Yes, but this "innovation" (as sold) must exist as a viable commercial airplane.
So far, I see zero evidence that this company has addressed any of the aforementioned challenges beyond theoretical fuel consumption and theoretical passenger logistics.
As someone who has 31 hours towards their single-engine ppl cert, I absolutely abhor the stagnation of general and commercial aviation due, largely, to certification barriers, BUT even having a viable flight-worthy blended-wing concept does not make for a viable mass market product.
Not related, see the near half-century of "alternative" wing and airframe designs that are absolutely better at a few pieces of the puzzle, but also absolutely failed to be viable when integrated into a fully functional and safe airplane.
This company needs to focus on success in a niche product role before addressing the safety, integration, and manufacturing needs of the mass commercial aviation market. They are not (atm) backed by this sort of "patient capital".
Not related, see all of the VC and failures required by Whittle (in wartime no less) to develop the jet engine or Tesla's corporate journey from Roadster -> S -> Y.
Not this again. They’ve clearly hired a new PR firm
Suffice it to say, from stable aeronautics at-edge, jet way footprint efficiency, ground support efficiency, airframe pressurization, cargo & passenger logistics, lifespan, and certification, there are many, many reasons “tube + wings” is the dominant airframe architecture for all non-military aircraft.
I never felt he mislead, but also at some point (much like ESPN’s Stephen Smith) he decided “winning” in punditry was more about by being loud than about by being right.
I don't know the man personally, but I was never impressed by his punditry even in the early PC MAG days and it got even worse when he started writing for MarketWatch.
He was always lots of loud platitudes or damnations with more noise than signal or thoughtful analysis. At some point, I just stopped listening and/or reading whenever his name came up.
Do not do this. There are many, many excellent long-standing security and "web control plane isolation" reasons browsers are not permitted generic socket permissions.
The closest mechanical analog that comes to mind is why 3-wheeled ATVs are a bad idea.
They performance potential was always there for solar and wind energy. It was a known quantity that was an engineering inevitability.
The industrial scale-up just happened quickly since the same tech could be leveraged from chip manufacturing for solar and composite construction from airplanes for wind turbines.
There's no similar performance potential for wind-powered vessels over combustion-powered vessels that can be "scaled-up" and, if need be, we can make green fuel from raw materials and still economically out-perform wind vessels.
Let's see it last. It won't. This is just a short-term private endeavor/vanity-press project. Just because a business uses a "sustainable technology" does not make it a sustainable business. Comparing cargo ships to airplanes is apples vs. oranges and reveals the author's deliberate "headline" motivation and lack of technology understanding compared to the actual ground truth of shipping.
Until fuel prices change for the long-term and/or emissions regulations have an order of magnitude uptick as well as covering far more than sulfur (see IMO 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78#IMO_2020 ), there will be zero economic incentive to use wind-power over diesel/bunker-fuel power.
And no, any advantages of docking at smaller ports are defeated by those ports having less land-transit access and we already have fleets of (smaller) cargo vessels serving these ports at insanely low $/ton/mile rates.
Just like farms, all of the economics point to larger vessels, larger ports, and operating entity consolidation. See "The Box" by Marc Levinson https://a.co/d/0gtBkWwt or watch a few "What's Going On With Shipping" https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping videos.
It will take some sort of global political or environmental catastrophic externality to even budge, let alone change, the status quo.
I've read (and re-read) all of PG's essays over the years. Often they're wonderful fonts of wisdom. Sometimes they're myopic and poorly supported, but never just plain wrong.
This is, sadly, a first for him.
AOC (the politician referenced) did not mean that earning a billion is "impossible". She, very clearly, stated within the context of that interview that Billionaires must be an extractive class at the cost of normal market efficiencies due to the rent-seeking behaviors of the monopolies that must exist to attain that level of wealth.
This is largely poor regulation. The assumption that "more bright = more safe" and the lack of enough real-world testing.
The only other product analogy that comes to mind is "thicker = better" for hiking socks. When they got too thick, they applied too much pressure to the heal and also provided additional moment distance making it far easier to roll an ankle.
At least in the U.S., it's a complete non-issue for an output power that can easily cover the size of a wedding reception as long as you're not using a wide-band transceiver.
You'll want to be "kind" to the extant spectrum and do a responsible frequency sweep to select the "quietest band" prior to broadcasting. And you'll only want to broadcast during the event itself.
The FCC has better things to do than to try and track down an ephemeral milliwatt infringer.
If anything, it's taught me how little I know about "real flying" compared to CFD and systems engineering.
Commercial aviation is conservative because aviation is "hard" and mistakes in aviation are "extremely costly".