People always comparing it to the long certification times of other machines. It’s Experimental. It just needs to work. They are doing the HC50 certification in parallel so that can take as long as it needs, probably 5-10 years. Stop comparing apples with oranges.
Bitcoin payments: the customer pays into a UK exchange called Coincorner, who pay Hill immediately in £ …he has no exposure to BTC.
Customer deposits are non-refundable so he can book that as revenue and spend it on R&D.
There’s up to 4000 sales with interest registered but waiting on certain milestones such as Engine on test bench, prototype lifting off, serial #1, 50,000 fleet hours, …. Each major milestone (like real fuselage), brings a surge of orders.
Remember this is a new category of customer unlocked: people like me who “can afford the capital cost of a helicopter but who can’t afford to lose it”. I would never have bought a helicopter otherwise. I am an entirely new market for helicopter orders. He understands his market. There is an app with lots of tech video updates the public doesn’t see, and a supportive community that is very positive and posts cool pics. Basically the opposite of pprune. The wait time is part of the excitement and journey for me. Getting to see weekly updates as things come together over many years builds excitement. For me, lifting off this machine after waiting 3-5 years or whatever it will end up being, will be amazing.
Seeing as this thing is experimental, it just needs to work, physically. I still haven’t seen any of the negative nancies actually provide any legitimate engineering reasons why it won’t work or be manufactured.
He publicly stated in the last update about the council applications for the production center, and he has 4 backup options including worst case a bunch of small sites he rents. He said he isn’t going to let a planning application stop him.
He says he’s done the rotor system but can’t show details until some patents have gone through.
Engine: what I’m most worried about since it’s gone through several iterations but he appears set that it’s basically finalised now, and seems confident for a “summer” (Nth hemisphere) running.
I suspect this long thread will continue to go back and forth as things are designed. “He got an engine but look it blew up ha ha”. “Look it flies but they had ground resonance how **** is that”. “They made their factory but it was late”. “Oh yeah they are selling but it’s a long wait time and £100k more than they promised”. “Oh look it only goes 140kts, all those hill evangilists said it would probably go 160”. “Haha look it’s got an AD for this issue now - we said that would be a problem 3 years ago”. People will always complain.