Will not take off anymore: Google co-founder closes the air taxi project

The Kitty Hawk Corporation, which specialized in the creation of various kinds of air taxis, was founded back in 2010 by the world’s most famous high-tech personality – Larry Page. The co-founder of Google decided to be one of the first to enter the market of electric aircraft that could be used to transport passengers, including within the city, but, apparently, the company failed to achieve at least some success in twelve years – today, September 22 , employees of the Kitty Hawk Corporation have officially announced on their social media pages that they are closing

Unfortunately, so far no one has reported the exact reasons for the company’s closure – Larry Page himself does not comment on the situation, and the team members notified of their closure only with a short message. Probably the main reason for this development is too high ambitions – even to develop an air taxi that can be used to transport people is already a rather difficult task. But in addition to creating the vehicle itself, you also need to create infrastructure – take-off platforms, hangars, service stations, and so on. And, of course, you need to obtain a state permit to operate the airspace, which is also problematic.

At the same time, Kitty Hawk Corporation employees said that although they are closing the development of their own electric air taxi, one project of the company still managed to survive – we are talking about a joint development in partnership with Boeing. The fact is that the companies some time ago entered into a partnership agreement to develop Wisk Aero – for the sake of this project, Boeing even invested $ 450 million in the latest funding round. Accordingly, this project continues to live, but it is not entirely clear whether Boeing will develop the vehicle on its own or still with the participation of some of the partner company’s engineers after the closure.

I wonder how this situation will affect competitors in the same area – nevertheless, Larry Page had an excellent team and investments from the largest companies in the world, but even he did not manage to bring the project to release. What can we say about lesser-known projects, and there are more than enough of them on the market now that do not have additional funding and a Google co-founder in their team – they have even less chance of success.

Source: Trash Box

Flora

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