[ryanwaggoner]

Aviation as a field is littered with dozens (hundreds?) of startups that have blown through millions and decades trying to build certified aircraft and going bankrupt in the process.

Not the first to say this, but there is zero chance that this startup designs and builds a certified electric airliner in the next decade. I highly doubt we'll have these in 20 years. In ten years, we might have battery technology where it starts to make sense, but the most experienced builders of large aircraft in the world generally spend at least a decade and billions of dollars developing new planes. And this will be with completely untested technologies, new safety procedures, engines, etc. Boeing spent $32 billion bringing the 787 to market. On the smaller end, Bombardier spent ~$5 billion on the C series, which looks comparable to this, and I'd expect costs on this to be MUCH higher since it's a lot of new and untested tech, instead of iterating on decades of prior experience.

This is either appallingly naive on the part of this team and / or their investors, or this is an acquisition play. I doubt the latter makes sense, and I wonder if this is just VCs not having any knowledge of the field or how unrealistic this is.