Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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