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Autonomous aviation startup Xwing hits $400M valuation after latest funding round

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  The safety pilot has his hands off the controls during an Xwing demonstration flight. Image Credits: Xwing Xwing has scored another win two months after it completed its first gate-to-gate autonomous demonstration flight of a commercial cargo aircraft. The company said Thursday it has raised $40 million at a post-money valuation of $400 million. The company is setting its sights on expansion — not only tripling its engineering team, but eventually running regular fully unmanned commercial cargo flights. Xwing has been developing a technology stack to convert aircraft, including a widely used Cessna Grand Caravan 208B, to function autonomously. But it’s had to solve a few problems first: “the perception problem, the planning problem and the control problem,” Xwing founder Marc Piette explained to TechCrunch. The company has come up with a whole suite of solutions to solve for these problems, including integrating lidar, radar and cameras on the plane; retrofitting the servomotors ...
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Should frequent flyers pay for the decarbonization of the air industry?

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Researchers are proposing a frequent flyer tax to pay for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the airline industry. A new paper from the International Council on Clean Transportation proposed the tax as a way to fund some of the $121 billion that needs to get invested every year to decarbonize flying. "Varying the levy based on flying frequency focuses the tax burden on wealthier frequent flyers and helps ensure that people with lower incomes are not priced out of air travel because of climate policy," the study's authors, Xinyi Sola Zheng and Dan Rutherford, wrote. A sliding fee for flights beginning at $9 for the second flight and $177 for their twentieth in a given year would raise $121 billion -- versus a flat tax of $25 per ticket for all flights. For the study's authors, the tax is a way to avoid penalizing people in lower income brackets and shifting the load to the wealthiest 10 percent of the world's population. Not only would the revenues come from wea...
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ZeroAvia’s hydrogen-powered vision for aviation nets $21.4 million from Amazon, Shell and Bill Gates-backed fund

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ZeroAvia , the company that’s on a mission to move the world to zero-emission, hydrogen-fueled flight, has just received some corporate jet fuel in the form of a new $21.4 million cash infusion. The investment came from the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures and the Ecosystem Integrity Fund , which led the company’s latest round, alongside previous investors Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, Horizons Ventures , Shell Ventures and Summa Equity . Aviation is a huge contributor to the carbon emissions that cause global warming, and the industry, along with shipping, will be one of the hardest to decarbonize. Electrification technologies have yet to account for ways to propel aircraft or move massive seafaring vessels, and a consensus is emerging among technologists that hydrogen will be the best solution to ensure zero-emissions flight can become a reality. “I’m a big believer in hydrogen from the perspective that if I have enough zero carbon hydrogen, and it’s cheap enough, then ...
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