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IPFS News Link • Transportation: Air Travel

Kitty Hawk's new electric aircraft is quieter than a dishwasher

• https://newatlas.com, By Nick Lavars

 Details are scarce on the technical capabilities of the newly announced Heaviside, but the company is very keen to emphasize how little noise it makes during flight.

The Heaviside follows in the footsteps of the Flyer, which emerged in 2017, and last year's Cora, a two-seat electric aircraft designed with short trips in mind. Like the Flyer, Kitty Hawk's newest aircraft is a single seater but appears far more passenger-ready than that earlier prototype, which amounted to rotors fixed to an open-air pipe structure and a pair of pontoons for landing and taking off on water.

The sleek orange and charcoal Heaviside features six rotors fixed to the wings and another pair mounted alongside the cabin, which allow it to take off and land vertically before shifting to horizontal flight, negating the need for a runway. Kitty Hawk says that the aircraft is capable of traveling from San Francisco to San Jose in 15 minutes, a distance of around 30 miles (48 km), which would make for an average speed of 120 mph (192 km/h).


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