Uber To Take Over GA From 2020

[Ejector]

Uber plans to launch flying ride service in Texas and Dubai by 2020 - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-26/uber-plans-to-launch-flying-cars-within-three-years/8471990)

[Shagpile]

Ok I'll bite.

Firstly, here is the white paper: https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf

Your headline is misleading. Apart from transporting Bronwyn Bishop 5 miles across town, this concept is not displacing GA. In fact the Uber concept will rely on pilots (hooray!) which is probably a mistake (wait, what?). These kinds of autonomous transport in the future will be automated. Why would you waste precious weight transporting a human when that could be better spent on more batteries for longer range, or another human passenger.

Secondly, Uber are a walking dead company. They won't be around in 2020 (caveat: unless they somehow convince some more idiot investors to give them more money). Their employees are leaving in droves, they are plagued by scandals and court cases, their CEO is an asshole etc etc. Countries are clamping down on the lack of employee benefits they (don't) pay their drivers. See Italy most recently. And that is not to mention their main taxi business *burns* capital. From what I read, 1/3 of your fare has been discounted by investors. Thanks Dotcom bubble v2.0 !!

Anyway back to driverless plane: neat concept and it will happen, but won't be displacing GA for another decade at least. Battery energy density & charging times needs some breakthroughs for longer distance transportation.

What we will see in the interim is more hybrid solutions. I visited Aero-Expo this year in Europe where the theme was electric GA. Some cool developments taking place. Bigger than I realised. But still years off.

For anybody interested in what the next 10 years of technology will bring in the car space, which has relevance to aircraft, take a look at Tony Seba's video: https://youtu.be/Kxryv2XrnqM
It's very well researched and presented. Highly recommended.

[neville_nobody]

Just another attention seeking news headline. Not going to happen in that time period if at all. End. Of. Story.

I love all these tech nerds who think that aviation regulators are just going to roll over and waiver every regulation that ever existed because they're 'special'.

Contingency procedures with a EFATO in an urban environment alone would be a massive hurdle to jump over, and that is assuming you already have a type certificate and an AOC.

[Shagpile]

Actually multi rotor electrics can handle engine failures quite easy. This is not a 1950's era lycoming which is what the regulations are designed around.

And you are right - this will never happen first in highly regulated countries. Which is why they are doing it in the UAE and elsewhere first.

Once this kind of concept has a million hours of real life operational data and a public screaming out for it, the regulators will have no choice: the politicians will tell them to make it happen.

The article is deliberately sensational, yes. But I think the author also doesn't realise they may actually be covering something big developing over the next 10+ years, even though it's probably not going to be Uber's concept that gets there.

[Ascend Charlie]

If the CAA won't allow a chopper with one engine and 1 or 2 pilots to fly in a particular area, for whatever reason, they sure as heck won't let a driverless electric machine do it either.

[neville_nobody]

Actually multi rotor electrics can handle engine failures quite easy. This is not a 1950's era lycoming which is what the regulations are designed around.

So what kind of performance are we talking here? Multi Turbine helicopters have issues off a standing start so how much better are the electric variety?

[Vag277]

The issue here will not be CASA. Look at the Australian Design Rules for motor vehicles. First each state does it differently, the crash requirements will increase weight beyond "beam me up Scotty" limits and the fight over licensing will go forever.

[Shagpile]

...Which is why this thing will never happen in Australia first.

In 2 years, early adopters will be in driverless cars. By 5 years, all new cars will be electric, driverless with the ability to be put to work generating the owner money. Cars will switch from ownership to car-as-a-service. The transition will be households with 1 car instead of two, and primary commuting done driverless.

By 10 years, about when we're landing people on mars (and doing return journeys every 2 years when Earth & Mars line up), countries will mandate zero cars be internal combustion engine. 100% of new cars sold, with perhaps some exceptions for vintage models, will be electric driverless.

Now back to our drone thing: how hard do you think it will be for regulators and rule makers to see an autonomous drone concept as safe in 5-10 years. Incredibly easy. Considering aviation automation is much easier than cars. And the same regulators will probably be catching a ride to work where their car drives them.

Don't compare an R22 with this concept. Autonomous drones will have 4 to 12 electric motors. Incredibly simple and fault tolerant. Ballistic parachute most likely.

But it won't be Uber that does it!

[fujii]

It's called "disruptive technology" for a reason. Comments here remind me of Kodak's reaction to digital photography. CASA won't have much say in what happens. CASA currently caters for a relatively small part of the populace but demand will force CASA's hand. Uber has already disrupted the surface taxi industry and there's no reason it won't succeed here. Again, it was public demand.

This won't be a door to door service but hub to hub where there will be surface transport? A surface taxi in peak times from Melbourne airport to Dandenong can take two to three hours. An air taxi, fifteen to twenty minutes.

[neville_nobody]

Don't compare an R22 with this concept. Autonomous drones will have 4 to 12 electric motors. Incredibly simple and fault tolerant. Ballistic parachute most likely.

I'm not I'm comparing them to multi turbine engine ones.

The whole 'disruption' mantra is just an excuse to flaunt the rules. If one of these electric things got airborne in your urban heliport and had a EFATO and went straight down it would be a huge public safety issue.

[Arnold E]

By 5 years, all new cars will be electric,

Extremely unlikely, the lead time to develop a new model is about that time and there are planned cars without electric engines right now. Pistons will be going up and down in bores for a long time yet.

[clark y]

Imagine the noise these things would create. Being in the sky their noise footprint is many times larger than a car.

[fujii]

Nev. If you have it flaunt it but be careful not to flout the rules.

[Ascend Charlie]

The NIMBYs will stop it, if Labor doesn't. Noise and "perceived noise" is the killer - people see something in the sky, assume it is noisy, and get irritated by it, the complaint ends up on the Minister's table, and with the next election only 6 months away, he will stop the lot.

If Sydney can't get one CBD heliport, it certainly won't get a bunch of suburban hubs ("Huburban"?)

[27/09]

Just explain to me again how these Uber machines will be powered?

Electric is all fine and dandy. How much do the batteries weigh? How much energy needed to lift just the batteries?

How long do the batteries provide power for? How long to recharge them?

How much noise will the props/fans make?

[fujii]

Just explain to me again how these horseless carriages will be powered.

Petrol is all fine and dandy. How big is the tank? How many petrol stations will there be?

How far on a tank?

The noise will scare the horses.

Aerial taxis are coming.

All the problems and objections will be overcome. The only drawback is that they will take some of the magic from flying.

[27/09]

Fujii

You're missing my point.

The big fly in the ointment is the energy density of what ever is used as a power source. Petrol (gasoline) has 53 times the watt/hour capacity of a lithium ion battery. In other words for every kilo of petrol you need 53 kilograms of lithium ion battery. With current technology an electric powered aircraft doesn't make sense.

So far as the noise goes, I'm not thinking of the horses. Noise pollution is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, I don't see the noise these things will make as being accepted by the general population.

[fujii]

25
Apr
2017
Uber partners with Pipistrel Aircraft to manufacture electric VTOLs
(za tekst v slovenskem jeziku kliknite tukaj)Uber partners with Pipistrel Aircraft to manufacture electric VTOLsDallas, 25 April 2017It is our pleasure and honor to inform you that Uber and Pipistrel announced today in Dallas (USA) at Uber Elevate Summit


Pipistrel is already a world leader in electrically powered aircraft. Battery technology is rapidly advancing.

[Horatio Leafblower]

I struggle with the concept but as an adherent of horseless carriages I offer you this:

Silicon Valley discovers Aviation: But for how long? (http://airfactsjournal.com/2017/04/silicon-valley-discovers-aviation-long/)

[fujii]

https://www.facebook.com/verge/videos/1417286841640988/

[Ascend Charlie]

Fujii, there is already a full thread on the rotorheads about Lilium, including reasons why it won't work, even though the model in the video can fly.

[fujii]

Many technological advances were preceded by naysayers until those naysayers were proven wrong. Those naysayers were often the best in their fields.
It's not that it won't happen, it's just that it hasn't happened yet.

[Derfred]

The big fly in the ointment is the energy density of what ever is used as a power source. Petrol (gasoline) has 53 times the watt/hour capacity of a lithium ion battery.

Actually energy density is volumetric. With aircraft we're more concerned with weight. Which is termed specific energy. Yes, the figure is close to 50x, but your next statement is not correct:

In other words for every kilo of petrol you need 53 kilograms of lithium ion battery.

If that were true the Telsa Model S would need a couple of tons of battery. It doesn't have anything like that.

You're forgetting that internal combustion engines at best convert 20% of their fuel energy to power. Whereas an electric drive can achieve over 90%.

This brings the specific energy problem down close to a factor of 10 rather than 50.

It's still a big hurdle to overcome, yes. But there are other battery technologies in the wings that may help close the gap.

[27/09]

It's not that it won't happen, it's just that it hasn't happened yet.

Probably true, BUT I very much doubt Uber will be around when it does happen.

[27/09]

You're forgetting that internal combustion engines at best convert 20% of their fuel energy to power. Whereas an electric drive can achieve over 90%.

This brings the specific energy problem down close to a factor of 10 rather than 50.

It's still a big hurdle to overcome, yes. But there are other battery technologies in the wings that may help close the gap.

Good point re the efficiency of the the different engines. I'd say the battery (electrical) technology will need to surpass (not just equal) whats being achieved by the internal combustion engine before they will have any real impact.

There's a terrifically long way to go before anything like this can become anywhere close to mainstream. Solving the motive problem is probably one of the easier challenges.

[LeadSled]

Folks,
There was some fascinating stuff in a recent AW&ST, the results of a US Gov. sponsored competition, think hybrids, just like some present cars, and think a whole new approach to a swivel wing distributed thrust VTOL --- part of a big increase in efficiency was use of AC, instead of DC power, and thrust varied by prop pitch change at constant rpm. .
I would not be too quick "lay down the law" about what's possible and what's not.
Boeing and a partner are seriously looking at a Regional airline size hybrid.
Part of the design is to swap out batteries during a <30 minute transit.
As I said, fascinating.
There is an old engineering adage: "We do the improbable immediately, the impossible takes a little time".
Tootle pip!!

[Derfred]

Good point re the efficiency of the the different engines. I'd say the battery (electrical) technology will need to surpass (not just equal) whats being achieved by the internal combustion engine before they will have any real impact.

Why do you say that? I would think that if we can get to within say 2-3x energy density then electric storage and propulsion will become quite viable for at least light weight short range aviation purposes. The reason I would suggest that is because the disadvantage in weight may be overcome by the advantage of reliability, cost, and the relative cost of the energy source (electricty is several times cheaper than petrol/diesl relative to it's usable power - if it wasn't, we'd all go off the grid and run our own petrol/diesl powered generators!)

Can we improve battery power to that point? Within 5 years, I would say no, but beyond that? I think we would be foolish to doubt it.

Elon Musk has arguably personally pushed the world ahead 10 years from where it would otherwise be. You can bet there are many billions being spent quietly around the world to compete with his battery factory.

[Shagpile]

It already exists:
EHANG|Official Site-EHANG 184 autonomous aerial vehicle (http://www.ehang.com/ehang184)

http://document.ehang.com/Public/cn/ehangweb/image/ehang184/tj/stg_tj_sec2_r.jpg

[Derfred]

Yeah, I've seen this one before. It rings a lot of alarm bells to me.

- Chinese company rushing to be "first to market".

- Dubai government that will do anything to "put itself on the map", to hell with safety regulations, or proper standards and certification.

- A company whose track record to date is selling toy drones through Amazon and Best Buy.

- A company which has apparently "partnered" with a bunch of other IT companies... don't see anyone with any actual commercial aeronautical design experience in there.

- Their own specs advertise a max power of 152 kW, with a battery pack of 17kWh. This would provide maybe 6 minutes of flight at max power with no reserve.

- Using a consumer 4G LTE link to control the device, with the only backup being some kind of autonomous "find a safe landing site and land". Wow.

- Does 4G LTE even work anywhere near 3500m (claimed max altitude)?

- No mention of any kind of ballistic chute recovery system if the above fails.

- There don't appear to be any "off-the shelf" certified parts being used. Everything has been designed in-house: Props, motors, batteries, hardware and software. But don't worry about that, they're using composites just like "spacecraft"!

...

Look, my scepticism may be unfounded, maybe it will be a raging success.

But, for starters, from a design point of view, contra-rotating coaxial props?
They have been proposed on just about every ground-breaking aerial vehicle since Sir Isaac first invisaged the helicopter (because it seems to make sense on paper). But it's never got past the prototype or concept stage because turbulent aerodynamics dictates that it simply doesn't work (on anything larger than a toy).

Reminds me of the "gull-wing" doors that appear on just about every headline-grabbing concept car that appears in motor-shows, and has done for decades. They do that because it looks cool, and looks great on paper. Never makes it to a real car of course, because in practice it's a dumb idea. Yeah, I know Elon Musk just did it on the Model X, maybe he'll be the first to get it right.

This thread has emphasised that storage specific energy and efficiency is key to electric flight. Even if this vehicle does successfully fly with its contra-rotating props I doubt it would be very efficient.

This strikes me as a scaled-up toy drone. I'm sure it's software is sophisticated enough to conduct a successful demo flight. This company is possibly very good at toy drone software. But is it designed to be mission-critical? Does it run on mission-critical hardware? What sort of fault checking does it run? What sort of automatic fail-over exists? We're only told it has "two" flight management systems. Is that two Rasberry Pi's? Rockwell-Collins and Honeywell make mission critical flight management systems, but I'll bet they didn't even get a phone call from this mob.

Think about the software and hardware requirements in a modern fly-by-wire aircraft. Think about the amount of redundancy, design, testing and certification (and expense) that goes into making it safe. We all know how reliable consumer-grade computers, consumer-grade operating systems, and consumer-grade software is.

A multi-rotor aircraft is about as stable as a unicycle. A computer glitch for a fraction of a second turns it into a plumetting hunk of carbon-reinforced epoxy resin.

Running "100 successful test flights" and launching commercially in Dubai may be great for headlines and possibly fundraising, but I won't be volunteering to be a crash test dummy in this little baby in the near future.

Were there any humans in these "test flights"? I doubt it, because if there were they would have made sure it made headlines. How many of these "test flights" actually flew 25kms from A to B? Is that video of it flying over snow-capped peaks even a real video? Where are the videos from all these "successful test flights"? Surely there must be 100 of them!

Launching commercially as an air-taxi in Dubai this Summer? That's northern Summer... That's a month away. Awesome. Looking forward to it. Don't worry that it takes Airbus or Boeing 5 years of exhaustive testing and certification to get a new aircraft in the air, these blokes will have it up and running in no time.

If they are too proud to even employ an articulate English speaker to create the English-speaking version of their website, what does that say about their employment of experienced aeronautical professionals to design their human-carrying toy drone?

I might wait for Sir Richard or Elon Musk to develop one before I get too excited. At least they would have the funds and skills to do it properly, and get it right. The fact that neither has done so yet probably speaks volmes: I'm sure they're both keen to do so when it becomes properly viable.

[Shagpile]

The Raspberry Pi is a hobbyist play thing but you'll be surprised how close it gets.

It's a general purpose computer with 64gb SD card, passively cooled 1.2ghz 64bit quad core CPU, no moving parts (vibration resilient), hdmi, ethernet, WiFi, ultra low power requirements (3-5W) in a tiny form factor (45g).

Looking good so far until we look at operating temperature rages. The Pi FAQ says the main SoC is good from 0-70 C. Unsure about the solder/PCB -- probably as good as my 760 radio solders which seem to keep breaking every year. I read one test which says it worked at 50C but started freezing at 55C. You're right - it's just too amateur. But that's not what people use.

Ok let's knock it up a notch to the Nvidia Jetson TX2 board. Expect about $600 retail. (US $399 for a thousand of them).
https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/jetson-tx2-delivers-twice-intelligence-edge/
Firstly the thermal is -25-80C. That's more like it. 8-15W power usage (still tiny). But the specs are also a lot bigger: 2ghz quad core CPU, very powerful graphics chip (I'll get to this in a second). 8gb high bandwidth ram, 4K video encoding/decoding, 85g weight, dual CAN bus controller, high bandwidth video/sensor/data links, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac 2x2 wifi, blah blah etc etc. It's awesome.

Ok so this is what people mean by consumer hardware disruption: it's specifically designed for things like self driving cars, drones and so on.

Now the fun: the gpu isn't designed for playing games. It's for machine learning, which is how cars can drive themselves in real time. The chip in this thing (Pascal architecture) is one of the most advanced things in the world right now, save custom asic's developed by Google/Facebook for specific machine learning applications in data centres. Once trained from bucket loads of real world data, it can take in high bandwidth sensor data and output smart decisions like where to steer/fly.

Watch this and let me know if you think the regulator can keep up with this kind of technology:
https://youtu.be/BLlwm5Dq7Is

Self driving cars have already forced the hand of most worldwide regulators to accept them. The public get what they want.

There are challenges to short range flying drones because we're still at the version 0.1 stage (remember when smartphone didn't even exist? 2007). That EHang is a proof of concept at best, but it is happening.

I can honestly see dozens to hundreds of self flying drones on pre-programmed routes doing 10-30min trips across congested cities carrying 1-2 pax for $10-20 a pop in the near future, if somebody can solve the hundreds of puzzle pieces.

The argument "if Richard Branson hasn't done it yet so it must be Snake Oil" is false. Often we must wait for multiple technologies to simultaneously mature & reduce in cost to economically unlock opportunities. For self flying cars it has not existed until now. That is cheapish Lion batteries (sub $500/kWh), tiny cheap sensors, high performance lightweight embedded computers, machine learning algorithms & research, mobile payments and so on. Things I hope really happen soon are some battery breakthroughs in supercapacitors for ultra fast charging plus better specific energy (lighter) batteries.

10 years is a long time...How exciting for aviation! I reckon we'll see it. But it won't be Uber!!

[JDJ]

Battery technology is advancing on many fronts - this is a very promising idea...

New battery design for electric cars would stack up to 1,000-km range - New Atlas (http://newatlas.com/battery-stacking-electric-cars/49324/?li_source=LI&li_medium=default-widget)

[clark y]

Time to put my safety hat on. Those props would be deadly.