Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

It'll be cool if we can get electric aircraft like this as cheap as some of the somewhat homemade ultralights people make today. Battery and motor prices have a long way to go though

I did some contract work (2002-2003, at the tail end of their bankruptcy I think) for a Kitty Hawk that went out of business (after a second round of bankruptcy), and for a minute I thought this was an old article or something.

I protest, totally protest. Under no circumstances let people with dotcom webdev mentality run anything really serious in aeronautics.

I myself had a rather similar talk to what that the panelist had with Kitty Hawk people with a very well moneyed, but also very naive CEO of a drone delivery startup. Some sarcasm added, but it went along these lines:

Me: your best bet is to make a helicopter. Men much brighter than you were banging their heads against the wall non-stop for 60 years trying to solve this exact problem.

Startup CEO: But I hired most brilliant engineers from Amazon and Waymo for that. I'm paying them near 200k each.

Me: If this, this, and this thing breaks, your drone drops dead upon an urban area. And if you get into negative gees over ridgelines, your motor don't have enough torque to keep COM behind the centre of aerodynamic forces to prevent inversion. You can't change the law of gravity.

And he was like "can't we really do anything about that, can't we?" These people are so used to the culture of "easy solutions" that it's scary.

A convertoplane this big will be extremely unstable in wind gusts

Isn’t this why they partnered with boeing? To navigate regulation and bring in more aviation expertise

There is precedence for a fixed-wing rotor-based VTOL aircraft with the Osprey, at least aerodynamically. Operationally, the Osprey was a bit of a disaster.

But I agree that flight (and ESPECIALLY manned flight) needs extensive experience in aerospace engineering.

I haven't been following the project. How do you know they have webdev mentality?

The challenges of the Osprey with oversight from the minds that brought us the 737 MAX!

Osprey is more of a true biaxial helicopter first, and a convertoplane second.

V22 have 2 lateral DOF in which it can move without moving COM relative to point of aerodynamic force, and without changing its aerodynamic cross-section, so you don't get positive feedback to change of orientation in wind gusts.

This thing cannot do that as far as a glancing look can tell.

I am not an aeronautic engineer, just a motoglider pilot wannabe. If it looks borderline silly to even a man like me, it's scary to imagine what wool they must have pulled over for their mentors and industry advisers to go with that.

It would be a good idea to use better baselines for noise pollution than helicopters and airplanes of today. Perhaps like this - Life in the Spanish City that banned cars. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/18/paradise-life...

This is about how much noise your aircraft are allowed to create. What you should be able to hear in the street are "the tweeting of birds in the camellias, the tinkle of coffee spoons and the sound of human voices".

The company's lead is Sebastian Thurn who has been working on robotics, self driving cars, and AI since the early 1990s.

One of the most successful car makers in history from the early days of mass production of cars was run by an accountant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_P._Sloan

The OP is spreading FUD.

I can't imagine it would have more batteries than the model 3. It would be too heavy.

What about Zipline? They seem to be doing drone delivery (of emergency blood supplies) in other countries and their approach to both safety and design seem admirable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnKnMgWy_tM

The last time these kind of vehicles came up, someone linked to an Uber conference on the topic.

From what I gathered, this kind of noise level is a standard feature of the new electric air taxis.

> The Mountain View, California-based company calls it Heaviside, after noted physicist and electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside, who advanced a variety of theories and innovations in mathematics, electronics, and communications in the early 20th century.

I like this idea of naming things after people who've contributed to the field. Mount Everest's name came from a British surveyor and geographer George Everest.

Brand names quickly take on meaning, it doesn't have to be <NounVerb>.

I also can't imagine someone starting an aircraft company without having safety being drilled down their throat a million times before they produce anything that get's off the ground.

They built the thing, and fly it around 600ft in the sky. It’s not vaporware.

From what I can tell from the picture, it has 8 props, two wings, and a N-number of N221HV. Anything beyond that would be pure speculation.

Interestingly, when you look up the N-Number it says the engine type is “Electric”. Maybe that means something else?

https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?N...

When a VTOL vehicle switches directions of the blades in the air, is there any sort of drop in altitude as it moves into the forward direction? Or is it a gradual type of thing as it starts angling forward?

I could see any drop before it kicks in being startling for customers, especially if the motors are less powerful than a helicopter or jet.

I noticed the video makes a cut from flying to the landing part, without showing the transition of the blades downwards from forward flight. I'd imagine this also takes some careful timing to line up properly with the ground target.

When they led with “100x quieter than a helicopter,” my first reaction was a skeptical “well sure, decibels are logarithmic!” But 40dB from 600ft away is impressive, and within the range of what I would consider acceptable for residential flyover (though not takeoff and landing) in a medium-density area.

> On the helicopter, there’s a little bolt on top, and if you unscrew that, you take the cotter pin out, we all die.”

I imagine that's hard to do while in operation.

Meanwhile, a heli has autorotation, which is quite convenient in various failure modes.

One of the few companies in that space being run by sane people

May not be exactly the same, but I don't believe there's an appreciable drop on a tiltrotor like the V-22.

It is pretty quiet and very impressive. I wonder how many flyovers I would be ok with. 4 per hour sounds ok, but what if they route a highway above my house?

Every time I see a multirotor carrying people, I think of the many times while building them at the beginning of the drone renaissance that I saw 4/6/8 bladed multirotors have an AP failure, a blade break, a speed controller overheat, etc etc and it fell out of the sky, literally.

These do not have a glideslope!

Sure, a ballistic chute might prevent an onboard tragedy but I continue to wonder about what the flying car gets parachuted onto. What fires get started? Who gets crushed?

Super cool tech. Huge accomplishment for the engineers involved.

I want to know how this makes a safe unpowered descent.

I don't know much about this aircraft but this appears to be a winged aircraft which unlike quadcopters and helicopters,losing an engine or rotor does not translate to a crash(?) because it had n number of rotors on each side,if one is lost,you lose altitude maybe and turn off matching rotors on the other side,which naively appears safer than a helicopter.

Could be, I hope so. I really want to ride in one if they are indeed safe. With all of those motors and props in the air, that's a whole bunch of parasitic drag if it is able to glide.

This thing must be crazy light.

I wonder how much of the advertised quietness will dissapear once it gets speced for range and passengers.

If they've solved a fundamental problem of noisy props I would be very impressed.

For public transport or work commute,they don't need to fly that high. Maybe worst case they will be allowed at low altitude over water ways or low enough to where pre-emptive air-bag deployment would make it safe. In many ways hover craft is safer than cars I think,mostly because of the space available and lack of breaks (they say most car fatalities happen when people hit the break out of panic).

[I've been an engineer working on this vehicle for the past 2 years.]

Hi HN! It's great to see lots of interest.

One big reason we went public with the project is to help with recruiting, as we're starting to scale up our hiring for lots of positions, including testing, manufacturing, and every sort of engineering that you can think of.

The team is super strong technically, and is full of people with interesting backgrounds, from former Tesla execs to competition wingsuit jumpers (Seriously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk1ChndsN8Y).

The whole "flying car" industry has a high hype-to-substance ratio, but I think we're the real deal. The jobs page is here: https://kittyhawk.aero/heaviside/

I'd love to talk technical details on here, but we're still keeping pretty quiet about specifics. All I can say is that our test video is real footage, and not a render ;).

Your quote refers to the "jesus nut": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut, which doesn't apply to newer helicopters.

I checked on LinkedIn, the company has guys with PhD's in aerospace engineering working for them. Do you want to inform of this shortcoming?

The wing design reminded me of this Real Engineering video on the pros and cons of backward swept wings, including a look at the Grumman X-29:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN6vGxyMcVU

This definitely isn't shooting for mach 1.8, so the X-29 isn't an analogue, but there are interesting points about aerodynamics in that video nonetheless.

Love what you're doing and hope it's a success! That being said, how do you answer skeptics with questions similar to "What makes you believe your version will be different from the myriad of vaporware or lab-demo-only competitors?"

> I want to know how this makes a safe unpowered descent.

That's likely one area where a helicopter would have a significant advantage.

Why does it look like a toy when it flies? There’s something about he way it moves when it changes direction or lands that makes it not look as big as it should.

I'll just say, VTOLs are just so stupidly cool. Seeing a plane just sort of pick up and climb into the air like this will never cease to just be 'woah' inducing.

I frequently wonder about the things we're waiting for batteries to grow into, this is one of those things that makes me think the future has a decent shot at being insane.

I thought about that (and watched a few examples) but these would have a much less powerful motor, so I was curious how it handles it.

Sort of like the Ehang 216, but with a transition to horizontal flight.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf3BGnzXSG4

I'm encouraged to see proper wings and empennage, glad you're not making an octocopter. Bonus points for conventional (tailwheel) landing gear.

But questions:

How fast can it fly and for how long?

Article says "weighs about one-third of a Cessna". So less than 1000 lbs empty?

And, importantly, with those wings, does it "stall" normally, at 40 mph or so?

Asking as a former J-3 Cub pilot who'll assuredly never afford this.

I'm also guessing that the name 'heaviside' is a reference to the Heaviside step function. Which of course, looks like a vertical takeoff, and implies that this project is a "step function" in flying transportation, etc..It's a pretty great name.

The solution is remote work, not flying cars.

both

I guess this is the video he means: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7mc3C19kE4

I hope we see a vid with a 100kg test dummy in the chair soon.

I look forward to electric airplanes, this looks like an impressive contender, and I would like to know more about it. For one thing, I see this is being flown without an occupant. Is it carrying ballast equal in weight to a person, or is it merely carrying sufficient ballast, mounted well-forward, to put the CofG within limits? And is it carrying sufficient batteries to give the quoted 100-mile range? What is its operational ceiling?

I'm curious - surely there's still some single point that would let the rotor fly away? What does it mean that newer helicopters "doesn't have" this? I mean the rotor is attached? It's a single axel? There are scenarios where the rotor falls off?

Is Boeing who you would want to navigate regulatory paper work? Might be bad timing...

Wings don't help if you are below the stall speed.

It'd be nice to have emergency vehicles. But, don't build hanging parkways with good views, for the privileged, please.

We've been there before - https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2003/putting-pleasure-... - with Robert Moses parkways, "bridges instead of tunnels" and the likes. And we've now learned - it's a mistake to put mass transportation system into the air.

(Love flying, private pilot, airplanes, sailplanes, paragliders, had been flying half of my life. Yes, really cute bird. Yes, shiny. It's a mistake to put mass transportation system into the air. It is even worse to put a private road there.)

I see that, in horizontal flight, the propellers are behind the wing, and therefore in its wake. On the Piaggio Avanti, this arrangement creates quite noticable additional noise.

Conventional airplanes also have single points of failure, such as the main spar or the empennage. Granted, they are not moving parts.

This looks really exciting but I'm curious about the intended market. Is this a "level 5" vehicle in terms of autonomy? What sort of license would be involved for an owner and operator? Do you foresee people having these in suburban driveways or operating them between small airports? Willing to comment at all on target price (brackets)?

40dB at 600ft is impressive, especially if it is carrying a payload equal to that of a passenger, and is maintaining altitude. That 100x quote, however, has a whiff of an intent to deceive people who are not familiar with the technicalities of loudness measurement.

I'm psyched they named it after Heaviside. For the caliber, scope, and importance of his contributions, he is extremely under appreciated. Most of the people who have heard the name only know of the step function, but much of how electrical engineering is done (and named) is due to him.

Some things that could reasonably have his name attached (intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive):

Maxwell-Heaviside equations

Heaviside-Gibbs Vector calculus

Heaviside transmission line equations

Poynting-Heaviside vector

Heaviside loading coil

Heaviside-Cherenkov radiation

Heaviside-Lorentz force

Heaviside s-plane

> This is about how much noise your aircraft are allowed to create.

Sounds good. The same rules should apply to lawn mowers, motor bikes, construction, bars, stereos, drones, public transport, bands, dogs, children...

>I want to know how this makes a safe unpowered descent.

the wings seems to be enough for reasonable unpowered gliding. The canard design naturally helps prevent stall. And i'd be surprised if the engines on production models aren't split into 2 completely independent groups (given their number - 3 per/wing - on that prototype i think they aren't split) with completely separate power, controllers, etc, so even relatively serious failure would still leave you with half the engines - that would allow while uncomfortable, yet still controlled even vertical landing from lower hover which i'd suppose would be the worst situation to lose engines.

There isn't - the V-22 rotors tilt continuously from vertical to horizontal rather slowly as it builds up enough speed to transition to forward flight. Same thing with Quantum's VTOL UAVs.

Construction is temporary. Stereos and bands are played to bring enjoyment; the sound produced is the point, not a byproduct of some other motivation so those should get more of a pass. Many cities already enforce laws against persistently barking dogs and those laws can work just fine.

I'm with you regarding motor bikes and public transport but the same rules should not apply to the others. They can have their own rules.

The function is named after the person.

Sound from a lawn mower or a leaf blower is local and temporary. Yet cities do ban gas-powered leaf blowers.

http://files.meetup.com/4709972/Leaf%20Blower%20bans,%20etc....

100x quieter than a helicopter, with a few thousand people using them, is louder than a helicopter. A glance at any urban interstate would suggest that mass adoption would be loud...

Statistically speaking, powerplant failure is not a leading cause of accidents for general aviation aircraft. A small popup thunderstorm will rip this thing to shreds like confetti. A moderately gusting 30-40kt crosswind will result in this thing landing upside down in a ditch. A lightning strike from 10-20 miles away will result in an entire wing shearing off. Hit some precip on a cold day and structural icing will take this thing down in minutes.

Speaking as a pilot, if I were flying (or being flown) by this thing, the electric powerplant would be the least of my worries.

I realize that. I'm suggesting that they chose to name it after this person because of his association with the function, and it's evocations.

I would have thought most people would be more familiar with the heaviside layer (than the step function), even if only from the reference in the musical cats.

There has been at least two cases recently of the main rotor blades as a whole detaching in flight. Gearbox failure caused the second crash [1]

On the older 'teetering head' designs like the Huey, you can bump the mast (rotor shaft) in aggressive nose overs or low g conditions which would also separate the rotors from the aircraft.

[0] https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=213384

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHC_Helikopter_Service_Flight_...

I didn't know that, I'll check out his Wikipedia.

In that case I think you'd have to be sure you were building something great or at least challenging before you take on their name. Which has to be considered but regardless it's a nice gesture and the aircraft name which can change easier than a company name.

My comment was deliberately extreme as I believed the parent comment to be. The activities/devices I mentioned can be appropriate in certain locales, and inappropriate in others.

To suggest this new vehicle has to operate at a level to not drown out birds before it can fit into society is silly. It's reasonable to place restictions on their use, e.g. you shouldn't be able to takeoff and land in quiet residential neighborhoods, instead limit them to landing on the tops of very tall buildings or transport hubs.

Also, if people are allowed to use lawnmowers and loud exhausts on motorbikes, and have been doing so for years, suggesting a new technology has to be subject to more stringent restrictions is a little unfair.

Seems they are just taking a page out of Elon's playbook.

Totally, motorcycles, buses, etc. are all transient noise in a city louder than this vehicle. Other comments below are acting like these VTOLs would just be hovering over our apartments all the time, but it's actually closer to normal city sounds.

Emergency JATO? :D

This looks a lot more credible than the Moeller flying car :-). I'm never sure if I should be excited or not about flying cars in that I am already paranoid about someone running a red light, I'd hate to be tootling down the freeway and suddenly have a carplane appear on the road in front of me!

That said, make it a four passenger version and have them streaming across the Bay to off load the bridge infrastructure? That would be pretty cool. Would need a really good load/unload infrastructure though. I could see it making living in the Sierra foothills more realistic though.

A ten year old child scribbling with crayons on grid paper is more credible at this point than the Moller skycar. There's a number of companies that have flown (sans humans) small air taxi sized octocopters in the past 8 years, none of them Moller. Just off the top of my head, there's the Germans with their thing that has 16+ rotors, there is ehang, there's the Airbus vaihana project, there's this company, and several big names like Bell are working on tilt rotor small electric vtols.

Isn't that true for all winged aircrafts?

By all means let's hold the Heaviside to the same high safety standard as other aircrafts, but not higher.

This is one of the reasons why this craft and the Airbus vahana craft have at least eight motors and propellers.

Serious camera carrying octocopters for filming are strongly preferred over quad and hexacopters. They often carry $60,000 RED or Arri camera+lens combos. In a quad, motor failure is a guaranteed crash. In a hex, it's extremely dicey. Octocopter design with eight separate ESCs is safer.

In many cases the battery system is still 1+0 non redundant, however. As is the flight controller.

And since the Heaviside has many pairs of small rotors, it has another option which is to switch the rotors gradually pair by pair, but switching each pair quickly.

Couldn't the parking be organized by just putting roboticized "air garages" to the top of sky scrapers? Carriers operate a fleet of aircraft in a very constrained space. With purely VTOL craft there is no need for that to be horizontal, it all could be put to vertical.

So you would have

1. Landing bay (helicopter pad or an enclosed bay).For enclosed bays those could be stacked on top of one another.

2. Robotic parking

3. Air control system to facilitate traffic and parking.

I'm not saying this is a necessarily a good idea. But I would love to know why it would not work.

Privileged? Would you call shuttle buses employed by tech companies as privileged too? What about using these planes instead of shuttles to mass transport people?

I think you'll find building sufficient parking on top of skyscrapers will run into cost and weight issues.

Cost, because much parking is currently on street or in dedicated low cost parking structures.

Weight... For obvious reasons.

Heaviside is particularly inspiring to me because he was (somewhat) self-taught. He came from a modest family, got a job as a telegraph operator, then as an electrician, then learned physics, then made huge contributions to it.

Proper but forward-swept wings, which mean you won't be able to fly this without substantial computer assistance.

Do you know Lilium and their electric VTOL aircraft? It also looks unreal during some flight manoeuvers, see here: https://youtu.be/RLqzatnVAfA?t=62

That was a video of a sub-scale prototype, they have newer videos of a larger one at http://www.lilium.com

I don't think those are valid arguments. Just because current urban design is built around a specific transport mode does not mean it could not be rebuilt to facilitate another.

Not remodeling. Redesigning. It's very straightforward to move and redesign urban centers. Lot of countries do it all the time. The proble.s are not related to human nature or engineering, but to purely finances.

Oh sure because the air roads are going to be packed as densely as the ground roads with planes flying tail to tail in multiple lanes. /S

If you have a ton of PhDs in thermodynamics, and the company is developing a perpetual motion engine, something is definitely wrong.

Analogously, if the company is pilled to the brim with ex-Boeing engineers, but don't seem to recognise an obvious lack of airworthiness, they must probably doing that intentionally

> Isn't that true for all winged aircrafts?

Indeed it is, and my comment should be read in the context of the post I am replying to. Having wings gives Heaviside an advantage over purely multi-rotor aircraft most of the time, but during VTOL operations, there is a stage where the wings do not help.

Helicopters have an advantage over all other VTOL aircraft in that they can autorotate, though this is especially tricky in lightweight helicopters, on account of a lack of rotor inertia.

As someone who likes to be outdoors, I can attest to the quite remarkable frequency and persistence of lawn-mowing, anywhere within earshot of human settlement. If I could swap a passing Heaviside for each gas lawnmower I hear, I would take the trade.

Losing a motor isn’t really an issue on multirotors so long as you have >4 blades. Most autopilots have the ability to compensate for a motor loss.

Mind linking us to a some of the myriad of vapourware please? Just haven't seen that many EVTOL aircrafts successfully fly, like the heaviside shows, but maybe I have not been paying attention.

I thought it was a scaled prototype first time I saw the video.

The flight jerkiness probably comes from the flight controller not being super polished, and also the aircraft being piloted remotely by a drone pilot, so the pilot doesn't have the same feedback an onboard pilot would have.

Our cities continue to grow, we need a way to increase our travel speed.

This is why they'll never work in areas with weather as such. Certainly limits the geographical areas where they would be practical.

In rain, people would have to resort to ground based transport, so it doesn't really solve the problem. Transportation has to deal with weather. In the future, when batteries are light and powerful enough to run heavy aircraft (ie. Less vulnerable to light winds) vstol craft will be more practical. So much is waiting on Kw per AA sized battery.

Parkway is not parking. Wiki: The term has also been applied to scenic highways and to limited-access roads more generally. Many parkways originally intended for scenic, recreational driving have evolved into major urban and commuter routes.

The mistake that would be great to avoid is "private parkways in the sky" in the urban areas.

Meteorologist here. Every place on Earth has weather as such. Frequency is different for different places, but everywhere experiences those conditions multiple times a year (at altitude, hazardous conditions as such are far more frequent than on the surface).

Why is it silly? If someone rides a bicycle, walks or rides a subway in a city there is no noise pollution. Why noise pollution should be allowed for a guy flying his motorbike from his private hills to the urban center?

Please reread what I wrote.

To be clear, I really dislike noise pollution, and welcome the day when noisy lawnmowers, leaf blowers, jetskis and motercycles are banned from where people live, relax, most places really. I think it is really selfish for others to produce such noise around others.

What is silly is to say this noisy thing can't possibly fit into the world without hitting an extreme benchmark, when society has already accepted much worse offenders (whether you and I like it).