Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

[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 ;).

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.)

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.

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.