
Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside - BrooklynRage
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/kitty-hawk-reveals-its-secret-project-heaviside/
======
lmetro
[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](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/](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 ;).

~~~
dchichkov
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-...](https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2003/putting-pleasure-
back-drive-reclaiming-urban-parkways-21st-century/) \- 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.)

~~~
fsloth
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.

~~~
foota
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.

~~~
fsloth
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.

------
dchichkov
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...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/18/paradise-life-spanish-
city-banned-cars-pontevedra)

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".

~~~
zizee
> 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...

~~~
Atheros
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.

~~~
zizee
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.

~~~
dchichkov
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?

~~~
zizee
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).

------
mortenjorck
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.

~~~
ISL
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...

~~~
acollins1331
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

------
heyflyguy
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.

~~~
badrabbit
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.

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

~~~
UIZealot
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.

~~~
mannykannot
> 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.

------
dmix
> 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.

~~~
rrss
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

~~~
salty_biscuits
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.

------
blendo
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.

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

------
platz
> 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.

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

~~~
e12e
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?

~~~
maxden
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](https://aviation-
safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=213384)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHC_Helikopter_Service_Flight_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHC_Helikopter_Service_Flight_241)

------
whamlastxmas
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

~~~
zaroth
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...](https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?NNumbertxt=N221HV)

------
brownbat
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](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.

------
gimmeThaBeet
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.

------
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
walrus01
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.

------
dmix
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.

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

~~~
Tossrock
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.

~~~
UIZealot
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_.

------
duaoebg
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.

~~~
mannykannot
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.

------
jonplackett
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.

~~~
_Microft
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](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](http://www.lilium.com)

------
ZeroGravitas
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.

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

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

------
sjg007
The solution is remote work, not flying cars.

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

------
bdcravens
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.

------
baybal2
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

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

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

