid ourselves this is going to revolutionaise suburban or semi-rural transport. Its maximum payload weight (450kg) barely covers 5 passengers with no baggage. It's for hopping from the country club to the golf course.
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.
Hydrogen also sucks in that it puts you in your own scaling lane. Relying on batteries means EVs, grid storage, et cetera drive down your costs for “free”.
Bertha Benz faced a similar problem in 1888, and had to refuel the Patent-Motorwagen by seeking out pharmacies. Drivers of the steam cars that were popular in France could just pick up a bag of coal from anywhere. (Wait, that doesn't sound right. A bottle of kerosene, then.)
I like the idea of fuel cells, but hydrogen's going to have an image problem as soon as people see the failure mode, if it's just being stored as H2 in compressed tanks. Liquid fossil fuels and electric batteries burn with a gradual flame. Hydrogen suddenly detonates, with a supersonic, shattering shockwave, if it's mishandled.
Even with Cold War money, Lockheed's famed Kelly Johnson couldn't make the logistics work for the CL-400.
If we want clearer aviation then manufacturing synthetic liquid jet fuel (kerosene) is more likely to be viable than hydrogen.
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.
What problem would a hybrid solve for military? Military doesn't care about emissions and this doesn't offer resilience like fully electric does (recharge anywhere, reliability).
The same problem that a hybrid architecture solves for ships: the ability to use physically small electric motors with very high power density that are mechanically decoupled from the rest of the vehicle. This lets a bunch of designs pull off neat thrust vectoring tricky with much simpler and lighter components than a mechanical thrust vectoring system would need.
(Electric azimuth thrusters are becoming common in large ships for roughly this reason, too.)
> ships
That's a tangent from most sensitive vehicle to weight to the _least_ sensitive one.
The military cares a lot about range, signature reduction, and especially fuel efficiency. Reducing fuel usage reduces the logistical train necessary to sustain units in the field.
https://www.defensenews.com/land/2025/01/22/army-tries-out-n...
Dragging a trailer full of fuel seems easier than dragging a large generator and a trailer full of fuel.
Huh? The regular engine doubles as a generator.
Oh, you’re talking about a hybrid system. I thought you meant all electric like the aircraft from the article. My mistake.
That’s a ton of weight penalty (the most consequential tradeoff in aircraft design) so the design gains of being able put motors in weird places has to be significant.
Once we have higher density batteries it becomes compelling since you can store power for bursty operations like VTOL while using an ICE engine that otherwise wouldn’t have the power, but currently it doesn’t pen out. You need an order of magnitude more energy density from batteries before you can come anywhere close to what combustion engines can do.
How is it going to reduce fuel consumption by nearly doubling the weight?
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
The military operates more than one type of aircraft. I don't think an MV-75 will fit very well on an FF(X), for example.
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?
Range, for one, if what you're referring to as a mental model is 15" prop size quadcopters with an artillery shell strapped to them. For use <50km.
Now look at a photo of a human standing next to a shahed-136 size UAV for a totally different size scale.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/11/in-europe-the-p...
I see. Thanks for both your answers.
Different configurations are better for different missions. Small suicide drones have very limited range, weak sensors, and can't carry much cargo or a large enough warhead to take out hardened targets. Hopefully we'll never get into a conflict with China, but if we do the platforms will have to be much larger just due to the greater ranges involved.
Can we settle in the middle and trial them for cargo first? Seems obvious for deliveries.
> Can we settle in the middle and trial them for cargo first?
There is an existing market for passenger eVTOL to and from airports. Using that as a beachhead makes way more sense than trying to develop a de novo niche.
Oh market is def there. I mean validating technology on cargo.
> validating technology on cargo
The tradeoff is you have to build a cargo business. That costs money and leadership attention. Racing for the beachhead, given sufficient access to capital, is the more focused strategy. (This is a good example of how bootstrapped versus financed companies can be radically different in their technical debts, time to market, culture and discipline around validating hypotheses.)
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.
One large rotor is obviously more efficient than multiple smaller rotors. Where e-VTOL aircraft at least have the potential to win for certain missions is more with cost and availability. Helicopters are extremely expensive and require constant maintenance, and tilt rotors like the V-22 are even worse. But an e-VTOL could potentially eliminate transmissions, clutches, drive shafts, swashplates, etc. Long term we'll see a mix of both technologies being used.
As for survivability, we'll see. Any significant damage to the rotor systems will send most helicopters straight into the ground.
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?
I wonder what % of traffic is to/from JFK. The subway decently connects much of the city to the JFK air train, but it's a fairly inconvenient journey. Toronto's UP express has made travel to YYZ significantly easier, but I doubt it's possible to construct something similar in NYC.
I love aviation, but I also don't see air travel as being a scalable/affordable solution to this problem. Then again, it's only meant to alleviate traffic burden for a certain segment of the population.
the problem with train it stops ... on every train stop. New york specifically, there are several networks(new jersey, mta, there are lines that are 100+ years old.
In general if you have an affordable enough option you'd never walk into subway, with your several luggages, to travel longer. Train is a decent plan b.
> if you have an affordable enough option you'd never walk into subway, with your several luggages, to travel longer
I'm moderately wealthy and lived in New York for a decade. I take the train between JFK and Manhattan. (Specifically, the LIRR.) It's faster, more reliable and–for me–more comfortable than taking a car. (It's also safer.) If I have my cat with me or I feel like having fun, I'll take a Blade, but that's realistically only shaving like 20 minutes off the travel time.
LIRR is not a dirty MTA train :) Noisy shaky helicopter is not an electric taxi with 6+ motors that gives you more stability with way less noise that flies after take of using wings.
Cars for sure are less convenient.
> LIRR is not a dirty MTA train :) Noisy shaky helicopter is not an electric taxi with 6+ motors that gives you more stability with way less noise that flies after take of using wings
I've also taken the A from Harlem to JFK once. It was fine. Tougher to read a book, like I can on the LIRR, mostly because the frequency of stops means having to constantly be aware of your belongings.
And agree on helicopters. We already have helicopters. Switching them to eVTOLs is a move forward.
if your air taxi is pilotless and electric, why it can't be scalable.
How many people do you think enter/exit JFK arrivals and departures every hour? Where are you going to land all those air vehicles? Is this a shuttle service with many seats? How do you plan for the air traffic for that many people?
About 7000 on average, but let's say 10000 since demand varies. And let's consider doing 10% of them with helicopters. If we average 3 people per helicopter, that's 170 groups in and 170 groups out. If each landing needs 5 minutes of pad time, that's 14 pads. Make it 20 to handle variation.
Wow, that makes it sound significantly more feasible than I would have guessed.
Where do you put those 20 pads in the city?
I'm not sure but there's a whole lot of city available. That half of the problem is easy on a technical level.
Those are all reasonable questions, but if some entity would be able to answer them, of all things, I think JFK, an airport, would be well equipped to handle them.
JFK airtrain carries about 30K passengers per weekday in 2025. how many landing pads would be needed to carry a meaningful % of that traffic alone?
travel time is 5-10 mins with 40 mins to 2hours.
Yes, it is better compared to helicopter. cheaper, less noise. e.g. you can place it more applications, for less money.
Well it's 5-10 minutes once you get to the west 30th st heliport, which can easily take 20 minutes within Manhattan. Plus getting loaded in, cleared for takeoff, and potential for backups at the landing pads, I suspect the gains are much less in practice.
How long does it take to get from a helipad to the terminals at JFK?
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.
it's every airport in every city. In new york only you have 3 airports. its a 200k+ a day traffic.
[dead]
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...
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.
The upcoming solid-state batteries are around 500 Wh/kg.
But batteries have an advantage over turbines, especially small turbines: specific _power_ density.
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.
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.
Yes, I know, I'm from Scotland!
Maybe one day it will be so casual that one could catch a Joby wearing some jobby catchers.
Looks like noise pollution.
Wouldn't the city be better when the wealthy have to deal with the same services and quality of life as everyone else -- not (literally, in this case) elevating themselves above others, while making everyone else's life worse?
They are supposedly quieter than helicopters and we already have a ton of helicopter noise.
We also need to get rid of the unnecessary helicopter noise.
The US would benefit greatly if that were the case for all things. But alas, the owners don’t want to mingle with their slaves.
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
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.
> Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.
Every country says this about every other country. The UK has HS2, and we point to Germany. Germany has Stuttgart 21 and they point to Spain. Spain has the Sagrada Familia. Spain points to China, and China has the HZMB [0]
This stuff is really really hard, and standards have evolved hugely. The london underground would never be built today, because of the ignored costs. HS2's massive problem isn't that we spent £100m on a Bat tunnel [1], it's that nobody was willing to say no because that decision is pinned to you but the blame absolving is "someone elses problem".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80.... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo
I'm not exactly sure the point you're making about each country pointing at another as a positive example. The chain you've listed (US->UK->Germany->Spain->China) is a pretty good list of countries in descending order of cost to build infrastructure (it's not a straightforward analysis, but see https://transitcosts.com/new-data/ for example). There are always boondoggles, but the scoreboard is pretty clear -- each country in that list is better than the country before at building rail infrastructure.
Your analogy is like saying that everyone thinks someone else is a faster runner: amateurs point to collegiate athletes, collegiate athletes point to elites, elites point to Olympians. You can find someone in each of these categories who has run a bad race, but that doesn't invalidate the existence of the differences in ability.
No, my analogy is that everyone assumes that everyone else is an Olympic runner, when we’re all just college athletes.
There are plenty of countries winning gold medals for massive infrastructure projects while the richest one can’t even get into college
The comment I replied to said:
> Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.
I picked a handful of absolutely colossal overspends on massive infra projects to point out that no, not every other western country is doing so. All countries have their success stories and mega disaster projects
> All countries have their success stories and mega disaster projects
What mega project success stories does the US have in the last 20 or 30 years?
We just sent people around the moon. James Webb is uncovering a ton COVID vaccines
The US did all those before (and they were huge successes) it’s just re-learning what it already did.
So is building a new train line, or a highway/motorway, or a nuclear reactor.
I mean, I'm not sure that the Sagrada Familia is a good example. It taking a long time to build was arguably part of the _point_, and was planned from the start.
I wasn’t sure if I should leave it in or not, it was more tongue in cheek than anything. The train between Madrid and Barcelona is a real example [0]
[0] https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2014/05/13/inenglish/13999...
Isn't it? Look up the California high speed rail. There is massive corruption, incompetence, and red tape.
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.)
Even at 15 Euros I bet its way cheaper than a helicopter or electric VTOL aircraft
Oh, yeah, and it can and does handle a scale of traffic that a helicopter service obviously couldn't. I think each train takes about a thousand people and they're every ten minutes or something.
The "use helicopters for airport access" thing seems, at best, extremely niche.
Joby plans to expand way beyond airport access, it’s meant to be basically flying rideshare. The key enabler is they designed it to be quiet enough to not annoy everyone around like a helicopter, so that it would be reasonable to have this thing taking off from residential neighborhoods. JFK access is just a very visible first test run.
This thing will not be taking off from residential neighborhoods. Regardless of noise, like any manned VTOL aircraft it requires a large open area free of overhead obstructions (trees, wires).
And the notion that landing pads will be installed on the roofs of tall buildings is mostly a fantasy. Commercial or high-rise roofs are mostly already occupied with other machinery, and aren't designed to support the extra weight.
Yep, Stockholm's Arlanda express train is costly as well
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.
20% cost overrun is nothing if you look at the typical cost overrun of a US infrastructure project. UES extension in NYC a prime example of that. And 3 years late? How about 50 years late?
So your unions and regulations have nothing to do with it, but it has everything to do with corruption and the way US public command is arbitraged. You probably need _more_ regulation to avoid the former, and have unions involved in the review process (construction workers usually know when a construction company is full of shit).
yeah lol, in NYC 3 years and 20% would be regarded as an unprecedented success
Exactly, some serious bonuses would be paid out
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.
NYC unions are not your average worker. In my north of NYC town the labor rate for a union worker is 3x that of non union..and state laws mandate govt projects must pay that rate.
Yeah, that is what unions are for, protecting worker wages from the ever tightening noose of greedy capitalists that would otherwise use slave labor if they still could.
unions are often a form of corruption themselves. If, as is often the case, there's only one union that can do a job, that means that that union is a monopoly.
I don't see how that is corruption. Unions can be corrupted when the union leader's goals diverge from the average union members, but the whole point of a union is to collectively bargain as one to try and make up for the inherent power imbalance that capital holders possess. If workers were being treated well and not taken advantage of a union wouldn't form in the first place and people wouldn't want to join it.
They all too often use the together for political purposes that are corruption. If I legally have to hire union that is corruption.
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.
Do you know where JFK is? JFK does not sit outside the city like Arlanda. JFK is in the NYC Queens borough surrounded by highly dense urban sprawl. That setup makes sense for an airport that sits far outside the city.
No track to JFK can support anything near a 200km/hr train and building a track for such a train is a nonstarter.
It'd likely have to go largely underground. This is the approach being taken for Dublin Airport (again, a far, far smaller city than NYC); it'll be served by a largely underground metro line, running every 3 minutes each direction, taking about 20 minutes from the city centre.
Now, the catch there is that this metro isn't going to the airport, it's going _through_ the airport. Even without the airport it would be justifiable, so the airport kind of gets it for free. That's probably the only scenario where you can justify this sort of thing; it would be comically overkill if it was just to serve the airport (it will be able to move 20,000 people per hour per direction, which is... a lot more than the airport can move.)
That said, you'd think something along these lines might be justifiable; as you say, the area surrounding JFK is dense.
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.
the LIRR also goes from manhattan to jamaica, and it does in fact take 20 minutes or so (21 according to google maps)
You can only pick up the LIRR from midtown and the Jamaica endpoint is the AirTrain which requires a separate fare and another 10-12 minutes to get to the terminal. Having said that, AirTrain/LIRR is my preferred route into Manhattan on business travel, but I always take an Uber out to the airport unless I've got a late night flight.
Why? The LIRR is way faster out of the city compared to rush hour traffic. OTOH there are many fewer trains at night.
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.
According to Bloomberg[1] construction of the first phase of the second avenue subway cost about 2.5B USD per mile.
At that rate, even if you just look at extending the A/C/E from Jamaica to JFK, you're talking about 15B or so USD. And compared to today's [subway|LIRR] -> airtrain system, you probably only cut about 25% of the travel time (from 60 minutes down to 45 minutes)
Compare that to, for example, the Gateway Tunnel, estimated to cost about 16B USD and double the daily commuter capacity from NJ to NYC (including traffic to and from EWR!), and it's hard to justify new infrastructure to make it easier to get to the airport.
1. In NYC Subway, a Case Study in Runaway Transit Construction Costs - Bloomberg https://share.google/SPcN8iRDZG7lNiwt9
That’s something like $2k/resident to build, and then ongoing maintenance. Seems high for something that most will never use.
> Not sure the same ruthlessness would be needed with tunnels
Still requires lots of cut and cover due to buried power and water mains being poorly documented. And stations will require razing buildings, as well as gentrifying neighborhoods.
It’s not only about underground vs evicting people.
It’s also in large part about making sure that your project gets the required funding and other (social) projects don’t.
I live two blocks form the Rockaway A station, two stops from the Howard Beach/JFK station that hooks you into the Air train. It's at least 30 minutes on an express A to Fulton St, the first stop in Manhattan. Takes me about 45 minutes to get to Penn station from my house, an hour or more with delays. Unsure of what the Air train to LIRR Jamaica then to Penn in Manhattan takes, might be faster then the A depending.
15 minutes to fly from JFK to lower Manhattan is at least a 3x speed up, likely closer to 4-5x.
Back in the time when I frequented NYC I took the train to JFK, is that no longer a thing? the LIRR brought me a'clackity-clacking (haven't you Yanks learned about that new thing called welded rails?) past Rockaway to where those driverless shuttle things took over the ride. It did take a while but I rather liked the trip. I use public transport wherever I can, certainly over overpriced taxi 'services'. Once when in London I let myself be convinced by the press rep who insisted I take a taxi with her to the airport instead of the tube as I intended. Well, let's just say that if this were all part of her plan to corner me for a few more hours it worked because the non-unexpected traffic jam kept us from catching our flight. Great job, miss press rep, drinks are on you. In other words yay for public transport in those places where it is more or less reliable and not suicidally unsafe to ride.
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
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.
> 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
You must not live in a dense city. Rail doesn't have traffic and is usually faster, and much faster in heavy traffic, including rush hour, sporting events, airports, bridges/tunnels across the river, parades, marathons, etc. etc.
Also, there's no advantage to Waymo that doesn't apply to rideshare and taxi. I doubt people will care that Waymo vehicles autonomous, beyond the initial novelty (and despite SV's attempted marketing that their robots are better than people).
Finally, despite SV trying to ridicule any attitude that threatens their profits, most people like the greater good.
I do live in a dense city with rail and it's slower, especially accounting for last-mile transit. Rail does have traffic, they just sit next to you and you have to navigate around them on foot.
It's also not true that there's no advantage to Waymo; I take rideshare and taxis everywhere, and it will be a massive draw turning that into a pure transaction with a robot instead of it being a potentially social experience based on the whims and social malfunctions of the driver you get that day. As soon as Waymo or equivalent is available everywhere I will never choose to take a human-driven car again. And that's before getting into the many traffic advantages afforded to a fleet of cars that act as a collaborative swarm.
To me that does describe the greater good. For all its real benefits, passenger rail is inflexible and bulky in comparison.
> Rail does have traffic, they just sit next to you and you have to navigate around them on foot.
Obviously not what I'm talking about. It does not increase travel time in a significant way, and I'm including NYC subways. It's not like traffic jams for cars.
> it will be a massive draw turning that into a pure transaction with a robot instead of it being a potentially social experience based on the whims and social malfunctions of the driver you get that day
You're entitled to your personal preferences, of course, and I hope you find what works for you. Assuming your preferences are globalized is not factual: Most humans generally desire social interactions with other humans. We are naturally social animals that live in groups.
> To me that does describe the greater good.
Antisocial behavior is not 'good', it's just what you like. The pandemic was a major negative for society on a social level.
> Obviously not what I'm talking about. It does not increase travel time in a significant way, and I'm including NYC subways. It's not like traffic jams for cars.
It's still relevant. Waiting for the next train, finding a seat, these are still jams. Travel time is also increased when you are required to be on the transit schedule instead of leaving at any time.
> Most humans generally desire social interactions with other humans. We are naturally social animals that live in groups.
This is a silly leap. Taxi and ride-share drivers are service workers. You don't shoot the shit with the cashier at McDonalds; he is doing his job and is literally forced to politely entertain you if you decide to trap him in conversation. When you are paying somebody to do a job it is not a social interaction anymore and has no bearing on whether one enjoys real social interaction. There are Uber drivers who falsely identify themselves to the app as deaf or hard-of-hearing specifically because they'd rather focus on driving than be a performing clown for chatty riders at the same time.
> Antisocial behavior is not 'good', it's just what you like. The pandemic was a major negative for society on a social level.
It's not antisocial to want privacy; it's not antisocial to want a predictable experience during transit. A Waymo is substantially less likely than a human stranger to rob or kill or rape you; Uber added a feature where women riders can set a preference for hiring women drivers to avoid tension and danger. The human element of taxis is a downside unless you fancy yourself Miss Daisy.
> better in every other conceivable way
except for being like 10x more expensive, of course
> easier infrastructure build out
lol yes we should just replace Amtrak with 40 lane highways full of waymos. great idea
> except for being like 10x more expensive, of course
Expense is largely fake when we're talking about transit. Amtrak specifically is directly federally subsidized; most bus lines run at a substantial loss. At scale there's no specific reason a fleet of cars has to be more expensive to the rider than either of these things.
> lol yes we should just replace Amtrak with 40 lane highways full of waymos. great idea
Didn't suggest replacing what's already there, there's just no justification to start building more in the US in big 2026. The time has really passed for that to be a good investment.
Buses are cars, buses can be self-driving, and they use the same infrastructure as other cars. Cars can also be made to be much smaller for the average trip, 1-2 passenger seats only, if you don't need a driver. They can go faster and stop less if you aren't subject to human reaction time. These changes are obviously future tech, but it seems nearer every day, and if we achieve genuine full self-driving at scale all assumptions and constraints about travel by car have to change.
Keep in shape my friend! The smaller/sportier flying cars will probably have more weight restrictions.
Why drive to a VTOL zone? Just take off from your driveway!
> 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.
> 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?
Regularly? No. Most people aren't regularly taking helicopters anywhere, in part because their ability to fly around New York usually requires VFR conditions.
Occasionally? Yes. If you live in Harlem and need to get to JFK, you're paying an outsized time tax to get to and through Grand Central or Penn Station compared with taking the West Side Highway down to the 30th Street heliport. If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel.
(I'm ignoring the outer boroughs and New York's surrounding suburbs, for whom this could actually be a game changer.)
> the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it is a dumb car for rich people
Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.
> If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel.
We will see what happens the first time one of them crashes.
Obviously there are a lot of variables but helicopter and city bus crashes happen so we’ll have some idea what to expect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Hudson_River_helicopter_c...
https://abc7ny.com/post/mta-driver-injured-bus-crashes-store...
> Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.
... Eh? The very successful Nissan Leaf (for quite a long time the best-selling electric car in the world) came out the year after the Tesla Roadster. The Renault Zoe (again, quite successful) came out about a year after that, if you're really hung up on the 'west' thing.
> 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.
Tesla never meant to sell it in large numbers, and they probably couldn’t have made many more anyway. And this still represented around $3bn if revenue and helped get Tesla off the ground.
> 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).
> Someone making $50k isn't going to spend $200/trip regularly
They don’t fly regularly. I picked that number because it puts $200 into the reasonable splurge bucket, and that’s the lowest income of a friend I know who has taken one more than once.
If $50k doesn’t do it, take it to $80k and still understand that covers quite a bit more than half of Manhattan. Plugging these services as top 0.1% is wrong—that’s private jets.
> They don’t fly regularly
Right, which is why it makes no sense for them to pay extra to get to the airport slightly faster. (They might splurge $200 occasionally to get home from a late night out or something, but this isn't serving that route). They're not doing last-minute spontaneous trips or trying to cram a city break into a weekend. They're not cutting it close on the timing knowing they can always buy a replacement if they miss their flight. They probably don't even have precheck, which tells you how much saving 20 minutes the rare time they fly is worth to them. This is absolutely not a product that fits into a $50k or $80k lifestyle.
I live in NYC and make quite a bit more than $80k and would still never splurge $200 for a trip to the airport. JFK by car (when I'm in an emergency) is already $100 and I get irrationally angry at it. Not to mention I'd have to actually get to a helipad, which are only on river fronts, an basically no train goes to those either, so I'm still in a cab.
> would still never splurge $200 for a trip to the airport
Would you splurge $200 on anything? There are 8.6 million people in New York and 1.7 million in Manhattan. Some fraction of those can call this their cup of tea.
Like, I will never splurge for curbside bag check. That doesn't make it a plutocratic privilege. eVTOLs have lots of downsides that are worth debating. Only solving "problems for the 0.001%" is not one of them. That designation belongs to private jets.
I'd absolutely splurge $200 on a lot of things (a date just the other day for instance) but there's many options at least as convenient, remembering you still have to get to the helipad, as this.
As a New Yorker I don't want these things with zero failure ability anywhere near me. At least a helicopter can autorotate.
I think many people reflexively assume that this in the same cost tier as a private jet. I wonder if it could eventually get to somewhere on the order of uber per mile, since a mile takes much less pilot time, and the maintenance requirements are presumably lower on these than on traditional single engine piston aircraft.
> Like, I will never splurge for curbside bag check. That doesn't make it a plutocratic privilege.
Doesn't it? It feels like it to me, like that $70 coffee with gold flakes that was doing the rounds a year or two back - sure, it's technically an amount of money that a regular person could spend, but it's absolutely not a product for them.
> why it makes no sense for them to pay extra to get to the airport slightly faster
“Slightly” faster from where they live is like an hour.
> They're not doing last-minute spontaneous trips or trying to cram a city break into a weekend
I’ve taken Blades quite a few times. This describes zero of their clients. It’s folks who want to fly out of EWR without having to deal with New Jersey’s infrastructure, those splurging and a very small number of regulars.
> This is absolutely not a product that fits into a $50k or $80k lifestyle
Agree. But it can and does on occasion. That makes it categorically different from purely plutocratic services. Also, use $80k if that works better for the example. That’s half of New Yorkers and a commanding majority of Manhattan residents.
Helicopters and eVTOLs are relatively accessible in a city as rich as New York.
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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.
There is a train to JFK, it does not take 20 minutes.
Multiple trains. You can take LIRR to Jamaica and transfer to AirTrain. Or take the A subway line. LIRR is faster but still like 45 minutes to either Brooklyn or Manhattan.
> There is a train to JFK, it does not take 20 minutes
An express train could. It would be a political non-starter since it does jack shit for the boroughs.
They are not mutually exclusive you know?
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
You’re probably right on crime. But I will say that both SF and Chicago(most of my experience) local train systems are constantly filled with homeless people with severe mental health issues. Generally , without fixing that a large segment of the population are never going to want to ride public transport.
I'm with you. Imagine the Sackler class being forced to see the results of what they have inflicted on American society?
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.
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.
Do the people who run the helipads not also get to eat and put their kids through school though? Where are you that makes the parents pay directly for school such that not having a job at the train station means their kids go hungry and unschooled? What horrible place is that? (Wait, don't tell me, is it the USA?)
I don't know how the economics in the electric VTOL era works out, but the thing about air travel vs train travel is that in order for the train to be useful, you have to build tracks from every train station to every other train station to have perfect routability, which is expensive. However, for a helipad, once you've built the helipad it automatically connects to all other helipads in range.
> haven't done the math, but I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains
In Manhattan? I honestly would. If it were a nation, it would be the 22nd-largest economy. Any disruption to that system is massively expensive.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do the math. But we also shouldn't be reaching conclusions without attempting it.
People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time. Manhattan is hardly a purely reasonable place, in fact it's far from it. All kinds of nonsense takes place in nyc all the time. If nyc was driven by cold economic reason it would be boring and lame compared to what it is today.
> People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time
This isn’t in the same category as burying a new train line. I lived around just the Hudson Yard water and electric expansions when those happened. It was years of increased noise, traffic and litigation.
Sure it was bothersome, but it didn't seem to cause the city to collapse into itself, either.
> it didn't seem to cause the city to collapse into itself
Straw man. Nobody claimed these were existential threats.
OP said "I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains." I'm saying I wouldn't be surprised if the opposite came out–take the costs of the disruption and time value of money into account, and building a new train line anywhere in Manhattan is a worse use of resources than (a) increasing capacity on existing lines, a veritable forest of low-hanging fruit or even (b) eVTOLs.
> Nobody claimed these were existential threats.
Strawman: yes, but the point stands in its milder form that noise etc isn't substantial economic disruptive.
But yeah the reality is that no one is going to be digging in NY substantially soon/ever because if you look at precedent that's been the case for the last 100 years. And building a tunnel to JFK would be huge
NYC already have a functional mass transit system. Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus? Why it's so hard to understand there still is the need for other modes of transportation. At the very least, tourists want to view the city from above, or those who wants a quick hop from JFK to Manhattan. This is not a replacement for mass transportation.
At least try to show curiosity about what they want to solve.
> Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus?
Hypothesis: people aren't familiar with New York's trains. It's a world-class network the likes of which we don't otherwise have in North America. (Sorry Toronto.) So when they see eVTOLs, they emotionally map it to their local trainless context.
I don't fit the hypothesis - the two cities I've lived in (Berlin, Seoul) have excellent trains. So it's perhaps overfitting in the other direction.
Both of those cities are not in North America. In North America, New York City is by far our best example of a transit system. It is terrible by world standards, but is still the best example we have in North America.
... I mean, no. It's more that it is weird that there is no train to the airport (it looks like you can take ~3 trains from Manhattan). New York is likely the only really big city in the developed world where this is the case.
In Ireland, everyone thinks it's pretty ridiculous that there's no train to Dublin Airport (all going well, it will finally have one in 2036 or so, after _many_ false starts). Dublin's a city of about 1.5 million people. It's pretty incomprehensible that a city ten times the size wouldn't have one.
There is (since 2023) a train that connects directly from Grand Central to JFK AirTrain.
Airtrain opened in 2003 [1]. It connected to the subway system and, through Jamaica, Penn Station. The novel bit in 2023 was also linking into Grand Central.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTrain_JFK
Huh. Google Maps was not showing me that.
EDIT: Oh, wait, misread, I thought you meant a direct train from Grand Central to the airport.
> a direct train from Grand Central to the airport
It’s a single, low-bullshit transfer. Frankfurt Airport also requires a connection for terminals 2 and 3 [1].
[1] https://www.frankfurt-airport.com/en/transport-and-parking/t...
EVTOLS supposed to be less complex than cars and cars are already cheaper than trains.
Call me skeptical on being less complex than cars. I suppose this must be referring to parts count compared to an internal combustion engine car?
Suspension, steering, brakes, airbags, body...
Of course on a serious EVTOL you got variable pitch props and tilting rotors (basic 4 rotor design is inefficient just doesn't scale).
Avionics vs modern AEB, ESP, etc likely on par. Inverter redundancy way more important on EVTOL, but EVs have redundancy too.
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.
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.
I'm very dubious. Primarily because this goes from landing pad to landing pad. You'll still need transportation from the pad to wherever you're going. A taxi goes door to door. And what's an extra 20 minutes if you're sitting the whole time?
This is like a person-sized Roomba. Even if it might work, within certain strict constraints, it's essentially unnecessary.
> 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.
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.
Collective rotor based helicopters don't scare me at all, but drone based multi-rotor designs definitely do. A regular helicopter can safely land even with catastrophic engine failure or complete electronics failure thanks to its auto rotation capabilities, a drone platform just becomes a falling rock with zero control or stability. Plus a drone's control system is way more complicated which leaves more room for failures and problems.
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
When I read the headline, I pictured something like the flying cars from "Blade Runner". What I see in the video is a helicopter with six rotors.
I get that the leap forward here is that it's battery-powered. Still, I can't help feeling underwhelmed.
The main difference I read is that those airfoils actually come into play when it's not taking off and landing. That still doesn't make it nearly as cool as the air cars in Blade Runner but it's slightly better than just a helicopter too.
Aren't air traffic controllers already overworked and understaffed? How does adding hundreds of tiny helicopters fit in that picture?
Of all the reasons not to do this, air traffic control limitations have got to be the easiest to solve.
Also civilian air control needs to be handed over to Skynet
Will this be any less ridiculously loud than the conventional helicopters that fly over Brooklyn all day ferrying people to JFK?
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.
Sound comparison here: https://youtu.be/IX7rdJm5v6s?t=104
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?
That doesn't matter as much when each passenger is happy to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege.
24 pax/hr * $1000/pax * 12 hr/day = $288,000/day in revenue
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 say the same about ground taxis - buses are much more efficient
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.
This is a powered lift aircraft. There is no ability to autorotate or glide. It has redundant rotors and power systems so should be pretty reliable, but if there's a catastrophic failure then it will immediately go into a spin and crash.
> pretty reliable
Got it. If anything in this high tech state-of-the-art machine causes more than 2 motors to stop motoring then I'll most likely die in a crash. But it's not very likely that'll happen.
"The air taxi can continue flying with up to two motors out" says the article.
Probably safer than a V-22 Osprey.
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.
I'd rather be in a helicopter than one of these in the case of total engine failure, and I don't really trust helicopters!
Looks awesome. Wonder what happens if one engine fails, it will adjust itself probably.
2 engines can fail and it will still fly
Apparently nobody with Scottish heritage was involved in selecting that name.
That's a funny name - look up the Scottish slang "jobby".
It'll be even better when UPS buys a bunch of them.
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.
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