Cosmic Log
Boeing made its first delivery of a 737 MAX 9 jet to Lion Air Group today — less than a year after the same holding group got in on the debut of the plane’s smaller sibling, the MAX 8.
Last year’s first-ever 737 MAX delivery went to Malaysia’s Malindo Air, a low-fare airline that’s now known as Batik Air Malaysia and is under the wing of Lion Air Group. The jet that took the spotlight today at Boeing’s Seattle Delivery Center went to a different Lion Air Group carrier, Thai Lion Air.
British Columbia will contribute $300,000 toward a study that will look into the business case for an ultra-high-speed transit system connecting Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.
Boeing 737 jets are rolling out of the factory in Renton, Wash., more than once a day, but the Southwest 737 MAX 8 jet that emerged today brought hundreds of Boeing employees outside to watch: It’s the 10,000th 737 jet to be produced.
The occasion was marked by the Guinness World Records’ renewed recognition of the 737 as the world’s most produced commercial jet aircraft model — and by a pep talk from Kevin McAllister, Boeing Commercial Airplanes’ president and CEO.
Tesla cars riding electric-powered tracks? Forget about it, at least for now. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and founder of The Boring Company, says pedestrians and cyclists will be the first users of his underground transit tunnels and Hyperloop tubes.
In a series of tweets on March 9, Musk said “all tunnels and Hyperloop will prioritize pedestrians and cyclists over cars.”
“Will still transport cars, but only after personalized mass transit needs are met,” he explained. “It’s a matter of courtesy and fairness. If someone can’t afford a car, they should go first.”
Which means Tesla might well get into the mini-bus business, adding a new electric-powered vehicle to its line of sedans, sports cars and trucks.
“Eat Your Own Dog Food” is an aphorism referring to the Microsoft tradition of using its own software products, but it applies equally well to the first production cargo trip of Tesla’s all-electric truck — which carried battery packs from Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada to its car assembly plant in Fremont, Calif.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk spotlighted the start of the 260-mile journey on Instagram.
It’s not exactly a revelation that the Boeing Co. is interested in autonomous flight, including robo-planes that can fly people. But in a Bloomberg News interview, Boeing’s CEO says air taxis could be coming sooner than expected.
“I think it will happen faster than any of us understand,” Dennis Muilenburg, who also serves as Boeing’s president and chairman, told Bloomberg in last week’s interview. “Real prototype vehicles are being built right now. So the technology is very doable.”
The timetable for technology adoption will depend on how quickly regulators work out the “rules of the road” for autonomous flight, he said.
Fleets of air taxis could well become commonplace within a decade, Muilenburg said, but he cautioned that “it won’t be all turned on in one day.”
The White House says President Donald Trump has struck an “informal deal” with Boeing on a $3.9 billion fixed-price contract for two new Air Force One planes.
“Thanks to the president’s negotiations, the contract will save the taxpayers more than $1.4 billion,” White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said today in a widely distributed statement.
The extent of the savings is debatable, however.
Vahana, the Airbus-backed venture that’s developing a fleet of electric-powered air taxis, shared the results of its first flight test amid the prairies of eastern Oregon three weeks ago. But now there’s video showing the Alpha One octocopter landing on its airstrip at the Pendleton UAS Test Range.
Pop up some more popcorn: Billionaire Elon Musk has gotten himself into another CEO vs. CEO challenge, this time with Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi over air taxis.
Uber and many other companies are working on electric-powered, flying vehiclesthat could carry passengers autonomously between landing pads, circumventing traffic jams. Uber has said it could start testing what are basically flying cars by 2020in Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort Worth and Dubai.
Khosrowshahi — who left Bellevue, Wash.-based Expedia last year to become Uber’s CEO — is sold on the idea. Musk isn’t. Instead, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is partial to tunnels that let cars or electric-powered pods zip beneath surface roads. Musk’s tunneling venture, The Boring Company, is involved in experimental projects in the L.A. area as well as Chicago and Baltimore-Washington, D.C.
Other ventures, Virgin Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, are following up on Musk’s Hyperloop concept for near-supersonic travel through low-pressure tubes.
The Boring Company, created by billionaire Elon Musk to revolutionize the market for tunnels and flamethrowers, is one of four ventures to put in bids to build a high-speed transit system between downtown Chicago and O’Hare International Airport.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel listed the respondents on Feb. 7 in a news release, and said the next step will be to determine which of the ventures are truly qualified to build, finance, operate and maintain the O’Hare Express.
The system is required to run shuttles every 15 minutes or less, with a downtown-to-airport transit time of no more than 20 minutes, for a fare that’s less than the cost of current taxi and rideshare services.
The Chicago Infrastructure Trust leaves it to the bidders to come up with the best way to make that happen. It could be by sending electric-powered pods through underground tunnels, which is the likeliest course for The Boring Company. But the system also could make use of above-ground tracks.