On an air taxi built for one

Hi folks, it's Brad in San Francisco. There's one air taxi company that's conspicuously flying against the jet stream, but first...

Today's top tech news:

Apple must allow alternative payment methods for apps, a U.S. judge ruled
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Tinder gets its first female CEO as her predecessor takes over Yahoo

Sometime in the next six months, if all goes according to plan, Sebastian Thrun will follow the recent examples of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and turn himself into an aerial guinea pig of sorts.

Thrun, a Silicon Valley veteran and head of the air-taxi startup Kitty Hawk, said he'll climb aboard a prototype electric vehicle and become its first passenger. The single-seat drone will likely fly for five minutes at about 1,000 feet above the ground, the company says.

Before starting Kitty Hawk, the German-born entrepreneur co-founded the division that became Waymo during a seven-year career at Google. Thrun has his commercial pilot license and is pursuing a certification to fly large commercial jets.

On this flight, though, he'll get to enjoy the view. The company's Heaviside vehicle, named for the English mathematician who predicted the existence of the ionosphere, is designed to be a completely autonomous aircraft. That decision stands in contrast to a lot of Kitty Hawk's well-funded competitors in the race to build the so-called flying car of the future.

Adding pilots is a waste of time, according to Thrun. "You spend a lot of time building a pilot-able aircraft," Thrun said, "and then you spend the same amount of energy to take the controls out of the effort."

"I believe from the get-go that we should really aim to where we want to go," he said on the 200,000-acre ranch near Hollister, California, where the secretive startup has been testing Heaviside for the past few years.

Kitty Hawk was one of the first companies in the currently crowded field to create eVTOLs, helicopter-like electric aircraft that take off and land vertically. It's over a decade old, but my colleague Ashlee Vance and I broke the news of Kitty Hawk's existence only in 2016. Since then, attention and investment in eVTOLs has exploded. Morgan Stanley said the market will easily eclipse the helicopter industry and become a $1 trillion business by 2050. Startups like Santa Cruz, California-based Joby Aviation, Palo Alto, California-based Archer Aviation and Germany's Lilium GmbH have gone public over the last few months by merging with special purpose acquisition companies.

Kitty Hawk, which remains private, is defying most of these trends. Larry Page, the reclusive Google co-founder and former CEO, funds the entire effort himself from a fortune that the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates at $128 billion and, Kitty Hawk said, works closely with Thrun. The startup is currently committed to the one-seat Heaviside, while Joby (whose aircraft has five seats), Lilium (seven) and Archer (five) all believe you'll want some companionship in the air, as well as the security of a licensed pilot at the controls.

But Thrun and Page believe that putting more people aboard will add weight, noise and cost—and limit the potential of air taxis to capture people's commutes and remake cities. "I firmly believe when you go to a four-seater, you will be four times as expensive in everything," Thrun said. Owning a gas-powered car costs about 50 cents a mile, and he argues that only a one-seater will be able to match that price, while indulging people's tendency to commute to work by themselves.

By most measures, Kitty Hawk is behind its rivals, which are all in various stages of applying for U.S. regulatory certification. Thrun said he's still perfecting Heaviside—he's particularly unhappy with the energy the vehicle expends during landing—and certification would only lock the company into a preliminary design.

But Kitty Hawk has also encountered some turbulence over the past few years. It built a cool-looking, open-air, single-passenger drone for use over water, called the Flyer, then scrapped it last year. It also developed a two-seater dubbed Cora, and then spun that project into a joint venture with Boeing Co., called Wisk, in 2019—right as the aerospace giant was thrust into crisis after two fatal crashes of its 737 Max.

Over the summer, Kitty Hawk parted ways with Damon Vander Lind, the company's general manager and primary designer of Heaviside. Thrun said Vander Lind wanted to expand the cockpit, put a pilot on board and move as quickly as its rivals toward certification.

But that wasn't the future Thrun and Page had in mind. "I came down thinking, for me, this is only worthwhile if you reach for the stars," Thrun said. (Vander Lind declined to comment.) "It's not interesting for us to build a hundred thousand [aircraft]. You want a million or a hundred million," Thrun said. "You want to get to a point where you go to people in a city and say, We are not just safer than your car and not just faster, this is cheaper."

Thrun, at least, is entirely comfortable getting into the Heaviside cockpit by himself for the upcoming test. And he's puckishly stubborn on the topic. When I suggested that most air travel-wary passengers might want someone's hand to hold if something goes wrong, he replied that Kitty Hawk could simply put a disembodied robotic hand in the cockpit.

Later, he emailed me a link to one for sale on Amazon. —Brad Stone

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