There are already new companies doing short-distance electric passenger flight. These companies could well scale to longer distance flights.
You could also imagine a company like Tesla getting in that business as well.
And as far as automotive, or generally non-aerospace, companies are concerned, well, aerospace is hard. Really hard, it is with the potential exception of life science the most regulated industry on earth. None of the automotive experience (close to none, but you get the point) translate into an aerospace environment. And even if, we are still looking at billions of development cost for small aircraft to be used commercialy, in the range of ten billion plus for commercial airliners.
Yeah, I wasn't making any time prediction, but big technology changes can break established industry patterns.
> The latter of which falls squarely into the helicopter segment.
There are lots of markets in the past that flew these kind of routes and with electric other can again and more routes can be added because of the changed economics. Helicopters are unsafe and have low capacity, I don't really think they are actually competing in the same space.
They address something different then something like the Heart Aerospace ES-19. That plane is 400km, 19 seater designed to launch in 2026.
And that is with incredibly conservative choices, conservative air-frame, conservative batteries and so on.
There is a huge amount of potential for increasing the range left once you fully optimize every aspect of the plane around electric.
> And as far as automotive, or generally non-aerospace, companies are concerned, well, aerospace is hard.
I picked Tesla for a reason. Tesla works with SpaceX. Those two companies already work together on many fronts. Tesla battery packs and electric motors in SpaceX vehicles. They have shared research divisions in material science and likely other things. Musk has been talking about electric plans for decades, its pretty clear that he wants to develop them and has mentioned before that between Tesla and SpaceX he has the ingredients. Its just that there is so much more scaling to do in automotive and trucking that it doesn't yet make sense to invest the resources.
Lets just be real, Tesla knows much more about electric motors and batteries then companies like Heart Aerospace, or existing companies like Boeing/Airbus. Yes the industry is regulated more and certifications are more strict, but a company that produces 3+ million electric motors a year (more large electric motors then anybody else in the world) fully vertically integrated, can manage to match companies like Heart or Airbus when developing battery packs and electric motors and get them certified and produced.
SpaceX speaks for itself, they outperform Boeing to an almost embracing degree in space, see Crew Dragon compared to Starliner. I am confident that if they were to work on an airplane they could do it. They had to do a huge amount of certification work for DoD, for NASA, they know how to work with regulators and the get hardware certified.
Now of course, it would not be easy and success in aerospace is never guaranteed. But the ingredients are there and the is little question they could raise the required funding. I think that would be a better thing to focus on then robots to be honest.
