Ain’t no way you want flying taxis in Manhattan. If two collide or one fails, you could kill dozens of people.
Maaaaybe instead of the tunnels and bridges, to increase throughput during rush hours, but even then we’re trying to have fewer vehicles in Manhattan, not more.
Also, I cannot imagine what it would be like to go through an intersection during the winter. You would be hit with a wall of cross-cutting wind tunneling down 50 blocks that no airborne device is going to handle well. Absolute nightmare.
I don't really agree with that. Helicopters can auto-rotate, drones can't. If something goes wrong with a drone system, it is going to crash hard guaranteed and likely doesn't have any meaningful control on the way down.
It's certainly not crazy to imagine that you could cut the costs of a helicopter-like aircraft that was purpose-made for relatively short, relatively low-speed, relatively light load duties.
The energy cost during operations is very relevant, too, which is why you see things like tilt rotor designs with wings/bodies to generate lift.
When Airbus was doing the math on these a few years ago, the pilot cost was also one of the main concerns, so it was "autonomous or bust", and they ended up investing a lot on the autonomous side (not just the aircraft but also urban traffic management, etc).
That's not at all obvious to me. Please explain. Both are approximately car sized and both are likely to hit pedestrians.
In a place with fewer pedestrians I'd buy that airborne vehicles might have a higher chance of hitting a person because they could crash somewhere that a traditional taxi couldn't. But when the place is packed wall to wall with people an arms length away I don't think that applies anymore. At least it doesn't seem self evident to me.
Consider that not all malfunctions of a car leads it to crashing into things. The fuel system, the engine, the transmission and even the steering can completely break down and the car will still came to a stop. They are equipped with redundant brakes, and are always supported by the ground.
At the same time an aircraft is much more precarious. If anything in the fuel, engine, transmission, props, or control surfaces go wrong it will come down and fast. They have much more potential energy than a car (because they are high up). They also typically have much more kinetic energy because they have to move faster to maintain lift if they are fixed winged, or they have to have fast rotating parts if they are rotary winged.
In crowded streets cars obviously go slow, and in any case most traffic accidents don't result in a car starting accelerating uncontrollably until it runs into a building.
Even a 20 m flight height means the taxi will reach 72 km/h before it hits the ground.
I’m not an expert by any means, but one of the major impediments I would imagine to flying taxis carrying people is safety; there’s a _lot_ that has to be done before people board an airplane in terms of checks, paperwork, planning, etc.
The dream of “order a flying taxi on your phone and it takes you wherever you want in five minutes” isn’t really compatible with aviation safety culture (at least at the pilot level in the US). That’s not to say it can’t be done, but you probably need a lot of really good PR people to figure out how to say “we want to remove the safety controls from this so we can make money with it” and have people buy it.
aviation occupies a great deal of my attention, and there is a logic to everything that is done, based on actual provable, repeatable results.
anything involved in high volume passenger aviation has to pass reliability tests that will dry your eyes out just reading through the synopsis, nothing is making it to the PR stage.
I splain little bit, pick some fancy country full of rich people flying around, tell them that the US has just ripped the lid off airspace restrictions (again¹), and is now letting some kind of ubber drone thing loose , and quite litteraly instantly there will be calls for all flights going to the US to turn around as all insurance policys for commercial flights to the US will be null and void.
i don't think mountain rescue is asking for a better vehicle. traditional helicopters work.
flying taxi startups, drone companies, jetpack companies, and all the other fantastical flying startyps keep trying to say they have applications in mountain rescue, but i'm pretty sure that's providing a lot more benefit to the flying taxi startup's pitch deck than it is to any mountain rescue operation.
Traditional helicopters also have the effective lift-weight ratios to tackle the density*altitude of mountain rescue that these "air-taxis" have _zero_ hope to achieve with the the vastly lower power-weight of electrical drive-trains and their lift-inefficient multi-rotor designs.
China calls it the low-altitude economy, and besides human transportation there is a lot that can be done. Personally, I believe that propeller-driven devices are too dangerous and noisy, but there might be innovations coming out of China that Europe can't
Bird flight doesn't scale significantly. You can deliver very small objects via bird, and perhaps build a bird-like drone that does the same. But you can't build a human-carrying bird.
It's very possible, and in fact most likely, that it can't scale. Insect flight is an even better example - the mechanisms that allow most insects to fly simply don't work past a few grams of weight. So, it is simply impossible to create an insect-like drone that can carry a human.
I expect the exact same is true for birds - the kinds of effects that allow birds to fly with so little energy compared to a propeller-based aircraft are almost certainly not scalable, due to the fundamental properties of air as a gas. As far as I know, bird flight is made possible by complex turbulence effects induced by the microscopic structure of their feathers. It's very unlikely this effect could skale to 100kg of weight.
Lower noise, lower operating cost, lower purchase price, easier to pilot, more reliable (fewer parts), safer (redundancy), no emissions, faster time to air, configurable to requirements, etc.
Unfortunately Manhattan doesn't seem like a great place for bikes. The weather is just too variable. Some daredevils will be out in any weather but for most people it's just not feasible about half of the days of the year.
Not that helicopters make any more sense. The city needs some car bans, and yes, bicycles are part of replacing that. But only mass transit will be able to move enough people when there's a foot of slush on the ground.
Weather in New York is perfectly fine for biking. If you can walk outside you can bike. Both means of transportation are equally resilient to bad weather. What you need is protected bike lanes, so you can bike relaxed and holding an umbrella if necessary, as millions of people do every day in Netherlands and other European countries.
Because the need is fulfilled adequately. They are not solving anything new or revolutionising anything old, these are dumb ideas for dumb people to throw money at hoping it sticks.
It is not. Wilderness rescues are extremely resource constrained due to the costs involved coupled with the fact that those in need of rescue were fully aware of the risks before they set out. There's a severe limit to how many tax dollars will go towards bailing adults out of situations of their own making. Lowering costs would quite literally save lives.
At least with respect to aviation, we don't have any non-combustion power-trains that can remotely come close to the power-to-weight ratios of turbine engines.
The earliest cars were replacing the animal muscle power of carriages--a trivially easy feat given that the most primitive steam and combustion engines easily 10x both the raw power, power-to-weight, and power-density of a team of horses.
