Over the last few years we have talked on several occasions about the flying car that Larry page, one of the founders of Google, was building.
This is Kitty Hawk’s Flyer, a project in which many millions of dollars have already been invested, and which will not see the light of day, although the reason is good: they will devote the resources to create something bigger.
The car in question had already made more than 25,000 flights, both piloted and unmanned, and they claimed that learning to drive it was a matter of hours. Now they want to go further with Heaviside, an electric plane capable of going further, with more cargo inside and faster.
On their website they say that Project Heaviside is the company’s latest high-performance electric vehicle. It is 100 times quieter than a normal helicopter, and once in the air, the vehicle blends into the background noise of a city or suburb, barely audible to the human ear.
In terms of its speed, it can travel at 290 km/h and uses less than half the energy of a car (Flyer only reached 160 km/h maximum).
Looking like an airplane, it is still an eVTOL (all-electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing), a vehicle that takes off and lands vertically, with an electric motor and a range of 160 km per charge.
It maintains the multi-propeller configuration seen in other projects of the company such as Cora, which is very similar. The company claims that it is “100 times less noisy than a conventional helicopter” and that the sound will hardly be perceptible to the human ear when flying over cities. It is still a work in progress, but the company claims that it can fly at 290 kilometers per hour and that its range is 160 kilometers per charge.
The ultimate goal is to have flying taxis that are inexpensive, fast and avoid city traffic.
You can see more details at Kittyhawk.aero.