For all the hype swirling around electric aviation, the current state of battery technology and electric powertrains remains a limiting factor for all the drones, air taxis, cargo haulers, and flying cars hoping to take off. Unhappy with that cap on the range, power, and speed of these aircraft, one …
Read More »Cars Aren’t Going Anywhere, and More Transportation News Thi…
If experiments on the ground are cool, experiments in the sky are cooler. And so we can count ourselves extra icey this week, as we got to see to high-flying studies. First, we chatted with aviation company UAV Turbines, which is building mini, watermelon-sized jet engines. Pourquoi? Turns out 500- …
Read More »Uber Eats Hopes Drones Can Lift It to Profitability
Come next summer, the most remarkable thing about your home-delivered late-night California burrito won’t be the French fries inside. It’ll be that the San Diego speciality made part of its journey by drone, as part of a scheme to pull Uber’s food-delivery business financials out of a nosedive. At Forbes’ …
Read More »What Boeing’s 737 MAX Has to Do With Cars: Software
Software eating the world may sound good to tech mavens. But the now eight-year-old maxim has its serious downsides. Software defects have been blamed for Boeing 737-MAX 8 crashes in October and March, which killed 346 people. The aircraft has been grounded worldwide for three months, as investigators from Indonesia …
Read More »An Aviation Pioneer Goes All In on Electric Planes
When André Borschberg started flying as a 15 year old, he didn’t worry about how much fuel he had to burn to get and stay aloft. These days, it’s pretty much all he thinks about. It has been three years since Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard completed an around-the-world journey in …
Read More »Flying Car Startup Alaka’i Bets Hydrogen Outdoes Batteries
Hydrogen fuel cells have had a hard time making inroads as power sources for ground-based electric vehicles, but things are starting to look up for the zero emission propulsion tech. A new air taxi startup, Alaka’i Technologies, this week unveiled a liquid-hydrogen-powered, five-passenger electric aircraft that it claims will be …
Read More »Drone Delivery Services Are Actually, Finally Almost Here
A drone-delivered pizza feels like a good idea. A drone-delivered vaccine—especially one gently dropped into a place that’s otherwise hard to get to—feels like a great one. And while it might take a while for these things to show up at your specific door, hops forward in the budding drone …
Read More »Kitty Hawk, Flying Cars, and the Challenges of ‘Going 3D’
To get a peek at the future of transportation, you could start by visiting a warehouse building in an industrial stretch of Mountain View, California. Above the door, which has its window papered over, a safety sign catalogs various health and fire hazards that lurk within. A red and black …
Read More »Boeing 737 Crashes May Make It Harder for Air Taxis to Take …
Two fatal crashes in the past six months, which together killed 346 people, have forced all Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft out of the sky, as the airplane maker and regulators around the world seek the causes of the accidents and changes to prevent future crashes. But fallout from the …
Read More »UPS Drones Are Now Moving Blood Samples Over North Carolina
If you’re inclined to puns, you might say medical samples are the lifeblood of hospital systems. But if you actually work with them, you know they’re more of a headache. Because the same road traffic that keeps you from getting home keeps the couriers charged with moving these tissue and …
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