VTOL Supersonic aircraft

[ThomasD]

Another form of Transporation for the Wealthy. They Talk about landing in Downtown NYC to JFK. I assume the company is talking about a Helipad in Manhattan.

 

[Alexia]

Electric airliners are at least two decades away.

Energy density in batteries is just not where it has to be to sustain even regional airliners, much less the long haul voyages that Airbus and Boeing are chasing after in their newest jets, the 787 and A350.

Aircraft design and certification is a slow and expensive process, a process I see Musk getting bored and/or irritated at. Moreover, they'd have to get airlines to bite. This is where the tricky part is. Whichever of Musk's companies builds this electric airliner has to match the reliability and service of Boeing and Airbus, whose newest planes have a dispatch reliability of >99.5%

Electric airlines is something that’ll take a really long time to figure out battery usage and a lot more, I believe Elon can work on it as he has made good credibility in this recent times

 

[Buckminster]

Couldn't resist:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1714308793662599524

Will Elon accept windows at all?

 

[Buckminster]

How to fix Concorde:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1719178169066852649

 

[Buckminster]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1729996432344555693

17 min. Entire design for electric vertical take-off supersonic aircraft.

 

[Buckminster]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1787908976199532788

https://twitter.com/x/status/1784221769160900687

 

[Tha_Ape]

Electric planes advantage are noise. They sacrifice performance for low detectabiliy. See "Great Horned Owl aircraft". Or for high altitude, long endurance "pseudolites" like NASAs pathfinder.

Conventional planes get lighter as they fly which directly affects range. With electric, you're carrying that battery with you the whole way. At 10% charge, you're still carrying 100% of the battery weight. Fuel is a huge component of a planes weight. So burning it significantly reduces the planes weight.

As for VTOL hypersonic, I'd say the falcon 9 classifies as that. Takes off and lands vertically and puts things in orbit (hypersonic). Air breathing hypersonic is much harder. Harvesting oxygen from the air is a lot more difficult than bringing an oxidizer with you. You've got to get the O2, mix it with fuel and then combust it/ accelerate it all while moving through the air REALLY quickly. Even on the SR71, the turbofan just became a "pump" to get the air through the engine while the RAM jet produced the thrust.

 

[ThomasD]

What ever happened to Musk's Hyperloop?