To be clear, this is the theoretical minimum amount of energy to lift a mass straight up. I’d be surprised if an airplane moving sideways would hit even 30% efficiency in comparison.

How have I not heard this before… It seems more relevant then ever these days

Now that you mention it, they specify a maximum total weight of 25,000 lbs, so at 100% efficiency it would take 339MJ of energy to lift the fully loaded plane to 10,000 ft. That can be converted as 94 kWh, and at the current cheapest electricity price in the US of $0.1235/kWh, that’s $11.63

Therefore, it is literally impossible for this plane to reach 10,000 ft for $5 fully loaded.

I guarantee you the microcontroller that handles the wifi is 10x more powerful than what would be required to just run an offline schedule. There’s no processing involved… It’s not like this is using a camera + AI to see if your cat is too fat.

Edit: I just looked up this model and its actual features… it’s not that far off, since it seems to run image recognition to tell when the cat is eating. If they’re streaming video back to the cloud for processing, that sounds even worse than what I was expecting. It would be entirely possible to run a small image recognition model locally in a product like this.

There are much simpler solutions like the ones that detect a chip in the pets collar (or the embedded id chip most pets have)

Anyone know the terminal velocity of a falling Porsche 914? lol

It’s not a question of where he grips it! It’s a simple question of weight ratios. A five ounce bird could not carry a 1 pound coconut!

Well, the data we do have is that the flight was just under 30 minutes and very likely under 100 miles.

From the Wikipedia on airline fuel efficiency:

The worst-performing flights are short trips of from 500 to 1500 kilometers because the fuel used for takeoff is relatively large compared to the amount expended in the cruise segment, and because less fuel-efficient regional jets are typically used on shorter flights.

In the example values table, the most efficient plane for a 560km trip burns 0.92 kg of fuel per km, so doing some rough math and assuming the electric plane travelled 100 miles, that would be roughly 148kg of fuel, or 50 gallons (190L).

At current jet fuel prices ( $3.76/gallon ) that’s about $188 US in jet fuel as a rough estimate. It’s unclear if the test flight went up to full altitude or if the plane was at full weight, so a fair comparison might have used even half as much jet fuel.

Edit: From some of the other comments, it seems like they might have only considered flight time as cruising time, not takeoff and landing, so my numbers will be quite far off if that’s the case. My gut feeling is that this is probably the case, because this seems like too big a difference otherwise.