I am really excited to se electric aviation start to enter the market. A lot of people point out the battery density / jet-A difference and it is valid, but it isn't the whole story. Jet-A has a much lower conversion to useful work than a battery, an electric power train (minus the batteries) has a lot of opportunity to shed weight (no bleed-air, fuel plumbing, less need to safety systems). There are a lot more opportunities to explore interesting airframes because electric can be placed in unique and more efficient ways (hence the eVTOL in this story). The basic physics change a lot too. We will see how high altitude flight shakes out but there is a big potential to go higher so that more efficiency can be gained, again needing less energy. The big point here is you can't simply compare electric to gas turbine and only swap the fuel for batteries. It is a totally different set of design parameters and it has so many amazing opportunities to be better.
> The five-bladed propellers have a low tip speed, with twisted blades designed to reduce the “whop, whop, whop” of a helicopter to the volume of leaves rustling in the wind
I think they must mean when it’s high overhead. Based on the video, it’s still pretty loud up close.
Awesome! Joby needs trained pilots so that may be a bottleneck to scaling. I am guessing they would have to create autonomous air taxis like EHang to scale.
Ehang had a scaled-up multi-rotor drone that could carry one person. They're a drone company. Worked, but max flight time was something like 17 minutes. Their new model has both lift props and wings, plus a pusher prop for horizontal thrust. Range about 200km.
Joby is more like an Osprey. It takes off and lands hanging from its props, then tilts the props horizontally to operate in airplane mode.
This potentially offers more range with less power consumption. They've tried running on hydrogen, and claimed 524 miles of range.
There's also Archer Aviation (https://www.archer.com/) which has a roughly similar vehicle.
Test flights since 2021. Was supposed to be in service in 2025. Didn't happen.
They supposedly have an air taxi contract for the 2028 Olympics in LA.
Owned, or at least heavily financed, by Stellantis.
There seems to be convergence on something that transitions to airplane mode, as opposed to the previous round of giant quadrotor-type drones.
It's now clear that this can be done, but not clear that there's a business in it.
This so inefficient it’s painful to watch. It’s about 14 miles to go from jfk to manhattan. A train could do this in 20 minutes or so. A train could ship thousands of people in one go, supports millions of ordinary people in their daily lives, and doesn’t cause excessive noise pollution at street level (not to mention the climate, safety, and infrastructure benefits)
In London a new train line was built deep underground from Heathrow all the way through central London and out the other side. It stops all the way, travels further (19 miles) and still only takes 25 minutes, so don’t pretend it can’t be done.
Instead of supporting people we solve problems for the 0.001% who will give us a quick buck, while we pretend we’ll one day be rich enough to ride these things
> It’s about 14 miles to go from jfk to manhattan. A train could do this in 20 minutes or so
I used to live on 30th & Madison. Blade was about 30 minutes door to door. LIRR was 50 to 55 minutes. Car 45 to 120 minutes. Helipads are cheaper to build and site than train stations; for most people, eVTOL will almost always be faster than the train. (I mostly take the train.)
> Instead of supporting people we solve problems for the 0.001% who will give us a quick buck
Blade cost $200 a trip. Assuming that's only affordable for someone making $50k a year or more, that covers the top 80% of Manhattan, 30% of New York City and America and about 5% of the world.
I'm not arguing we don't need better rail (and ferry) connectivity between our airports and urban cores. But you're always going to have a need for time-efficient travel options. And eVTOL has significant applications outside luxury transport. This complaint lands like someone complaining that the original Tesla Roadster was "inefficient and painful" as it was only affordable to the rich.
> Helipads are cheaper to build and site than train stations
Is that still true once you control for capacity? A modern single-line station is handling, what, 150 people alighting every 2.5 minutes? How many helipads would you need to match that?
> $200 a trip. Assuming that's only affordable for someone making $50k a year or more, that covers the top 80% of Manhattan
Someone making $50k isn't going to spend $200/trip regularly. They might spend it occasionally for an urgent trip, but how often is that going to be to/from an airport? For someone making $50k any flights they're taking will have been planned and booked months in advance, they can't afford to fly spontaneously/last-minute. (And if 80% of the population did want to use it, would it even be possible to build enough enough helipads? There isn't room for anything like 80% of the population to park in Manhattan, and these things look to be bigger than cars and I don't see anyone putting them in a multi-storey garage).
People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent?
This suggestion lands like someone suggesting that people making $25 an hour in the most expensive city in America are going to consider throwing away $190 to save 15 minutes. In other words: incredibly out of touch with reality.
As a side note: the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it was a complete flop of a car that didn’t even appeal to impractical rich people or anyone else. 2,450 sold for the entire production run. A failure for any purpose except publicity. The model S is the one that changed things, and it was never widely criticized as impractical or only for rich idiots.
> People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent?
Regularly? No. Most people aren't regularly taking helicopters anywhere, in part because their ability to fly around New York usually requires VFR conditions.
Occasionally? Yes. If you live in Harlem and need to get to JFK, you're paying an outsized time tax to get to and through Grand Central or Penn Station compared with taking the West Side Highway down to the 30th Street heliport. If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel.
(I'm ignoring the outer boroughs and New York's surrounding suburbs, for whom this could actually be a game changer.)
> the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it is a dumb car for rich people
Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.
> the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it was a complete flop of a car that didn’t even appeal to impractical rich people or anyone else.
Tesla never meant to sell it in large numbers, and they probably couldn’t have made many more anyway. And this still represented around $3bn if revenue and helped get Tesla off the ground.
It would be expensive to build a new train to JFK. The unions and regulations in NYC make those projects very long and very expensive (look at the 2nd Ave subway line). There is an "AirTrain" to JFK but you have to take other trains to get to it first. There was supposed to be one to LGA but it got cancelled.
We used to have a really nice water shuttle to LGA but that also stopped many years ago. People didn't want to travel to the water shuttle and pay $20 to get to the airport in 15 minutes. I'm hard pressed to see how a cheap quadcopter ride is going to be anything other than a novelty unless the FAA allows the heliports to be built inland -- we've had a bad history with blades flying through the streets.
Op's example was underground. Moses built above ground, thereby requiring the ruthlessness. Not sure the same ruthlessness would be needed with tunnels.
The infrastructure requirements to get a train into operation, let alone travel to a destination twenty minutes away, takes decades of development and billions.
I haven't done the math, but I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains, and that's before you consider that people developing and building a train line get to eat and put their kids through schools.
I can't believe seriously arguing for oversized quadcopters as a mass transport alternative.
People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time. Manhattan is hardly a purely reasonable place, in fact it's far from it. All kinds of nonsense takes place in nyc all the time. If nyc was driven by cold economic reason it would be boring and lame compared to what it is today.
Do the people who run the helipads not also get to eat and put their kids through school though? Where are you that makes the parents pay directly for school such that not having a job at the train station means their kids go hungry and unschooled? What horrible place is that? (Wait, don't tell me, is it the USA?)
I don't know how the economics in the electric VTOL era works out, but the thing about air travel vs train travel is that in order for the train to be useful, you have to build tracks from every train station to every other train station to have perfect routability, which is expensive. However, for a helipad, once you've built the helipad it automatically connects to all other helipads in range.
NYC already have a functional mass transit system. Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus? Why it's so hard to understand there still is the need for other modes of transportation. At the very least, tourists want to view the city from above, or those who wants a quick hop from JFK to Manhattan. This is not a replacement for mass transportation.
At least try to show curiosity about what they want to solve.
> Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus?
Hypothesis: people aren't familiar with New York's trains. It's a world-class network the likes of which we don't otherwise have in North America. (Sorry Toronto.) So when they see eVTOLs, they emotionally map it to their local trainless context.
Interestingly enough, I posted this as a follow on to a comment I made on yesterday's derailed Waymo-in-Portland discussion, where I wondered when will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S. I'm could see it happening within my lifetime.
> where I wondered when will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S.?
I had a similar thought a few days ago in respect of Waymos specifically: "Americans take about 34 million public-transit trips a day. Assuming 25 rides per day, that's about 1.4 million self-driving cars to rival public transport's impact. Waymo has "about 3,000 robotaxis deployed nationwide." Doubling fleet size annually–Waymos and non-Waymos, though currently they have no peers–would get us to parity in less than 10 years. (A more-realistic 35% growth rate puts us around 20 years.)"
I'm very much in agreement. All of the pitches for more passenger rail have a for-the-greater-good tint to them that glosses over the fact that point-to-point private vehicles are better in every other conceivable way, more so if they're autonomous. I'd be comfortable betting that any serious passenger rail projects breaking ground right now today are going to be legitimately antiquated by the time Waymo and/or Flying Waymo and their equivalents are commonplace and cheap. More desirable, more convenient, easier infrastructure build out, less disruptive maintenance, better capacity allocation. I hope I live to see the day I can summon a car to my house, hop inside, and it travels automatically to a designated VTOL zone, docks into a fixed-wing harness and takes me anywhere I'd like to go. I'd get fat as hell.
> All of the pitches for more passenger rail have a for-the-greater-good tint to them that glosses over the fact that point-to-point private vehicles are better in every other conceivable way
You must not live in a dense city. Rail doesn't have traffic and is usually faster, and much faster in heavy traffic, including rush hour, sporting events, airports, bridges/tunnels across the river, parades, marathons, etc. etc.
Also, there's no advantage to Waymo that doesn't apply to rideshare and taxi. I doubt people will care that Waymo vehicles autonomous, beyond the initial novelty (and despite SV's attempted marketing that their robots are better than people).
Finally, despite SV trying to ridicule any attitude that threatens their profits, most people like the greater good.
This argument always comes up. "Why not public transit? It's so efficient, look at country X". Well, country X has people who respect public property and are orderly, so they can have nice things.
The US is filled with people who don't. And who do drugs. And who rob. So people retreat to places like a Joby aircraft or self driving Waymo, which don't have those issues.
Other countries with good systems also have such people. America’s crime rate is far lower than the 1990s; the impression that you live in a crime-infested world is likely increased media coverage.
I think the real reason the US has poor public transit is that its transport landscape has been shaped by years of planning and funding decisions that have put the car first, and cities rebuilt accordingly.
America’s enormity also makes nationwide PT more difficult (but not impossible).
Then add the meritocratic attitude that if you can’t afford a car it’s somehow your fault, and you end up with little political and societal interest in a good public transit system.
> [...] but it does generate a significant amount of noise when it takes off and lands. The company didn’t share information on that, but it was certainly enough to make one wince – even if it nowhere near approaches the sensory assault of a regular helicopter.
The venture money behind some of the larger and more prominent electric VTOL air taxi/helicopter-plane things seems to be betting that by the time they get the hardware design, software, user interface and general safety systems to 100%, battery technology will also have become a lot better.
I'm referring to Joby, Archer, Wisk and similar.
The range is not really good right now with batteries at 255Wh/kg and much worse energy density than Jet-A fed into turbine(s). None of the evtol companies are big enough or vertically integrated enough to come up with some miracle 500Wh/kg battery on their own, so they're relying on market pressure generally to cause their battery subsystem vendors to make some significant breakthroughs.
More directly related to the PR, I saw the video of the JFK to Manhattan test flights and they're being done with only the pilot on board.
The venture money is betting that the e-VTOL technology can be weaponized. Small, disposable drones have been getting all the attention lately due to the war between Russia and Ukraine. But longer term there are a lot of potential missions for larger VTOL combat aircraft — both drones and crewed.
I would guess that a military version would be a hybrid: electric motors as in all the e-VTOL prototypes, enough battery power to comfortably take off, land and maneuver in combat conditions, and a small hydrocarbon-fueled engine to recharge the battery while cruising.
What problem would a hybrid solve for military? Military doesn't care about emissions and this doesn't offer resilience like fully electric does (recharge anywhere, reliability).
The same problem that a hybrid architecture solves for ships: the ability to use physically small electric motors with very high power density that are mechanically decoupled from the rest of the vehicle. This lets a bunch of designs pull off neat thrust vectoring tricky with much simpler and lighter components than a mechanical thrust vectoring system would need.
(Electric azimuth thrusters are becoming common in large ships for roughly this reason, too.)
The military cares a lot about range, signature reduction, and especially fuel efficiency. Reducing fuel usage reduces the logistical train necessary to sustain units in the field.
> Can we settle in the middle and trial them for cargo first?
There is an existing market for passenger eVTOL to and from airports. Using that as a beachhead makes way more sense than trying to develop a de novo niche.
Different configurations are better for different missions. Small suicide drones have very limited range, weak sensors, and can't carry much cargo or a large enough warhead to take out hardened targets. Hopefully we'll never get into a conflict with China, but if we do the platforms will have to be much larger just due to the greater ranges involved.
The 'final' decision was recently made to go ahead with the massive project for this, which is eventually intended to replace the UH60/Blackhawk type platform. Traditional big money defense contractor stuff.
I'm not sure I agree that they're making that bet (there's lots of market at current ranges IMHO), but even if they were it would be a great bet to make. We're talking about jumping to 375 [1] or even 400 Wh/kg in production cars this year [2] (with prototypes long since shown off). And there's every reason to believe that there's a lot more headroom in this space to improve, and that we will improve rapidly since we're making so many more batteries now.
I'm skeptical that air taxis could ever meaningfully reduce traffic congestion to / from JFK. Compared to cars, these would seem to require a significantly larger landing pad and passenger unloading space and need much more safety margin in-between drop offs. Maybe this is competitive vs the private helicopter market?
I wonder what % of traffic is to/from JFK. The subway decently connects much of the city to the JFK air train, but it's a fairly inconvenient journey. Toronto's UP express has made travel to YYZ significantly easier, but I doubt it's possible to construct something similar in NYC.
I love aviation, but I also don't see air travel as being a scalable/affordable solution to this problem. Then again, it's only meant to alleviate traffic burden for a certain segment of the population.
the problem with train it stops ... on every train stop. New york specifically, there are several networks(new jersey, mta, there are lines that are 100+ years old.
In general if you have an affordable enough option you'd never walk into subway, with your several luggages, to travel longer. Train is a decent plan b.
> if you have an affordable enough option you'd never walk into subway, with your several luggages, to travel longer
I'm moderately wealthy and lived in New York for a decade. I take the train between JFK and Manhattan. (Specifically, the LIRR.) It's faster, more reliable and–for me–more comfortable than taking a car. (It's also safer.) If I have my cat with me or I feel like having fun, I'll take a Blade, but that's realistically only shaving like 20 minutes off the travel time.
LIRR is not a dirty MTA train :) Noisy shaky helicopter is not an electric taxi with 6+ motors that gives you more stability with way less noise that flies after take of using wings.
> LIRR is not a dirty MTA train :) Noisy shaky helicopter is not an electric taxi with 6+ motors that gives you more stability with way less noise that flies after take of using wings
I've also taken the A from Harlem to JFK once. It was fine. Tougher to read a book, like I can on the LIRR, mostly because the frequency of stops means having to constantly be aware of your belongings.
And agree on helicopters. We already have helicopters. Switching them to eVTOLs is a move forward.
How many people do you think enter/exit JFK arrivals and departures every hour? Where are you going to land all those air vehicles? Is this a shuttle service with many seats? How do you plan for the air traffic for that many people?
Those are all reasonable questions, but if some entity would be able to answer them, of all things, I think JFK, an airport, would be well equipped to handle them.
Well it's 5-10 minutes once you get to the west 30th st heliport, which can easily take 20 minutes within Manhattan. Plus getting loaded in, cleared for takeoff, and potential for backups at the landing pads, I suspect the gains are much less in practice.
JFK and city is a relatively niche and regionally unique market compared to how short/medium range aircraft are used in general. For instance the Joby or Archer product right now wouldn't have the range to fly from a helipad on the Seattle waterfront to somewhere in the San Juan Islands. Or for a flight from Vancouver harbour to Victoria.
Isn’t the comparison against helicopters for regional and urban transit where EVTOLs hold an edge because of the drastic energy reduction that fixed wing has over helicopters?
I mean sure long term the goal may be to wait for battery density to increase to keep moving upmarket and eat longer and longer flights from traditional aviation, but I don’t think better batteries are a requirement for the initial batch of vehicles.
Joby actually claims their business is viable without significant advances in battery energy density. We'll see. I think this will be closer to an Eclipse Aviation business case than SpaceX.
I am really excited to se electric aviation start to enter the market. A lot of people point out the battery density / jet-A difference and it is valid, but it isn't the whole story. Jet-A has a much lower conversion to useful work than a battery, an electric power train (minus the batteries) has a lot of opportunity to shed weight (no bleed-air, fuel plumbing, less need to safety systems). There are a lot more opportunities to explore interesting airframes because electric can be placed in unique and more efficient ways (hence the eVTOL in this story). The basic physics change a lot too. We will see how high altitude flight shakes out but there is a big potential to go higher so that more efficiency can be gained, again needing less energy. The big point here is you can't simply compare electric to gas turbine and only swap the fuel for batteries. It is a totally different set of design parameters and it has so many amazing opportunities to be better.
Clearly no Scottish people with oversite on naming! Loads of wee jobbies flying around!
> The five-bladed propellers have a low tip speed, with twisted blades designed to reduce the “whop, whop, whop” of a helicopter to the volume of leaves rustling in the wind
I think they must mean when it’s high overhead. Based on the video, it’s still pretty loud up close.
Is it any louder than driving on the highway with the windows down? I imagine when air hits ears at a high speed, it's going to be loud.
I wonder what it's like flying in one. People are scared of planes, but flying in helicopters is way scarier.
> People are scared of planes, but flying in helicopters is way scarier
Genuine question: do eVTOLs flip over in the water like helicopters do? Or is the battery place low down.
Awesome! Joby needs trained pilots so that may be a bottleneck to scaling. I am guessing they would have to create autonomous air taxis like EHang to scale.
Ehang had a scaled-up multi-rotor drone that could carry one person. They're a drone company. Worked, but max flight time was something like 17 minutes. Their new model has both lift props and wings, plus a pusher prop for horizontal thrust. Range about 200km.
Joby is more like an Osprey. It takes off and lands hanging from its props, then tilts the props horizontally to operate in airplane mode. This potentially offers more range with less power consumption. They've tried running on hydrogen, and claimed 524 miles of range.
There's also Archer Aviation (https://www.archer.com/) which has a roughly similar vehicle. Test flights since 2021. Was supposed to be in service in 2025. Didn't happen. They supposedly have an air taxi contract for the 2028 Olympics in LA. Owned, or at least heavily financed, by Stellantis.
There seems to be convergence on something that transitions to airplane mode, as opposed to the previous round of giant quadrotor-type drones.
It's now clear that this can be done, but not clear that there's a business in it.
This so inefficient it’s painful to watch. It’s about 14 miles to go from jfk to manhattan. A train could do this in 20 minutes or so. A train could ship thousands of people in one go, supports millions of ordinary people in their daily lives, and doesn’t cause excessive noise pollution at street level (not to mention the climate, safety, and infrastructure benefits)
In London a new train line was built deep underground from Heathrow all the way through central London and out the other side. It stops all the way, travels further (19 miles) and still only takes 25 minutes, so don’t pretend it can’t be done.
Instead of supporting people we solve problems for the 0.001% who will give us a quick buck, while we pretend we’ll one day be rich enough to ride these things
> It’s about 14 miles to go from jfk to manhattan. A train could do this in 20 minutes or so
I used to live on 30th & Madison. Blade was about 30 minutes door to door. LIRR was 50 to 55 minutes. Car 45 to 120 minutes. Helipads are cheaper to build and site than train stations; for most people, eVTOL will almost always be faster than the train. (I mostly take the train.)
> Instead of supporting people we solve problems for the 0.001% who will give us a quick buck
Blade cost $200 a trip. Assuming that's only affordable for someone making $50k a year or more, that covers the top 80% of Manhattan, 30% of New York City and America and about 5% of the world.
I'm not arguing we don't need better rail (and ferry) connectivity between our airports and urban cores. But you're always going to have a need for time-efficient travel options. And eVTOL has significant applications outside luxury transport. This complaint lands like someone complaining that the original Tesla Roadster was "inefficient and painful" as it was only affordable to the rich.
> Helipads are cheaper to build and site than train stations
Is that still true once you control for capacity? A modern single-line station is handling, what, 150 people alighting every 2.5 minutes? How many helipads would you need to match that?
> $200 a trip. Assuming that's only affordable for someone making $50k a year or more, that covers the top 80% of Manhattan
Someone making $50k isn't going to spend $200/trip regularly. They might spend it occasionally for an urgent trip, but how often is that going to be to/from an airport? For someone making $50k any flights they're taking will have been planned and booked months in advance, they can't afford to fly spontaneously/last-minute. (And if 80% of the population did want to use it, would it even be possible to build enough enough helipads? There isn't room for anything like 80% of the population to park in Manhattan, and these things look to be bigger than cars and I don't see anyone putting them in a multi-storey garage).
People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent?
This suggestion lands like someone suggesting that people making $25 an hour in the most expensive city in America are going to consider throwing away $190 to save 15 minutes. In other words: incredibly out of touch with reality.
As a side note: the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it was a complete flop of a car that didn’t even appeal to impractical rich people or anyone else. 2,450 sold for the entire production run. A failure for any purpose except publicity. The model S is the one that changed things, and it was never widely criticized as impractical or only for rich idiots.
> People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent?
Regularly? No. Most people aren't regularly taking helicopters anywhere, in part because their ability to fly around New York usually requires VFR conditions.
Occasionally? Yes. If you live in Harlem and need to get to JFK, you're paying an outsized time tax to get to and through Grand Central or Penn Station compared with taking the West Side Highway down to the 30th Street heliport. If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel.
(I'm ignoring the outer boroughs and New York's surrounding suburbs, for whom this could actually be a game changer.)
> the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it is a dumb car for rich people
Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.
> If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel.
We will see what happens the first time one of them crashes.
Obviously there are a lot of variables but helicopter and city bus crashes happen so we’ll have some idea what to expect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Hudson_River_helicopter_c...
https://abc7ny.com/post/mta-driver-injured-bus-crashes-store...
> the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it was a complete flop of a car that didn’t even appeal to impractical rich people or anyone else.
Tesla never meant to sell it in large numbers, and they probably couldn’t have made many more anyway. And this still represented around $3bn if revenue and helped get Tesla off the ground.
It would be expensive to build a new train to JFK. The unions and regulations in NYC make those projects very long and very expensive (look at the 2nd Ave subway line). There is an "AirTrain" to JFK but you have to take other trains to get to it first. There was supposed to be one to LGA but it got cancelled. We used to have a really nice water shuttle to LGA but that also stopped many years ago. People didn't want to travel to the water shuttle and pay $20 to get to the airport in 15 minutes. I'm hard pressed to see how a cheap quadcopter ride is going to be anything other than a novelty unless the FAA allows the heliports to be built inland -- we've had a bad history with blades flying through the streets.
Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.
Isn't it? Look up the California high speed rail. There is massive corruption, incompetence, and red tape.
There's a free bus to LaGuardia from the subway.
If you’re interested how some of these things got build in New York in the past I recommend the books of Robert Caro about Robert Moses.
Building new massive infrastructure requires a level of ruthlessness that is not socially acceptable these days.
Op's example was underground. Moses built above ground, thereby requiring the ruthlessness. Not sure the same ruthlessness would be needed with tunnels.
It’s not only about underground vs evicting people.
It’s also in large part about making sure that your project gets the required funding and other (social) projects don’t.
The infrastructure requirements to get a train into operation, let alone travel to a destination twenty minutes away, takes decades of development and billions.
This needs a 20x20ft approximately flat surface.
I haven't done the math, but I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains, and that's before you consider that people developing and building a train line get to eat and put their kids through schools.
I can't believe seriously arguing for oversized quadcopters as a mass transport alternative.
> haven't done the math, but I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains
In Manhattan? I honestly would. If it were a nation, it would be the 22nd-largest economy. Any disruption to that system is massively expensive.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do the math. But we also shouldn't be reaching conclusions without attempting it.
People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time. Manhattan is hardly a purely reasonable place, in fact it's far from it. All kinds of nonsense takes place in nyc all the time. If nyc was driven by cold economic reason it would be boring and lame compared to what it is today.
Do the people who run the helipads not also get to eat and put their kids through school though? Where are you that makes the parents pay directly for school such that not having a job at the train station means their kids go hungry and unschooled? What horrible place is that? (Wait, don't tell me, is it the USA?)
I don't know how the economics in the electric VTOL era works out, but the thing about air travel vs train travel is that in order for the train to be useful, you have to build tracks from every train station to every other train station to have perfect routability, which is expensive. However, for a helipad, once you've built the helipad it automatically connects to all other helipads in range.
EVTOLS supposed to be less complex than cars and cars are already cheaper than trains.
Call me skeptical on being less complex than cars. I suppose this must be referring to parts count compared to an internal combustion engine car?
NYC already have a functional mass transit system. Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus? Why it's so hard to understand there still is the need for other modes of transportation. At the very least, tourists want to view the city from above, or those who wants a quick hop from JFK to Manhattan. This is not a replacement for mass transportation.
At least try to show curiosity about what they want to solve.
> Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus?
Hypothesis: people aren't familiar with New York's trains. It's a world-class network the likes of which we don't otherwise have in North America. (Sorry Toronto.) So when they see eVTOLs, they emotionally map it to their local trainless context.
I don't fit the hypothesis - the two cities I've lived in (Berlin, Seoul) have excellent trains. So it's perhaps overfitting in the other direction.
You state that like decades and billions is a long time.
You have 10000 people who need to do this trip every hour, how will you manage that with this? It can’t scale.
In the end normal people will be stuck without proper transport, while a tiny majority will fly around in comfort.
Interestingly enough, I posted this as a follow on to a comment I made on yesterday's derailed Waymo-in-Portland discussion, where I wondered when will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S. I'm could see it happening within my lifetime.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943360
> where I wondered when will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S.?
I had a similar thought a few days ago in respect of Waymos specifically: "Americans take about 34 million public-transit trips a day. Assuming 25 rides per day, that's about 1.4 million self-driving cars to rival public transport's impact. Waymo has "about 3,000 robotaxis deployed nationwide." Doubling fleet size annually–Waymos and non-Waymos, though currently they have no peers–would get us to parity in less than 10 years. (A more-realistic 35% growth rate puts us around 20 years.)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47915937
I'm very much in agreement. All of the pitches for more passenger rail have a for-the-greater-good tint to them that glosses over the fact that point-to-point private vehicles are better in every other conceivable way, more so if they're autonomous. I'd be comfortable betting that any serious passenger rail projects breaking ground right now today are going to be legitimately antiquated by the time Waymo and/or Flying Waymo and their equivalents are commonplace and cheap. More desirable, more convenient, easier infrastructure build out, less disruptive maintenance, better capacity allocation. I hope I live to see the day I can summon a car to my house, hop inside, and it travels automatically to a designated VTOL zone, docks into a fixed-wing harness and takes me anywhere I'd like to go. I'd get fat as hell.
> All of the pitches for more passenger rail have a for-the-greater-good tint to them that glosses over the fact that point-to-point private vehicles are better in every other conceivable way
You must not live in a dense city. Rail doesn't have traffic and is usually faster, and much faster in heavy traffic, including rush hour, sporting events, airports, bridges/tunnels across the river, parades, marathons, etc. etc.
Also, there's no advantage to Waymo that doesn't apply to rideshare and taxi. I doubt people will care that Waymo vehicles autonomous, beyond the initial novelty (and despite SV's attempted marketing that their robots are better than people).
Finally, despite SV trying to ridicule any attitude that threatens their profits, most people like the greater good.
Keep in shape my friend! The smaller/sportier flying cars will probably have more weight restrictions.
Why drive to a VTOL zone? Just take off from your driveway!
They are not mutually exclusive you know?
Yeah but I don’t want to travel on a train packed with randoms, some of whom are unpleasant or dangerous.
Have you taken public transit? Either it is good or it is awful.
The only country whose public transit was actually good is Japan, and why is deeper than just having a good transit system.
The privacy convenience and comfort are why I prefer Waymo over a bus/rail or even uber.
I will pay for an air taxi if it’s a good service.
This argument always comes up. "Why not public transit? It's so efficient, look at country X". Well, country X has people who respect public property and are orderly, so they can have nice things.
The US is filled with people who don't. And who do drugs. And who rob. So people retreat to places like a Joby aircraft or self driving Waymo, which don't have those issues.
Other countries with good systems also have such people. America’s crime rate is far lower than the 1990s; the impression that you live in a crime-infested world is likely increased media coverage.
I think the real reason the US has poor public transit is that its transport landscape has been shaped by years of planning and funding decisions that have put the car first, and cities rebuilt accordingly. America’s enormity also makes nationwide PT more difficult (but not impossible).
Then add the meritocratic attitude that if you can’t afford a car it’s somehow your fault, and you end up with little political and societal interest in a good public transit system.
*https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates
It actually flying: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DXrvm_LAAR8/
we cant view without a login anymore? i dont have a instal login but used tobe able to watch single videos shared directly with just a login nag
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/D_k8Tx7GCqo
Will this be any less ridiculously loud than the conventional helicopters that fly over Brooklyn all day ferrying people to JFK?
According to the guardian’s report[0], yes. 45dB compared to 100 dB for a heli.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/28/electric-air...
> [...] but it does generate a significant amount of noise when it takes off and lands. The company didn’t share information on that, but it was certainly enough to make one wince – even if it nowhere near approaches the sensory assault of a regular helicopter.
Could be worse, I guess.
Sound comparison here: https://youtu.be/IX7rdJm5v6s?t=104
The venture money behind some of the larger and more prominent electric VTOL air taxi/helicopter-plane things seems to be betting that by the time they get the hardware design, software, user interface and general safety systems to 100%, battery technology will also have become a lot better.
I'm referring to Joby, Archer, Wisk and similar.
The range is not really good right now with batteries at 255Wh/kg and much worse energy density than Jet-A fed into turbine(s). None of the evtol companies are big enough or vertically integrated enough to come up with some miracle 500Wh/kg battery on their own, so they're relying on market pressure generally to cause their battery subsystem vendors to make some significant breakthroughs.
More directly related to the PR, I saw the video of the JFK to Manhattan test flights and they're being done with only the pilot on board.
The venture money is betting that the e-VTOL technology can be weaponized. Small, disposable drones have been getting all the attention lately due to the war between Russia and Ukraine. But longer term there are a lot of potential missions for larger VTOL combat aircraft — both drones and crewed.
I would guess that a military version would be a hybrid: electric motors as in all the e-VTOL prototypes, enough battery power to comfortably take off, land and maneuver in combat conditions, and a small hydrocarbon-fueled engine to recharge the battery while cruising.
What problem would a hybrid solve for military? Military doesn't care about emissions and this doesn't offer resilience like fully electric does (recharge anywhere, reliability).
The same problem that a hybrid architecture solves for ships: the ability to use physically small electric motors with very high power density that are mechanically decoupled from the rest of the vehicle. This lets a bunch of designs pull off neat thrust vectoring tricky with much simpler and lighter components than a mechanical thrust vectoring system would need.
(Electric azimuth thrusters are becoming common in large ships for roughly this reason, too.)
The military cares a lot about range, signature reduction, and especially fuel efficiency. Reducing fuel usage reduces the logistical train necessary to sustain units in the field.
https://www.defensenews.com/land/2025/01/22/army-tries-out-n...
Can we settle in the middle and trial them for cargo first? Seems obvious for deliveries.
> Can we settle in the middle and trial them for cargo first?
There is an existing market for passenger eVTOL to and from airports. Using that as a beachhead makes way more sense than trying to develop a de novo niche.
Oh market is def there. I mean validating technology on cargo.
Why are larger drones better than smaller suicide drones that can have bombs attached to them and built by the thousands per day in a dark factory?
Different configurations are better for different missions. Small suicide drones have very limited range, weak sensors, and can't carry much cargo or a large enough warhead to take out hardened targets. Hopefully we'll never get into a conflict with China, but if we do the platforms will have to be much larger just due to the greater ranges involved.
Range, for one, if what you're referring to as a mental model is 15" prop size quadcopters with an artillery shell strapped to them. For use <50km.
Now look at a photo of a human standing next to a shahed-136 size UAV for a totally different size scale.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/11/in-europe-the-p...
I see. Thanks for both your answers.
The 'final' decision was recently made to go ahead with the massive project for this, which is eventually intended to replace the UH60/Blackhawk type platform. Traditional big money defense contractor stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_MV-75_Cheyenne_II
The military operates more than one type of aircraft. I don't think an MV-75 will fit very well on an FF(X), for example.
I'm not sure I agree that they're making that bet (there's lots of market at current ranges IMHO), but even if they were it would be a great bet to make. We're talking about jumping to 375 [1] or even 400 Wh/kg in production cars this year [2] (with prototypes long since shown off). And there's every reason to believe that there's a lot more headroom in this space to improve, and that we will improve rapidly since we're making so many more batteries now.
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/04/28/jeep-dodge-maker-validates-so...
[2] https://www.evlithium.com/lifepo4-battery-news/calb-solid-li...
you don't need crazy range to fly between jfk and city .
it's doable to do it today, economically, and solve tons of problems .
in a similar to ev rollout:
solve problem for wealthy people, get the premium, scale cheaper options. Nothing new. Technology of today is ready.
> solve tons of problems
I'm skeptical that air taxis could ever meaningfully reduce traffic congestion to / from JFK. Compared to cars, these would seem to require a significantly larger landing pad and passenger unloading space and need much more safety margin in-between drop offs. Maybe this is competitive vs the private helicopter market?
I wonder what % of traffic is to/from JFK. The subway decently connects much of the city to the JFK air train, but it's a fairly inconvenient journey. Toronto's UP express has made travel to YYZ significantly easier, but I doubt it's possible to construct something similar in NYC.
I love aviation, but I also don't see air travel as being a scalable/affordable solution to this problem. Then again, it's only meant to alleviate traffic burden for a certain segment of the population.
the problem with train it stops ... on every train stop. New york specifically, there are several networks(new jersey, mta, there are lines that are 100+ years old.
In general if you have an affordable enough option you'd never walk into subway, with your several luggages, to travel longer. Train is a decent plan b.
> if you have an affordable enough option you'd never walk into subway, with your several luggages, to travel longer
I'm moderately wealthy and lived in New York for a decade. I take the train between JFK and Manhattan. (Specifically, the LIRR.) It's faster, more reliable and–for me–more comfortable than taking a car. (It's also safer.) If I have my cat with me or I feel like having fun, I'll take a Blade, but that's realistically only shaving like 20 minutes off the travel time.
LIRR is not a dirty MTA train :) Noisy shaky helicopter is not an electric taxi with 6+ motors that gives you more stability with way less noise that flies after take of using wings.
Cars for sure are less convenient.
> LIRR is not a dirty MTA train :) Noisy shaky helicopter is not an electric taxi with 6+ motors that gives you more stability with way less noise that flies after take of using wings
I've also taken the A from Harlem to JFK once. It was fine. Tougher to read a book, like I can on the LIRR, mostly because the frequency of stops means having to constantly be aware of your belongings.
And agree on helicopters. We already have helicopters. Switching them to eVTOLs is a move forward.
if your air taxi is pilotless and electric, why it can't be scalable.
How many people do you think enter/exit JFK arrivals and departures every hour? Where are you going to land all those air vehicles? Is this a shuttle service with many seats? How do you plan for the air traffic for that many people?
Those are all reasonable questions, but if some entity would be able to answer them, of all things, I think JFK, an airport, would be well equipped to handle them.
JFK airtrain carries about 30K passengers per weekday in 2025. how many landing pads would be needed to carry a meaningful % of that traffic alone?
travel time is 5-10 mins with 40 mins to 2hours.
Yes, it is better compared to helicopter. cheaper, less noise. e.g. you can place it more applications, for less money.
Well it's 5-10 minutes once you get to the west 30th st heliport, which can easily take 20 minutes within Manhattan. Plus getting loaded in, cleared for takeoff, and potential for backups at the landing pads, I suspect the gains are much less in practice.
JFK and city is a relatively niche and regionally unique market compared to how short/medium range aircraft are used in general. For instance the Joby or Archer product right now wouldn't have the range to fly from a helipad on the Seattle waterfront to somewhere in the San Juan Islands. Or for a flight from Vancouver harbour to Victoria.
it's every airport in every city. In new york only you have 3 airports. its a 200k+ a day traffic.
I think Beta's CTOL has better economic prospects, if less useful as an air taxi.
More like in a similar (but smaller) role as the Cessna 408 Skycourier, which is short to medium range, unpressurized.
Isn’t the comparison against helicopters for regional and urban transit where EVTOLs hold an edge because of the drastic energy reduction that fixed wing has over helicopters?
I mean sure long term the goal may be to wait for battery density to increase to keep moving upmarket and eat longer and longer flights from traditional aviation, but I don’t think better batteries are a requirement for the initial batch of vehicles.
The upcoming solid-state batteries are around 500 Wh/kg.
But batteries have an advantage over turbines, especially small turbines: specific _power_ density.
Joby actually claims their business is viable without significant advances in battery energy density. We'll see. I think this will be closer to an Eclipse Aviation business case than SpaceX.