aviation

edit major one I forgot is the wonderfully weird physics of Blown Lift, aerodynamics is goofier than you think I don't know how else to say it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blown_flap

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2026/march/pilot/blown-wing-ultra-stol

“One of the most impressive aspects of the EL2 is that there’s really no change in handling qualities throughout its speed range. The ailerons remain effective at low speed and there’s no reason to avoid using them at high angles of attack.”

It is the nature of a lot of aviation stuff being so heavily dependent on technical details specific to a project that a lot of information essentially comes out in "press release" esque ways, I try to minimize it but definitely aerospaceglobal reads like that sometimes... but also the information is genuinely good too so shrugs.

To answer your specific question what you are missing here in your cynicism are three major things that break your thinking on this.

1. Electric aircraft don't make a lot of sense in many ways since batteries... but also they do since alternative energy is getting extremely price competitive and if you have a massive wind turbine that could be spinning but the grid doesn't need it and an electric aircraft sitting right next to it capable of ferrying medical patients or logistics between two major nodes such as a hosptial to a hospital in a dense city area... well... there is an obvious capacity here that becomes aparent. In other words it can't be both true that electric aircraft with electric batteries are a pipe dream AND that alternative energy is actually very cost competitive when it is available it is just the problem is matching production to demand......

2. Electric engines change the kind of aircraft you can make, make sure to understand that what made multirotor drones possible is the clock rates on chips for drones became fast enough to send speed corrections to a quadcoptors four motors to keep it stable. Before that the chaotic nature of the problem of maintaining stability was out of reach of chip speeds and the solution needed to be mechanical A.K.A. traditional helicopter designs. What microcontrollers with high clock rates and electric motors do is make it feasible to have many smaller simple rotors placed at aerodynamically optimal places in a way that it would never make sense with combustion engines. Imagine a similar aircraft with a seperate combustion engine for each propeller or a powershaft going to each one somehow... and you can clearly see it would be a nightmare that only a child would sketch out because it looks cool but importantly with electric motors they are so much more efficient, have so much more torque and are so much simpler that we are looking at a radically different set of design constraints here and you need to understand that.

3. The aesthetic that is pushed with this is basically "rich people can get to where they want to go in a more noisey fashion!" and yeah that is a vaporwave promise absolutely, but in dense urban areas there are plenty of very real use cases for short flight fairly light cargo missions that could meaningfully impact people's lives if the capabilities of these aircraft are considered and used intelligently.

I understand the cynicism though, and I am not saying that this isn't also stupid in the ways you are saying but it is nuanced and also the physics is undeniable beyond how stupid the framing of all of it is.