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

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.

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.

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?