Not to mention having to pay for insurance premiums of a miniaturized airplane that is zipping around a heavily inhabited urban area.
There are lots of reasons why this won't work, but it could work... and it could be quite useful in the right scenario.
Lots of useful long distance flights leave early in the morning, meaning to get to the airport for those flights you have to leave VERY early. But with an air taxi like this, it might allow you to save a couple of hours and a lot of headache.
It's not really mass-marketable though, and I doubt we could expect to see a constant stream of little air taxis buzzing around.
In the foreseeable future there will only be a handful of heliports per city center. Most passengers will have to take ground transport to reach one.
"Urban" and "flying" will never happen.
I'm regularly astonished that we trust people with shopping carts, given how well they use them. Nobody is going to trust any density flying over our heads. Not even with auto pilot. Sorry Fifth Element fans.
Concerts, for example - if you have a lot of these flying taxis, you can have people park in auxiliary lots that are 20 minutes away by car, then get shuttled over via air taxi. Depending on how many taxis and how fast the turnaround is, you could eliminate a non-negligible amount of traffic into/out of parking lots. Same with sporting events, etc.
And then on a similar note, airports - I believe something like this was proposed for LAX. In the same way that people park at off-site parking lots and take shuttle buses, they could park off-site and take air taxis.
These scenarios work relatively well because they put the air taxis in nonstop use for some period of time, and they have the space/infrastructure to set up spaces for them to land and load/unload folks.
Those modern transportation 'solutions' are a sign of local maxima of current city design. A bad design that cannot scale any further.
So maybe instead we start on fixing cities?
Exactly. And for some reason the "solutions" always have the nice feature that they get those using them out of the sight of the rest of the lowly peasants living in those cities.
As if it hasn't been demonstrated how public transport can do wonders for highly populated if done right (e.g. look at japan).
I mean, the real solution is to stop subsidizing suburbs, that are bleeding cities dry with the massive costs of infrastructure requirements and maintenance.
>“The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates the cost at $5 trillion — but that's just for major infrastructure, not the minor streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that serve our homes. The reason we have this gap is because the public yield from the suburban development pattern — the amount of tax revenue obtained per increment of liability assumed — is ridiculously low. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability. The engineering profession will argue, as ASCE does, that we're simply not making the investments necessary to maintain this infrastructure. This is nonsense. We've simply built in a way that is not financially productive. We've done this because, as with any Ponzi scheme, new growth provides the illusion of prosperity. In the near term, revenue grows, while the corresponding maintenance obligations — which are not counted on the public balance sheet — are a generation away.” [1]
"Fixing" a city is hard. And I haven't seen too many examples of it actually done, in comparison to cities that were built with public transit in mind from the beginning.
Tokyo and Paris were built with electrified, public transport in mind from the beginning?
Really?
He is an example.
So like a vacuum cleaner, yikes!
Also, whether in my small village or in a fancy suburb, there seems to always be someone with a 2 cycle, muffler-free piece of lawn equipment running. Leaf blowers are the worst, but weed trimmers and now even leaf vaccuums are common.
Or, if you live in an urban area, especially in NYC, there's rarely a moment that you don't hear an emergency vehicle siren echoing throughout the neighborhood.
Unfortunately, it's just a noisy world. At least this aircraft is electric and has some goal of keeping noise as low as possible.
If they managed to get into that range for a vehicle that must weigh many hundreds of times more, I guess that'd be very impressive.
Lawnmowers are significantly louder.
I wonder how they’re getting those numbers. Like at what distance are they measuring from?
I find it hard to believe they’re able to make a flying vehicle quieter than a drone 1/100th of its size.
Edited for clarity
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocopter_EC135
They are really surprisingly not loud. Not silent either, but not annoyingly, or disturbingly loud. Not comparable to the much, much older Bell UH-1 which we called 'Teppichklopfer' (carpet banger?). So it seems they know something about making helos less noisy.
I say this from the experience of having seen them come down maybe 200 times in the last 15 years? Sometimes just practicing it seems, with inner city, suburban, or park and field background noise floor.
But electric flight is without a doubt going to revolutionize commuter airlines. With an electric powertrain, you get rid of the vast majority of costs associated with flying which are the intensive maintenance and overhaul schedules required for turboprop/turbofan engines. You can then economically fly small traditional aircraft with electric powertrains carrying ~10 passengers up to 250 miles at 200mph with current battery tech, and takeoff/land from tiny municipal airports with no need for TSA. At that point flying becomes like hopping on a bus, and just as cheap. Living within 250 miles of a metro area and commuting every day will be a nonissue. Something like the Eviation Alice [0] is far more likely to be the future than any of these VTOL concepts.
https://www.airbus.com/innovation/zero-emission/urban-air-mo...
The weight of the tanks never drops, so you are flying always full tank plane, the energy density of batteries is much lower -> heavier tanks
And you'd better hope there is no battery fire. Those are vicious.
Additionally, one has to consider the flight path would ideally be more straight, allowing for less overall mileage per trip than a land vehicle.
https://worldairlinenews.com/2021/09/21/gol-to-launch-a-netw...
Brazil, and specially São Paulo, is a huge market for helicopters and air-taxi services in general, not to speak of regional air services, for which the VA-X4 aircraft is somewhat constrained with a mere 160km range.
The same lies that are peddled to us about pretty much everything. The emissions are just moved downstream, and could even be worse in certain places, as compared to other transportation systems. I am curious to see how they fare in energy usage as compared to an electric car, electric bikes and electric trains.
Most notably, even if the craft is charged with electricity generated by a coal-fired plant, overall efficiency is still improved simply because power plants are much more efficient than any kind of internal combustion engine. And of course, the vehicle will only become more clean as fossil fuel plants are phased out, where fossil fuel vehicles will only ever be fossil fueled, barring the unusual electric conversion.
That said, the ideal solution is electric mass transit like the train systems seen frequently in east Asia. Unfortunately, those are unlikely to appear in North American cities any time soon due to the thick jungle created by corrupt local politicians, NIBMYs determined to freeze-frame their neighborhoods at any cost, and price gouging underperforming construction contractors.
