Tag: Larry Page

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Kitty Hawk, the electric aircraft moonshot backed by Larry Page, is shutting down

Kitty Hawk, the electric aviation startup founded and led by the ‘godfather of self-driving cars’ Sebastian Thrun and backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, is shutting down.

The company said in a tweet and on a post in LinkedIn that it was winding down operations.

“We have made the decision to wind down Kittyhawk. We’re still working on the details of what’s next,” the posts on social media read.

Efforts to reach Thrun or a company spokesperson have been unsuccessful. TechCrunch will update the article if more information is provided.

Kitty Hawk was founded in 2010 by Thrun with backing from Page initially under the name Zee.Aero. Page had tapped Thrun, a longtime friend and adviser who co-founded X, the Alphabet moonshot factory, to lead the company. 

Kitty Hawk operated largely in secret for years — except for the occasional media scoop — until the middle of the decade when it introduced its Flyer aircraft. The single-seater, all-electric, vertical take-off and landing vehicle was the company’s inaugural moonshot to develop an ultralight electric flying car designed for anyone to use. 

Kitty Hawk built and flew 111 Flyer aircraft and conducted more than 25,000 successful crewed and uncrewed flights with its fleet. However, that program was shuttered in June 2020 — and about 70 employees were laid off — to make room for Heaviside, a more capable, quieter and once secret electric aircraft  known as H2 that could fly and land anywhere autonomously. Heaviside had been in development since 2015, but it wasn’t revealed publicly until the 2019 TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

Sebastian Thrun DSC02919

Sebastian Thrun of Kitty Hawk at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019 on October 3, 2019 Image credits: TechCrunch

Kitty Hawk had at least one other public project called Cora, a two-person, autonomous flying taxi that was initially revealed in 2018. Cora was spun off in late 2019 into a joint venture with Boeing. The joint venture, now named Wisk, is trying to develop and commercialize electric, self-flying air taxis. In early 2022, Boeing invested another $450 million into Wisk.

With Flyer shuttered and Cora spun off, Kitty Hawk’s only mission was Heaviside and reportedly another larger version of the aircraft. HVSD, which is named after renowned physicist and electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside, is Kitty Hawk’s third act.

While the program progressed, competitors like Beta Technologies, Joby Aviation, Lilium and Volocopter popped up and made progress as well. Internal strife between Thrun and Heaviside program lead, physicist and electrical engineer Damon Vander Lind, added to the pressure. Lind was fired in May 2021, Forbes reported at the time.

Kitty Hawk hit another milestone in 2021 when it demonstrated a beyond-visual-line-of-sight flight in Ohio. The demo was part of a joint effort with the FAA, the Air Force and SkyVision, a ground-based radar service. By then, the company had built more than 16 H2 vehicles.

By 2022, however, the mission was less clear. Sources told TechCrunch that Kitty Hawk working on Heaviside in 2022. However, its website hinted at another stage for the company. Kitty Hawk said it was working on its first commercial air taxi, a vehicle built off of the H2 platform that would be small, light and quiet and remotely piloted.

Kitty Hawk, the electric aircraft moonshot backed by Larry Page, is shutting down by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

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Inside the secretive Silicon Valley startup trying to save the oceans with tech

When Matthew Dunbabin saw the devastation wrought on tropical reef ecosystems by overfishing and climate change, he wondered if robots could help. With money from the Queensland University of Technology, where he is a professor of robotics, Dunbabin’s team developed a prototype underwater robot to reseed dying reefs with tiny coral larvae.

While initial results were promising, prospects for actually deploying the bots seemed dim. “Universities can get stuck into three-year funding cycles,” he told TechCrunch.“But global issues can’t wait three years.”

Then in 2019, Dunbabin was approached by Oceankind, a mysterious new ocean philanthropy organization that promised to accelerate his efforts. “They saw what we were doing and said, ‘what do you need to scale?’ And they wanted it to be quick,” he said.

In rapid succession, Oceankind provided three grants totaling almost $2 million to iterate the robot’s design, add machine learning capabilities and transform it into a multi-functional autonomous underwater reef restoration system, intuitive enough to be operated by citizen scientists. Queensland’s CoralBots are now being put to work in Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam and the Maldives.

“What I like about Oceankind is that they recognize the true cost of doing technology projects and they’re prepared to support it,” said Dunbabin. “They’ve been absolutely a dream funder.”

Until this week, Dunbabin was not allowed to mention Oceankind. Instead, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, which also received a separate $1 million donation from Oceankind, took public credit for the robot research. While Dunbabin can now give full credit to Oceankind for the funding, he is still unwilling to identify the Silicon Valley power couple behind the organization.

An examination of California state filings show that Oceankind was incorporated as an LLC in 2018, managed by a family office that controls many of Google co-founder Larry Page’s properties and businesses. But it was only last week that Oceankind’s website was updated to indicate that it was actually Page’s wife, Lucy Southworth, a research geneticist by profession, who founded and directs the organization. 

The website also now details how Oceankind has spent more than $121 million funding a broad range of projects related to marine science, technology, animal life and climate. That makes Oceankind one of the biggest non-governmental funders of ocean science in the world.

Casting a wide net for science

Oceankind’s stated mission is “to improve the health of global ocean ecosystems while supporting the livelihoods of people who rely on them.” “We seek to advance the policy, science, and technology necessary to reverse the growing threats facing our oceans.”

Oceankind’s list of grants shows the organization casting its net widely, funding everything from off-shore wind farms in Japan to cell-based seafood research. Oceankind has supported diversity and representation efforts, funded research into sewage control and sustainable fisheries, and made grants to science programs from the Arctic Ocean to the tropics.

One Oceankind project that may raise eyebrows is its funding of research that strays into the controversial area of geoengineering. In September 2019, Oceankind convened a conference of ecologists, biochemists and climate experts to look into ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE). As well as warming the planet, rising levels of carbon dioxide are acidifying the oceans, threatening shellfish populations and delicate ecosystems like coral reefs.

OAE involves adding large quantities of ground-up alkaline rock into seawater, where it would react with excess CO2 to form bicarbonates that sea creatures use to form their skeletons and shells. These should ultimately end as sediment on the seafloor, storing the carbon for millennia.

Although OAE is still mostly at a theoretical and experimental stage, deploying it at scale would be a massive undertaking. The official report from Oceankind’s conference noted that it could require five billion tons of rock annually, which is about twice the quantity currently used in global cement production.

Few attendees at the conference knew that Oceankind had a connection to Page, who, as the seventh richest person in the world, is in a position to personally fund a significant geoengineering program. The conference ultimately concluded that very wealthy donors could consider “large-scale demonstrations” to validate the effectiveness of OAE at scale.

Oceankind has given marine science nonprofit ClimateWorks grants totaling at least $18.2 million, dedicated to decarbonizing shipping, carbon dioxide removal and OAE. ClimateWorks in turn recently made grants for limited OAE field experiments.

The mystery of Oceankind’s money

Larry Page has long had a charitable foundation, named after his deceased father, of which he and Southworth are both directors. Over the last decade, that foundation has given hundreds of millions of dollars to donor-advised funds — tax-efficient charitable vehicles that are not required to disclose where the money eventually ends up.

Moreover, Oceankind itself is not a nonprofit, which are required to open their books every year in public filings to the IRS. Instead, Southworth incorporated Oceankind as a limited liability company (LLC), making it virtually opaque to public scrutiny. It is thus impossible to know how much, if any, of Page’s Google fortune has ended up at Oceankind. However, TechCrunch could find no indication in public records of traditional nonprofits or government agencies providing Oceankind with any funds. 

Oceankind confirmed to TechCrunch that Southworth resources it, and supports its executive director in leading the organization, but spokesperson Nina Lagpacan did not respond to questions regarding the ultimate source of its funding. She did provide TechCrunch with this statement: “Oceankind is not seeking visibility nor conducting media interviews at this time.”

This lack of transparency worries some experts in philanthropy. “Is it appropriate to put this kind of research into the hands of billionaires for them to be the drivers of it financially?” asks Stephen Gardiner, a professor of philosophy at the University of Washington and author of A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change. “I wonder about what sorts of accountability are in place, what sorts of power they might be exercising over what’s being done and how.”

Page and his family are reported to have spent much of the pandemic in Fiji. Last year, Page was granted New Zealand residency, where one of his eVTOL startups, Wisk Aero, recently completed flight tests.

“I don’t know anything about Larry Page’s preferences,” says Gardiner. “But if he’s in favor of some kinds of interference with the ocean but against others, that could influence the research agenda in a way you might not see if projects were being run through national science foundations or other institutions with more accountability and political legitimacy.”

14 climate tech investors share their H1 2022 strategies

On the flip side, Oceankind does seem to be empowering valuable initiatives that might otherwise languish. In 2021, Oceankind gave $100,000 to SkyTruth, a nonprofit environmental watchdog that uses remote sensing data to identify and monitor threats to the planet’s natural resources. The funds were to help it operationalize a system called Cerulean that tracks oil slicks back to individual ships at sea.

Over its first year of operation, Cerulean positively identified 187 vessels responsible for deliberate oil slicks, using satellite data, machine learning and human experts. “I’m confident the project would have happened anyway because it’s a great idea,” said John Amos, president of SkyTruth. “But it’s hard to say if we would have fleshed out this great idea as compellingly, if we hadn’t had support from Oceankind.”

Amos hopes that Oceankind will continue to support Cerulean as SkyTruth expands its oil slick tracking, eventually to a global scale. And from now on, it seems that the billionaires behind it will no longer hide beneath the waves. 

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CockroachDB, the database that just won’t die

There is an art to engineering, and sometimes engineering can transform art. For Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, those two worlds collided when they created the widely successful open-source graphics program, GIMP, as college students at Berkeley.

That project was so successful that when the two joined Google in 2002, Sergey Brin and Larry Page personally stopped by to tell the new hires how much they liked it and explained how they used the program to create the first Google logo.

Cockroach Labs was started by developers and stays true to its roots to this day.

In terms of good fortune in the corporate hierarchy, when you get this type of recognition in a company such as Google, there’s only one way you can go — up. They went from rising stars to stars at Google, becoming the go-to guys on the Infrastructure Team. They could easily have looked forward to a lifetime of lucrative employment.

But Kimball, Mattis and another Google employee, Ben Darnell, wanted more — a company of their own. To realize their ambitions, they created Cockroach Labs, the business entity behind their ambitious open-source database CockroachDB. Can some of the smartest former engineers in Google’s arsenal upend the world of databases in a market spotted with the gravesites of storage dreams past? That’s what we are here to find out.

Berkeley software distribution

Mattis and Kimball were roommates at Berkeley majoring in computer science in the early-to-mid-1990s. In addition to their usual studies, they also became involved with the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF), an organization of undergraduates who have a keen, almost obsessive interest in CS.

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Google’s Sundar Pichai grilled over ‘destroying anonymity on the internet’

Google’s Sundar Pichai faced an awkward line of enquiry during today’s House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing related to its 2007 acquisition of adtech platform DoubleClick, and how it went on to renege on an original promise to lawmakers and regulators that it would not (nor could not) merge DoubleClick data with Google account data — automagically doing just that almost a decade later.

By linking internet users’ browsing data, as harvested via the DoubleClick cookie, to Google accounts it was able to join the dots of user identities, (Gmail) email data, search history, location data and so on (Google already having collapsed the privacy policies of separate products, to join up all that activity) with its users’ wider internet browsing activity — vastly expanding its ability to profile and target people with behavioral ads.

Agency for Google users to prevent this massive privacy intrusion, there was none.

Rep. Val Demings contended that by combining DoubleClick cookie data and Google account data Google had essentially destroyed user privacy on the internet. And — importantly, given the domestic antitrust scrutiny the company now faces — that that had only been possible because of the market power Google had amassed.

“When Google proposed the merger alarm bells were raised about the access to data Google would have — specifically the ability to connect a user’s personal identity with their browsing activity,” said Demings, before zooming in to hammer Pichai on another tech giant broken data privacy promise.

“Google… committed to Congress and to the antitrust enforcers that the deal would not reduce user privacy. Google chief’s legal advisor testified before the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee that Google wouldn’t be able to merge this data. Even if it wanted to, given contractual restrictions. But in June of 2016 Google went ahead and merged this data anyway — effectively destroying anonymity on the internet,” she explained.

Demings then pressed Pichai on whether he personally signed off on the privacy-hostile move, given he became CEO of Google in 2015.

Pichai hesitated before attempting a bland response — only to be interrupted by Demings pressing him again: “Did you sign off on the decision or not?”

“I — I reviewed at a high level all the important decisions we make,” he said, after a micro pause.

He then segwayed in search of more comfortable territory, starting into Google’s usual marketing spiel — about how it “deeply cares about the privacy and security of our users”.

Demings was having none of it. The U-turn had enabled Google to combine a user’s search and browsing history, location data and information from emails stored in Gmail, she said, blasting it “absolutely staggering”.

She then referenced an email from a DoubleClick exec who had told the committee it was “exactly the kind of user reduction in privacy that users’ founders had previously worried would lead to a backlash”.

“‘They were unwavering on the policy due to philosophical reasons. Which is Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] fundamentally not wanting users associated with a cross-site cookie. They were also worried about a privacy storm, as well as damage to Google’s brand’,” she said, quoting directly from the email from the unnamed DoubleClick exec.

“So in 2007 Google’s founders feared making this change because they knew it would upset their users — but in 2016 Google didn’t seem to care,” Demings went on, before putting it to Pichai that what had changed between 2007 and 2016 is that Google gained “enormous market power”.

“So while Google had to care about user privacy in 2007 it no longer had to in 2016 — would you agree that what changed was Google gained enormous market power?” she asked.

The Alphabet and Google CEO responded by asking for a chance “to explain” — and then rattling off a list of controls Google offers users so they can try and shrink how it tracks them, further claiming it makes it “very easy” for people to control what it does with their information. (Some EU data regulators have taken a very different view of Google’s ‘transparency’, however.)

“We today make it very easy for users to be in control of their data,” claimed Pichai. “We have simplified their settings, they can turn ads personalization on or off — we have combined most of activity settings into three groupings. We remind users to go do a privacy check up. One billion users have done so.”

Demings, sounding unimpressed, cut him off again — saying: “I am concerned that Google’s bait and switch with DoubleClick is part of a broader pattern where Google buys up companies for the purposes of surveilling Americans and because of Google’s dominance users have no choice but to surrender.”

She went on to contend that “more user data means more money” for Google.

Pichai had a go at denying that — starting an answer with the claim that “in general that’s not true” before Demings repeated the contention: “So you’re saying that more user data does not mean the more money that Google can collect?”

That was easier for Pichai to sidestep. “Most of the data we collect is to help users and provide personalized experiences back”, he shot back, neatly avoiding the key point that the access Google has given itself to people’s data by cross linking their web browsing with Google IDs and product activity enables the tech giant to generate massive profits via targeting them with creepy ads, which in turn makes up the vast majority of Alphabet’s profit.

But with that Demings’ five minutes were up — although the hearing continues. You can tune in here.

Shortly later in the session, facing further questions around ad data, Pichai noted that Google no longer uses data from Gmail for ad targeting — although this change is relatively recent (June 2017).

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Larry Page’s secret war on the flu

Now that Larry Page has stepped down as CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, he could be following in Bill Gates’s footsteps and tackling global health challenges.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is taking over as CEO of Alphabet

According to charity and business documents obtained by TechCrunch, the billionaire co-founder of Google has been quietly waging a war on the flu.

Thousands of children and teachers in San Francisco’s Bay Area will receive free flu shots at their schools this year from Shoo The Flu, which describes itself as a “community-based initiative.” In fact, it is wholly funded by a for-profit company controlled by Page. Another of his companies, Flu Lab, is supporting multi-million dollar efforts to develop a universal flu vaccine. Neither effort makes public Page’s role in them.

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Watch Sacha Baron Cohen skewer Zuckerberg’s “twisted logic” on hate speech and fakes

Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has waded into the debate about social media regulation.

In an award-acceptance speech to the Anti Defamation League yesterday the creator of Ali G and Borat delivered a precision takedown of what he called Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s “bullshit” arguments against regulating his platform.

The speech is well worth watching in full as Cohen articulates, with a comic’s truth-telling clarity, the problem with “the greatest propaganda machine in history” (aka social media platform giants) and how to fix it: Broadcast-style regulation that sets basic standards and practices of what content isn’t acceptable for them to amplify to billions.

“There is such a thing as objective truth,” said Cohen. “Facts do exist. And if these Internet companies really want to make a difference they should hire enough monitors to actually monitor, work closely with groups like the ADL and the NAACP, insist on facts and purge these lies and conspiracies from their platforms.”

Attacking social media platforms for promulgating “a sewer of bigotry and vile conspiracy theories that threaten our democracy and to some degree our planet”, he pointed out that freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of reach.

“This can’t possibly be what the creators of the Internet had in mind,” he said. “I believe that’s it’s time for a fundamental rethink of social media and how it spreads hate, conspiracies and lies.”

“Voltaire was right. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities — and social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to billions of people,” he added.

Cohen also rubbished Zuckerberg’s recent speech at Georgetown University in which the Facebook founder sought to appropriate the mantle of ‘free speech’ to argue against social media regulation.

“This is not about limiting anyone’s free speech. This is about giving people — including some of the most reprehensible people in history — the biggest platform in history to reach a third of the planet.”

“We are not asking these companies to determine the boundaries of free speech across society, we just want them to be responsible on their platforms,” Cohen added.

On Facebook’s decision to stick by its morally bankrupt position of allowing politicians to pay it to spread lying, hatefully propaganda, Cohen also had this to say: “Under this twisted logic if Facebook were around in the 1930s it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his solution to the ‘Jewish problem’.”

Ouch.

YouTube also came in for criticism during the speech, including for its engagement-driven algorithmic recommendation engine which Cohen pointed out had singlehandedly recommended videos by conspiracist Alex Jones “billions of times”.

Just six people decide what information “so much of the world sees”, he noted, name-checking the “silicon six” — as he called Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

“All billionaires, all Americans, who care more about boosting their share price than about protecting democracy. This is ideological imperialism,” he went on. “Six unelected individuals in Silicon Valley imposing their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government and acting like they’re above the reach of law.

“It’s like we’re living in the Roman Empire and Mark Zuckerberg is Caesar. At least that would explain his haircut.”

Cohen ended the speech with an appeal for societies to “prioritize truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference, and experts over ignoramuses” and thereby save democracy from the greed of “high tech robber barons”.

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Reaction Engines’ Mach 5 engine is just the tip of the new aerospace boom

Imagine a hypersonic passenger aircraft that would cut the journey time between London and New York to around two hours. At Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, the aircraft would complete a trip across the Atlantic in around 120 minutes. Mach 5 is more than twice as fast as the cruising speed of Concorde and over 50% faster than the SR-71 Blackbird – the world’s fastest jet-engine powered aircraft. A flight across the Pacific would take roughly three hours. Flight times from London to Sydney could be 80% shorter. Who needs Elon Musk?

Reaching these speeds would require an aircraft engine that has never previously existed. But last week, the world got a glimpse of a new future via a project which has been germinating for 30 years.

Reaction Engines was founded in 1989 by three propulsion engineers from Rolls Royce: Alan Bond, Richard Varvill and John Scott Scott. Their idea was that in order for an engine to reach hypersonic speeds, the air going into it would have to be rapidly cooled, otherwise the engine would melt. Reaction’s breakthrough was inventing a “precooler” or heat exchanger which can take the air down to minus 150 degrees centigrade in less than a 20th of a second.

These ultra-lightweight “heat exchangers” would enable aircraft to fly over five times the speed of sound in the atmosphere. Thus the SABRE – Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine – was born. The Sabre engine “breathes” air to make 20 per cent of the journey to orbit, before switching to rocket mode to complete the trip.

Last week, Reaction Engines passed a significant milestone. It successfully tested its innovative precooler at airflow temperature conditions representing Mach 5.

The ground-based test at the Colorado Air and Space Port in the US, saw the precooler successfully operate at temperatures of 420ᵒC (~788ᵒF) – matching the thermal conditions corresponding to Mach 3.3 flight.

Reaction Engines

But this technology wouldn’t just be applicable to hypersonic flight. The precooler technology, developed by Reaction Engines, would significantly enhance the performance of existing jet engine technology, along with applications in automotive, aerospace, energy and industrial processes. Reaction Engines has attracted development funding from the British government, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the European Space Agency. It’s also raised over £100m from public and private sources and has secured investment from BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Boeing’s venture capital arm HorizonX. Reaction is expected to start building and testing a demonstrator engine next year.

The success of Reaction Engines to date is a sign that the ‘AerospaceTech’ sector is now booming. It is most certainly not alone.

Last month, Boeing and the UK government launched a £2m accelerator program to look for new innovations in this area. Boeing’s HorizonX is backing the initiative.

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Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

Sebastian Thrun is waving a device in his hand with an excited, almost gleeful expression on his face as he trots from a makeshift aircraft hangar toward the secret project that Kitty Hawk Corp. has been working on for nearly two years.

The serial entrepreneur and co-founder of X, the Alphabet moonshot factory, isn’t trying to contain his excitement as he presents what appears to be a decibel meter.

Thrun, the CEO of aviation startup Kitty Hawk, and Damon Vander Lind, the physicist and electrical engineer who has been leading the project, are standing in an expanse of grasslands and low-lying, oak-dotted hills that can only be described as cattle country. But there are no cows to be found here. Instead, a low-slung, orange and black aircraft with eight rotors and a 20-foot wingspan sits on a small asphalt pad.

It’s called Heaviside. Vander Lind’s pink-hued T-shirt, the letters HVSD emblazoned across it, suddenly makes more sense than it did an hour before.

HVSD, which is named after renowned physicist and electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside, is Kitty Hawk’s third act.

The first is Flyer, a single-seater, all-electric, vertical take-off and landing vehicle powered by 10 independent lift fans that operates between 3 to10 feet off the water. Then there’s Cora, a two-person, autonomous taxi that Kitty Hawk unveiled in 2018. Kitty Hawk, which is backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, recently formed a strategic partnership with Boeing to collaborate on urban air mobility, particularly around safety and how autonomous and piloted vehicles will co-exist. The partnership will focus on Cora.

HVSD is an electric aircraft designed to go anywhere and land anywhere fast and quietly, Vander Lind says.

“If you build an aircraft that can land anywhere and then say actually, oh wait it can’t just land anywhere, no I need a big helipad and I need to build a bunch of structure and all that — you miss the point,” said Vander Lind.

And indeed, HVSD isn’t parked on a large runway or giant helipad. The aircraft, which weighs about one-third of a Cessna, is on a section of asphalt much bigger than its wingspan. Just beyond this manmade parking spot are acres of grassland and the occasional tree. There is no runway to be found.

The big promises that Thrun and Vander Lind are trying to deliver on here are speed, silence and ease of use.

Vander Lind, who earned his pilot’s license, commutes part of the way to work in a single-engine piston aircraft he fixed up. He takes a bicycle for the remainder of the journey. The physicist and electrical engineer, who was a lead engineer at the Alphabet-owned airborne wind turbine company Makani Power, notes that his commute, while fun, is hardly practical.

HVSD aims to deliver both an enjoying ride and practicality, Vander Lind said.

Kitty Hawk Heaviside starry night

The aircraft is 100 times quieter than a helicopter, the pair said. And it’s faster. Thrun says HVSD, which has a range of about 100 miles, can travel from San Jose to San Francisco in 15 minutes. The aircraft can be flown autonomously or manually, but even then most of the tasks of flying are handled by the compute, not the human.

Moments after walking around HVSD, the decibel meter, still in Thrun’s grasp, gets put to work. A helicopter that is stationed about 150 feet from where we’re standing is fired up. After two minutes, the helicopter lifts off, it’s whop whop whop lingering even as the craft is more than 600 feet in the air and begins its circular flight path around the testing area. The meter pops above 85 decibels and stays there for several minutes. The decibels go beyond 88 decibels at landing.

Later, after the helicopter lands and the engine slowly winds down, the test turns to HVSD.

An engineer, who is standing in an open air tower, brings HVSD suddenly to life. Unlike a helicopter, the HVSD starts and lifts off in just seconds. There is sound as it lifts off — hitting about 80 decibels — but what’s striking is the brevity. The take off sound lasts fewer than 10 seconds. As HVSD gains altitude and then circles above us, the only sound is a few engineers and technicians talking nearby.

Once Thrun quiets the crew, the noise falls below 40 decibels, which is what a typical, quiet residential neighborhood registers at. HVSD is nearby at about 600 feet of altitude, but it is barely audible as it circles above us. An office with an air conditioning running might be about 50 decibels, Thrun says for comparison.

“The calculus here is that this has to be socially acceptable for people,” Thrun says. “There’s a reason why helicopters are not: they’re for rich people and they’re noisy.”

It took just a year to take HVSD from a concept and some sketches to building a prototype and conducting the first test flights. This past year has been spent testing and refining the aircraft and, as Vander Lind puts it, “trying to make it crash.” It’s a goal that they have yet to accomplish.

“This thing is really robust,” Vander Lind says pointing to HVSD before turning his sights onto the nearby helicopter. “On the helicopter, there’s a little bolt on top, and if you unscrew that, you take the cotter pin out, we all die.”

Kitty Hawk is testing HVSD with and without a pilot inside, which allows the company to push the aircraft and look for flaws and vulnerabilities. “We want to do everything we can to break it in the air, so when you get in it, it’s safe,” Vander Lind says.

It might be awhile before the public gets in HVSD. The Federal Aviation Administration allows Kitty Hawk to test its aircraft as long as it stays within view of the company’s engineers and test crew on the ground. And Thrun and Vander Lind acknowledge there’s more refinement to be done.

For instance, the cockpit, which fits just one person, is still just carbon fiber. Sitting snugly inside, and kicked back like one would be riding a recumbent bicycle, it’s not quite cozy. Vander Lind, who says engineers have slept in it as “one aspect of the testing,” reminds me I’m sitting on bare carbon. He wants to add a lumbar support, arm rests and other comfort features.

The interface of the aircraft at Kitty Hawk’s secret testing area has been stripped out. But Thrun tells me the interface will be simple to use like “pushing a button.”

Sebastian Thrun DSC02926

Sebastian Thrun discussing Kitty Hawk’s Heaviside with Kirsten Korosec onstage at Disrupt SF.

The idea is for HVSD to be accessible to more than just the super rich and those who have a pilot license, Thrun says. And, of course, to make commuting easier and faster.

The average commute time in the United States is 53 minutes, according to the US Census Bureau. Looking just at the weekday commute, an individual still manages to log 231 hours a year commuting. On Heaviside, Thrun says, it comes to 21 hours a year commuting. “That’s 10 times faster.”

Thrun and Vander Lind are squarely in the visionary and dreamer category. But even they understand there is work left to be done if they ever hope to bring HVSD to the public. Safety is paramount and the team is working on the compute that will handle the flying as well as redundancies.

And then there is the regulatory piece. Thrun has tapped Mike Huerta, who served as FAA Administrator from 2013 to 2018, as an adviser to Kitty Hawk to help the company get closer to its goal.

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Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun is coming to Disrupt SF

Sebastian Thrun can’t be described easily.

He’s a serial entrepreneur and educator, a computer scientist and inventor. He helped bring self-driving cars out of academia through X, the Google moonshot factory he founded. (That little project is now known as Waymo.) Thrun went on to co-found Udacity, the $1 billion online education startup where he is executive chairman.

Now, Thrun is pushing the “future of transportation” idea beyond self-driving cars. As CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, Thrun is working on bringing two aircraft to market — the one-person Flyer and a two-person autonomous taxi called Cora. Boeing and Kitty Hawk recently formed a strategic partnership with Boeing on Cora and more broadly on urban air mobility, particularly around safety and how autonomous and piloted vehicles will co-exist.

We’re excited to announce that Thrun will be joining us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF to give a behind the scenes look at Kitty Hawk and what the future of flight might look like.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here.

Thrun’s visits to Disrupt SF always deliver something new. Who can forget the puppy? This year, we’re focused on flying cars, what they’ll look like, and how Kitty Hawk, which is backed by Google’s Larry Page, will deliver on this promise of the future. 

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