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Kitty Hawk's 'Heaviside' is an ultra-quiet electric flying machine

As the field of players in "urban air mobility" (read: flying cars) get more crowded every day, the Larry Page-backed effort Kitty Hawk is trying a different approach with its latest vehicle: it's very quiet. Dubbed Project Heaviside, it's all-electric, flies like a plane but is capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) like a helicopter, while being as much as 100 times quieter than a helicopter.

It's also tiny, as you can make out in a picture with a person crouching next to the aircraft with seating for one. TechCrunch got up close and personal with Heaviside, noting that at the moment the cockpit seats its passenger on bare carbon fiber.

Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun told TechCrunch "The calculus here is that this has to be socially acceptable for people," while demonstrating Heaviside's capability to fly overhead without being any louder than an office air conditioner. It's also intended to support both manual and autonomous flight, although regulatory approval could be quite a way off.

From TechCrunch we get the following:

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 three to 10 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 not much bigger than its wingspan. Just beyond this man-made parking spot are acres of grassland and the occasional tree. There is no runway to be found.

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