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Comment on Uber’s Flying Taxiparent

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Came here to say exactly this. I'd add that of the non-aerospace tech companies that have tried to build planes, I'm not aware of any that have launched commercially and I can only think of one that has ever flown.

Turns out that building commercial aircraft is still hard.

making flying things is easy these days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQK9m_OBVgY

The US military has sunk $50 Billion dollars into this problem over the last 30 years and still aren't there.

Bell X22 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arXpHn9DPYo ) was technically pretty successful from the start. The only disadvantage vs. V-22 is the speed - that speed though comes at the cost of lesser stability and safety and higher complexity of V-22. For commercial application the priorities would be different, and thus i think the multirotor, being more easy to develop, would come cheaper and sooner than that while any commercialization of V-22 is doomed from the start.

The X-22 was in no way more stable or safer than the V-22 it had just as much problems at start and unlike the V-22 which was based on the XV-3 and XV-15 those problems were not mainly in manufacturing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_XV-3

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