The modern-day Kitty Hawk was run by Thrun, who previously directed Google’s moonshot R&D program and founded online education company Udacity. In 2015 Page set up another stealth startup next door to Zee.Aero and called it Kitty Hawk, after the tiny coastal village in North Carolina’s Outer Banks where the Wright brothers carried out their own flying experiments. Eventually Zee decided the plane should be developed into a pilotless air taxi, now dubbed Cora. Zee tested a piloted electric aircraft that the company considered selling as a kit to be assembled by buyers. The original vision was to produce a literal flying car, with folding wings so it could fit inside a home garage, but that was quickly abandoned as impractical, and Zee went on to try other designs, including one registered with FAA under the name “Mutt” because of its marriage of new elements with an older configuration. Larry Page began dabbling in aviation in 2010, quietly funding a company called Zee.Aero that was led by a Stanford aerospace professor, Ilan Kroo, near the Google campus. “It is going to be a ride-sharing model for transportation services.” “We have moved to seeing it as a transportation service and not as a vehicle for individual purchase,” said Daver. The company has shelved the idea of marketing Flyer as a recreational device and is exploring commercial options, perhaps running it as a kind of aerial ferry. That would leave Kitty Hawk with two other aircraft: Flyer and Heaviside, an autonomous winged one-seater unveiled in October that, in an attempt to solve the noise problem that has made heliports unwelcome neighbors, was designed to be 100 times quieter than helicopters, as well as faster. The jetmaker and Kitty Hawk declined to comment. Public filings and organizational shifts at Kitty Hawk described by former employees indicate that there’s been a change of control of the Cora program, and Boeing seems the likely acquirer. These challenges may explain why a strategic partnership with Boeing announced in June could go much deeper than publicly announced. In the case of urban air mobility, many of the requirements don’t yet exist. However, the company faces the same problems as any aspirant in the field: the poor energy density of the current generation of batteries severely limits the flight times and carrying capacity of electric aircraft, and building a functioning prototype is faster and easier than turning it into a reliable product that satisfies aviation regulators’ safety requirements. Kitty Hawk got off to an earlier start than many of the scores of startups now attempting to build electric urban air taxis, and the deep pockets of Page, who has a nearly $60 billion fortune, have been a huge advantage, enabling the company to hire hundreds of engineers, machinists and designers to create cutting-edge aircraft. “That’s just how it had to be if you wanted to keep getting a paycheck.”ĭaver did not respond directly to questions about employee departures, but said workers at Kitty Hawk are required to report safety-related issues to their managers, or through a confidential digital channel directly to the general counsel and human resources, and can anonymously discuss safety concerns with an external safety director. “It was a pattern-if you talked about safety, you were done, so you just didn’t,” said one former employee. She did not comment directly on the fires or reports of breakdowns or problems with batteries. “No person has ever been harmed or exposed due to undue risk in over 26,000 test flights with over 100 prototype vehicles,” wrote Shernaz Daver, an advisor to Kitty Hawk, in an email response to a list of questions sent by Forbes. Last year, the Mountain View Fire Department was called to put out an early morning blaze at the Flyer building, city records show former employees said the fire at the Google-owned building involved damaged batteries that had been pulled out of a Flyer that had crashed the previous day in flight testing under remote operation. Behind closed doors, Flyer encountered problems, including frequent breakdowns and fires involving batteries, electric motors and wiring, two former engineers said. Kitty Hawk confirmed to Forbes that, after unveiling a more polished version of Flyer last year, it has decided not to sell the one-seater to individuals and has returned deposits to would-be buyers.
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