There are to be three variants of the ES-300: an all-electric 200km version, a hybrid 30-seat 400km version, and a hybrid 25-seat 800km version. And the ES-300 airframe very much is not some existing airframe.

EV fires are rarer than ICE fires (and slower spreading as well), so given that the competition is fuel-based....

They didn't bother to install a co-pilot, a seat for the co-pilot, passengers, seats for the passengers, the hybrid gen set as you say, fuel for the gen set, and who knows if they installed a full production sized battery or just a smaller one

Are you just learning about the concept of a prototype in this comments section?

That's not correct. There are three modes. All-electric, hybrid-30 passenger, and hybrid-25 passenger, with ranges of 200km, 400km, and 800km, respectively. The airframe is to be certified for 20k feet (FL200), with optimal cruise altitudes from 10-15k feet, but this was explicitly described by the company as a "low-altitude test flight".

And to all the people going, "LOL, that's never going to cross the Pacific!" or similar range comments... and? Long haul flights (over 4000km) are only 5% of commercial flights. Very short / regional flights are 27% of total flights. There's very much a market for puddle jumpers, and airlines very much will buy them if they offer competitive advantages.

1984 is suggested to Musks kids.

They will continue to level Oligarch tax on all goods while they work hard on getting rid of you.

Just wait until it starts training on porn that people managed to upload to Twitch in violation of the terms and conditions. Then your use of the word "rape" in that comment will take on a whole new meaning.

Real-world flight times are likely to be miserable for most purposes. Currently, this plane has a maximum altitude of 2,000 feet. Not sure why. But the plane has a maximum airspeed of 140 knots. For context, a 737 has a cruising speed of 450 knots.

In practice, this means that this plane is only suitable for very-short-distance flights where a jet would not achieve normal cruising altitudes or speeds.

A nonstop flight from SJC to DFW takes about 3 hours and 35 minutes, give or take, for 1440 miles. At cruising speed, it would take 2 hours and 46 minutes. So an additional 50 minutes or so is spent on taxi time and landing at a much slower speed (maybe 140 to 150 knots). Of that, landing takes 20 to 30 minutes and drops the speed to a third, so I'm going to ballpark that as about 15 minutes of added time, leaving 35 minutes for taxi time. So the total flight time is probably about 30 hours at 450 knots.

Assuming that landing speed for the X1 is proportional to the difference in cruising speed (which may not be accurate, but won't make a huge difference), this means that same flight would take 35 minutes plus about 3.2x the flight time, or about 10 hours and 11 minutes.

On the flip side, the low landing speed means that it can fly into much smaller airports, and because it carries a much smaller number of passengers affordably, it could make much more direct flights economically feasible. Combine that with autonomous piloting, and if it actually had enough range to do medium-range flights, such a design would have potential.

When I fly from SJC to my mom's house in West TN, it takes me about 14 hours to fly commercially, thanks to 3.5 hours of driving, an hour of TSA time, and an hour or more of layover, and an extra takeoff and an extra landing. If I could get rid of all of that extra time and fly general aviation rules, then an automated flight with a single passenger to the nearest tiny little air strip would involve only half an hour of driving (3 hours savings), no TSA time (1 hour savings), no layover (1 hour savings), and no extra takeoff and landing (30 minutes savings), reducing the trip to about 13 hours and 15 minutes (12.5 hours in flight, 30 minutes of driving, and maybe 15 extra minutes for landing).

But that all assumes adequate range. With a hybrid range of only 500 miles and an all-electric range of only 125 miles, the X1 would have to make a minimum of four stops to reach Tennessee from California. So this plane, while a great demonstration of the potential for electric flight, still has very little practical use other than ultra-short-range flights. I suppose with this, I could fly into Nashville or Little Rock or Memphis and take a tiny plane to that airstrip if such a flight existed and were cheap, and that might be worth doing if it existed and were cheap, but I'm not holding my breath unless it is entirely automated.

Its just wealth transfer from US taxpayers to oligarch techbros.
There is no other reason.

Futurama did a joke on beaming commercials into your dreams while you sleep.

$899 to start. Enjoy your oligarch tax.

You're assuming they'll lose tax revenue and that they aren't spending more money on Paramount than they get back. Given this country's penchant for corporate welfare, I wouldn't assume that Paramount leaving would be tax-flow-negative. More specifically, after all of the incentives, tax credits, etc. are taken into account, I wouldn't assume that the loss from Paramount leaving would be greater than the loss from Warner Brothers largely ceasing to exist except as an IP licensing subsidiary of Paramount.

Yes, of course. I'm not saying it relieves them of responsibility. It just doesn't preclude that other people could *also* be held responsible. :-)

If they were monitoring the Coast Guard VTS channel and the boat that came to help was monitoring channel 16, the latter could easily have arrived before the Coast Guard forwarded the request to the VTS channel.

So I would say it is at least somewhat plausible, but only if his yacht falls into that larger vessel category.

That's true... unless either:

• The captain called the boat's owner and asked for permission and was told "No."
• The boat's owner had given specific instructions not to assist other boats.

Unfortunately, both of those has a small but nonzero chance of being the case. Oral instructions like "Say nothing so you have plausible deniability" would be hard to prove, of course.