The CAD Insider

Goodbye, Kobe. Rethinking Air Taxis.

Basketball loses one of its stars. Kobe Bryant, NBA legend, died in a helicopter crash over the weekend. With him was his daughter and 7 others. No one survived. It is a tragedy.

Kobe was in a Sikorsky S-76B, known as a “workhorse” and a “flying the Lincoln Town Car.” It is  repudiated to have an excellent safety record. An investigation is underway but preliminary reports say it was foggy, the visibility so bad the pilot had to get special clearance to fly in conditions worse than allowed for VFR, or visual flight rules. The helicopter crashed into the side of a hill.

Air Taxi’s Anyone?

Air taxi promises a 5 minute hop from Los Angeles' LAX to downtown.

The tragedy comes amid hype surrounding an upcoming air mobility, which involves small aircraft, that take you from big aircraft, to your destination, usually a downtown. It is a favorite subject for engineering software vendors because the aviation industry will use engineering software to design and analyze the small aircraft. It can make lighter parts, more powerful batteries (the flying taxis are usually electric powered), even new materials. The aircraft will open up a new chapter in aviation, making it more personal, more convenient. Wouldn’t everyone love to get from the airport to downtown in minutes rather than hours?

One company with a strange looking small plane shows how the wings fold up to become a stranger looking car. You can go from the Los Angeles airport to downtown in 5 minutes, point to point, flying over the dreaded US 110 Interstate. Your time is too important to waste on a clogged highway.

Flying taxi scheduled to land in Singapore in 2020.

Uber is so interested in air taxis that it has hundreds of companies bidding on designs of air taxis for its Air Elevate program. According to Uber, the FAA, the agency in charge of air safety, has been “amazing” in its “progressive stance to support the development of dedicated sky plane,” according to Aviation Week and Space Technology article.

Missing in the go, go attitude is any consideration of safety. Let’s face it, putting heavier than air objects above the ground is inherently risky. Credit engineers for making as safe as it is today but don’t forget, what goes up must come down. Here’s praying it all comes down as expected.

If any good at all come from this tragedy, can it be more attention paid to public safety?

Did Onshape Miss a Golden Opportunity to Make a Community?

Did Onshape miss the opportunity to become the next GrabCAD?

You can be forgiven for not knowing about GrabCAD. The once wildly popular model sharing site (over 5 million users at its height) was sold to Stratasys, a 3D printing machine maker, and appears to have drifted into obscurity.

Founded in 2009 by Hardi Meybaum in Estonia, GrabCAD moved to Cambridge, MA. The charming and handsome Estonian was soon making the rounds with venture capitalists, raising $14 million. He then befriended CAD royalty, including then Autodesk CEO, Carl Bass, SolidWorks top brass, among others. A bidding war may have ensued, with companies more interested in communities than customers. The “winner” being Stratasys who paid an amazing $100 million. Maybe Stratasys thought all the models in GrabCAD needed to be 3D printed?

The next big collection of mechanical designs may have been Onshape’s. Every user of free version of Onshape has to make all their models public. Let’s say a 100,000 users had 10 models each, that is a million models. Its nowhere near the size of GrabCAD, SolidWorks’ 3D ContentCentral or Sketchup’s 3D warehouse, but a good start. We have to think that it would have grown fast, fueled by a fairly robust and modern CAD application that was being given away for free.

But Onshape was more interested in the professional community. The users of free software, many of them makers, were not easily converted to paying customers. Onshape could not spend a lot of time and effort on them, or build a very public library, as it were, like 3D ContentCentral and 3D Warehouse, or a virtual community gathering place like GrabCAD, on their behalf. 

Users may have been considered an expense rather than an asset – and, so, an opportunity to make the next MCAD community was ignored.