SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — When he was still a boy making long, tedious trips between his school and his woodsy home in the mountains during the 1980s, JoeBen Bevirt began fantasizing about flying cars that could whisk him to his destination in a matter of minutes.
As CEO of Joby Aviation, Bevirt is getting closer to turning his boyhood flights of fancy into a dream come true as he and latter-day versions of the Wright Brothers launch a new class of electric-powered aircraft vying to become taxis in the sky. more
Not if the government decides to regulate them.
People can’t drive for shit as it is. Now put them into a fast aeroplane and watch them all kill one another.
Passenger pilots won’t work, obviously. The ability to think in real time about three dimensional space, its contents to include independent and largely random moving objects, and the rules that would have to be applied to avoid conflict (i.e. mid-air collisions), is somewhat limited among a population of transportation consumers few of whom can, in only two dimensions, change highway lanes smoothly or even parallel park.
And turning this over to AI, which is about due to take over the planet and start killing us defective humans, seems, ahem, imprudent.
It will be a while before we start transporting ourselves in the air in any significant numbers using methods other than the big aluminum flying tubes we use today.
I’m visiting the Las Vegas area this weekend. The number of fat-assed people is incredible. How much horsepower will it take to lift three or four 300 pounders off the ground? I don’t see flying cars becoming a reality until we get the country healthy again.
A bad idea that looks good at first glance. But the practicalities of it are insurmountable. For example, what laws govern the use of air taxis?
@Tony R — The three cwt body problem. 🤣
It ain’t just Vegas, Tony. I’m thinking about buying a tuba and following these people as they waddle around.
Assuming the government allows it, and the technology is “perfected”, I can’t see enough demand at the necessary prices to ever make this profitable. The costs of maintaining an FAA approved fleet are going to overwhelm the fare income. Oh, and “range anxiety” is going to reach new heights (heh). I would imagine that the FAA is going to demand, say, a 30% fuel safety margin over the length of the average flight (you don’t just zoom in and out of airport airspace on a whim… so you may have to hoover around awaiting clearance to land, so a healthy margin on extra airtime please).
Let’s presume after factoring that in, a real-world range of 200 miles. But: half of the range used will be for returning to the airport so your max practical commercial range is really 100 miles (2 50-mile round trips) . Can they reliably fill those return seats or will they deadhead half their flights? So, each one-way flight must cover the costs of a round trip. Then, what’s the refueling downtime? Even with a battery swap you’re looking at 30 minutes every two trips. Given several hours necessary to recharge the batteries, you’re looking at lots of sets of batteries to keep things moving.
Too Long/Didn’t Read version:
Guaranteed to loose money
Sounds like just another way for stupid people and sociopaths to cause fantastic disasters that will soon cause this mode of transport to be outlawed or regulated to the point where it’s just as expensive as renting a helicopter. At which point, it just makes more sense to use a helicopter, which is safe and more proven technology.
This sounds like a program to insure the availability of donor organs
They’re putting the finishing touches on recreating the piss and BO smell.