lmao. Sorry, but the peanut gallery has people who have been there and done that. And many have offered to help Peter, on fundamental mistakes he is making. He has consistently turned them down. If you want to read some rather hard core critique of raptor, go join HBA. There are a lot of engineers who have built one off planes, or run companies that supply stuff to experimental market. Other engineers on there actually develop commercial aircraft while building their own.
The critiques on here are mild in comparison.

Tim

It looks like he’s got almost $29k in the fund.

He should go ahead and ask for the escrows to be released. I bet half would blindly go for it.

I do "feel for the guy" but have almost zero respect for him due to the incredibly poor effort he calls engineering. It is certainly possible to design a complex system via the "cut and try" method if you're OK with the notion that it will probably require hundreds of redesigns for each and every "innovation" (i.e. attempt to use something unproven) and even that pessimistic assessment assumes the designer has at least some idea of how to identify problems and create actual improvements.

Going against "the experts" may make sense when you have actual insight into the issue at hand that others lack because their thinking is mired in past approaches. But ignoring existing knowledge completely without understanding much about what you're doing is a recipe for failure. Burt Rutan has a well earned reputation for innovative ideas that stray far from previously accepted practices but he actually worked out his radical designs scientifically rather than just wishful thinking.



Really? Was IBM a small company when they unveiled the PC? Apple and the iPod, iPad, iPhone, etc? Innovation is not as much about organizational size, it's about culture and most companies with innovative cultures take significant advantage of domain expertise and technical skills.

Lance

Come on... you use Apple as an example? Haha all the innovative things apple created were from one person. When that one person left Apple stopped innovating. Still to this day they have proven too large to innovate.

IBM? They like many big companies got small groups to innovate.

Fact. Large companies have a hard time with innovation but have great channels to push other small companies innovations to market.

There is a reason all big companies acquire small businesses, and it’s not for their management systems. They have to buy innovation.

Ever seen a group of educated engineers come up with anything new? Haha nope. They need some crazy guy to push them out of the box they live in.

Elon Musk and Steve Jobs where such crazy guys that questioned the norm
and pulled engineers kicking and screaming out of the box.

Sorry but engineers by nature can not innovate. They are necessary to make the ideas work that innovators have.

It takes both sides to make it work. The innovator and the engineer. One is nothing without the other.

Mike

^^^ This.

As soon as he was no longer running Apple, all Apple did was make bigger and faster versions of their products.

In fact, the current CEO swore up and down they would never create a hybrid tablet/computer version of the iPad, when that's exactly what their customers were screaming for.

Microsoft thanks them for their myopic vision. Their surface tablet out-sells iPads 2 to 1. Apple FINALLY came out with a trackpad keyboard for their 11 and 12 inch ipads and they can't keep them in stock. Some 5+ years later. By the time they change the iOS to allow local document storage, they will have lost a decade of sales to Microsoft.

Engineers and CEO's of established companies are terrible at innovation. It takes the new guy, the Maverick, to break out of the mold and create new products. However, you have to have good engineering skills to do what he's trying to do from scratch and it sounds like he's more like me, a "big picture" idea guy who hires experts in their fields to make things happen.

Which he didn't do. Or at least didn't listen to long-term.

I still think he has a good idea insofar as overall project, but the execution sucks.

Besides the gearbox, now that we see the clearance on the prop, he's going to have to design a longer landing gear or he's going to have to do what they did on the Duke, shorten the prop. 7 degrees nose pitch-up is nothing on a bounced landing recovery.

Ever watched students bounce one, then add power and have to pull back 10+ degrees nose up to go-around and touch back down briefly as they did the go-around? Do that in this plane and you just destroyed a prop and gearbox, maybe the engine too. Even experienced pilots have done this in nasty winds.

Some truth there, but overly simplified. It takes more than innovation and engineering. You need (not in order of importance) just off the top of my head:

Vision
Leadership
Engineering
Dedication
HR Management
Project Management
Sales
Funding
Luck

The teams that succeed have all of those. Small startups will have people with multiple pieces of those skills.

I only have a couple of them. I always team up with partners that have the other parts.

I submit that the Raptor project never had all of the necessary parts in place and have even less now.

He is a dreamer, with moderate level builder skills, and a very a low level of structural engineering skill, and a even lower level of aeronautical skill.
The big difference is that the other dreamers that some BT's people are comparing him to had the business sense to hire smarter people then them to work for them. When you have a big ego, it is not easy to hire smart people.
The issue for me is that he is using the good faith of investors to make his "vision" come true, without being a leader.
This industry is filled with talented and extremely smart people. Meaningful innovations at this point requires you to be above that... Not easy.
This bird was a non starter. The overall math did not pen-out. I am glad that it did not attempt to get off the ground.
If he fixes all the items that the test pilots have requested.... They will have an even longer list of fixes.
The reason that RV is so successful is that it is simple, and light.
Once you get into the heavy category, you need a very large team of very competent engineers, and lots and lots of money for lots and lots of RD development... You can't just wing it...

It's not that engineers can't or won't innovate and it's not that their personalities are incompatible with innovation, it's just that it's almost never in the job description. The job description is to make something that works on time and on budget. Give an engineer enough freedom (time and money) and he or she will innovate for you. Give anyone tight budget and tight deadline, why waste it on a wild idea that won't be ready in time (and will need more money to get it right)?

Time and money seem to be themes in this thread- money especially.

^^^ This.

As soon as he was no longer running Apple, all Apple did was make bigger and faster versions of their products.

In fact, the current CEO swore up and down they would never create a hybrid tablet/computer version of the iPad, when that's exactly what their customers were screaming for.

Microsoft thanks them for their myopic vision. Their surface tablet out-sells iPads 2 to 1. Apple FINALLY came out with a trackpad keyboard for their 11 and 12 inch ipads and they can't keep them in stock. Some 5+ years later. By the time they change the iOS to allow local document storage, they will have lost a decade of sales to Microsoft.

Engineers and CEO's of established companies are terrible at innovation. It takes the new guy, the Maverick, to break out of the mold and create new products. However, you have to have good engineering skills to do what he's trying to do from scratch and it sounds like he's more like me, a "big picture" idea guy who hires experts in their fields to make things happen.

Which he didn't do. Or at least didn't listen to long-term.

I still think he has a good idea insofar as overall project, but the execution sucks.

Besides the gearbox, now that we see the clearance on the prop, he's going to have to design a longer landing gear or he's going to have to do what they did on the Duke, shorten the prop. 7 degrees nose pitch-up is nothing on a bounced landing recovery.

Ever watched students bounce one, then add power and have to pull back 10+ degrees nose up to go-around and touch back down briefly as they did the go-around? Do that in this plane and you just destroyed a prop and gearbox, maybe the engine too. Even experienced pilots have done this in nasty winds.

Tony

I agree the Raptor performance claims are not even close to reality. I don’t think anyone is arguing that.

And the idea that he will get volume discounts to get the price down won’t be what he thinks.

But I still think the Raptor can be a viable aircraft if he ever gets to production.

Mike

Mike, why do you think that?

That would depend on your definition of "viable".

If you mean that it can struggle into the air, then yes. It will be a viable aircraft. By any other reasonable definition, I doubt it.

Can someone with canard experience tell me how a Velocity flies? Is it a nice handling airplane?

Scrolled through the go fund me page contributors list.

Didn’t see a Chris Close.

It wouldn't surprise me if the Raptor had completely different flying characteristics than the Velocity even though it appears to have a similar planform.

I do have to wonder how this project would have turned out had Peter just put his Audi Diesel engine in an otherwise normal Velocity. Obviously that would preclude pressurization but the Raptor was never going to be pressurizeable anyway. If a delta wing canard is your goal a velocity would be a pretty good starting place and it sure looks like most if not all of Peter's "improvements" don't fit the definition of that word.