Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars
vox.com
vox.com
Flying cars are certainly a nice gadget, but do we really need or want them? I can only think of two good arguments for flying cars, entering the third dimension if we run out of space on the surface and maybe being able to get rid of our current infrastructure, i.e. no longer having to build and maintain roads and railroad tracks and the accompanying infrastructure.
In metropolitan areas it certainly looks a bit like we are running out of space on the surface but I am actually not sure that we are not just pretty bad at making use of the available space. No longer having to maintain a large piece of infrastructure seems actually the more convincing argument to me.
The rolling resistance of a typical car is 0.01 to 0.015 [1], so the effective lift/drag ratio of a car's suspension is about 70 to 100, for just the wheels themselves. Missing from this number are the parasitic losses of all other unsprung mass, aerodynamic drag, and the costs incurred by traveling along roads which are neither level nor straight routes between your start and your end.
Small aircraft have L/D of 10-20 [2], and electric craft will probably fare slightly better if anything because of packaging advantages vs big ICEs.
I might do a more in depth analysis later and write up a Medium post, but my point is: Even just looking at the rolling resistance of the car and the whole L/D of aircraft, the difference is only an order of magnitude. Rolling resistance is one of the smallest contributions to drag in a car, so all up electric cars are probably only 3-6x more efficient than electric aircraft, and combustion cars are probably have a far smaller advantage.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_resistance#Rolling_res...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift-to-drag_ratio#Examples
The new DEP designs will do better, but exceeding 10:1 seems unlikely
The energy density of batteries is far worse than gasoline. Also, after you burn gasoline, you don't have to carry it anymore, which isn't true for batteries.
Also consider that for a plane, running out of gas can be fatal, so you can't actually use all the range. There needs to be a safety margin.
And then, consider that a practical flying car can't actually take off or land like a plane, and probably can't have the wingspan of a plane, so you might want to compare to a helicopter instead.
Current solutions can be airborne at maximum 15 minutes considering that FAA and other agencies require 20 minutes reserve you do the math.
The Zee.aero patent design as been abandoned because they couldn't scale it to fit a passenger inside.
If he means "VTOL Cessna with really good avionics" it's still a tall order but perhaps within the realm of "eventually possible given great determination and unlimited money" instead of "laugh him out of town."
As a proxy you have Icon A5 it was target at a price point of $130k in 2008 currently it's priced around $240k and only a handful have been delivered.
You will get a 25 minute around 30 miles ride with 20 minute reserve
Another optin is turbine like the AirMule, but will be hard to use it for civilian operations the hourly cost is brutal and noise and heat is really annoying for nearby people and even passengers.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2123200/The-ultimate...
Just add an airfoil envelope with enough of something lighter than air(heated air, helium, w/e) to offset the weight until a decent performance point is met. The heat from the engines running could help heat the gas for added efficiency.
Hybrid airships are already being marketed by Lockheed Martin so this isn't revolutionary at all.
Batteries are the heavy bit, and in my opinion, the future there is to have batteries capable of 2 minutes of flying, and a gasoline engine as a hybrid generator.
(3) With sufficient thrust, cars fly just fine. However, this is
not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
as they fly overhead.There's probably a market for a vertical-takeoff vehicle serving a premium/luxury transportation niche - the same segment that is currently served by helicopters. I imagine you would still need a pilot's license and have to adhere to the rigorous FAA-maintenance schedule - so it would never be a mass-market product.
Which means:
1. wait for tesla like autonomous software that works for cars - we have for planes but this is a bit different 2. either high density batteries for electrical engines or very light weight ICE engines ( biodiesel or bio ethanol ) to be mass produced
- Opens up a lot of potential living space which is geographically close, but not practically connected via transit arteries
- Opens up living space in areas which are not passable by cars either because of terrain or in-tact wilderness (e.g. an off the grid home on a nearby mountain)
Both would no doubt mostly benefit the rich, but well, nobody's shocked that this is where that's targeted.
If you have some sort of a mobile house factory that will utilize local materials and 3D print the rest you really only need to worry about a few materials that can't be locally sourced.
Yes this is far away but about as far as flying cars.
Heck In 2 decades you might order a house on amazon a blip will come and set it down some roomba style bots will come out and finish it and you'll jump into your flying car and move in.
When you can 3D print almost anything including your food and produce electricity locally via wind and solar you can now live in the middle of nowhere Alaska without much infrastructure.
The SF-Alameda-Oakland ferry is already 30 minutes :).
The SF ferry is also slower than driving with no traffic or bart :)
Small aircraft are already not a whole lot more sophisticated than a production car - and often less so. But nonetheless they're still an order of magnitude more expensive.
The noise problem you brought up apropos of nothing.
You're responding to a comment responding to a comment that had concerns that were already addressed by the article, to let me know your concerns weren't addressed by the article. Surely there's a better place in the comment hierarchy for this? You'll get ignored down here.
We definitely need for example a faster way to transport rich people than cars, but cheaper than planes in short distances.
We definitely need a better way to transport patients between hospitals than ambulances and helicopters.
We need to see the future here, not the past (the outdated idea of 'flying cars')
Q: Someone is building flying cars.
A: Do we really need them?
Q: Someone is investing money into extending human life.
A: Let's talk about the social implications of immortality.
Q: Innovation announced! A: Not possible based on my legacy experience/guild qualification.
- Straight line transportation, saving energy & time
- Faster speedwise
- No infrastructure needed, software is basically infrastructure
- Can handle rough terrain with less maintenance
- Can deal with traffic better or have more concurrent bandwidth.
- Can allow cities to de-concentrate and people to live further away. Our model at the moment is the city model where everyone needs to live in population centers to work well.
- Less time wasted in lifts if the car is parked on the terrace.
- Less need of properties to be adjacent to roads or the cost basis of new developments to be cheaper.
- No driving needed, simplistic autopilot can work.
- No bridges needed to cross water bodies.
I would argue there's no need to ask if people want or need it, it's one of those things everyone has dreamt with lust about at some stage or another.
Air transport will need management for safety reasons, which means air corridors, landing areas, some kind of ATC system. Which correlates to infrastructure costs, not so straight line transportation and not so time efficient commutes.
As activity centers tends to be somewhat concentrated, huge amount of flying cars will tend to go or left small areas at the same time, creating air traffic jams to land or take off.
Classic infrastructure will still be needed to transport heavy items, such as large quantities of food, machinery, etc. Even the construction phase a new developments will need those roads and bridges.
Strangely, faster transportation doesn't mean shorter commutes, quite the contrary, the average commute time tends to go way up when transports evolve to become faster and denser as it enables urban areas to grow even more. The real alternative is to "de-concentrate" activity centers to have relatively autonomous parcels with residential, work and commerce close together and necessitating only light transport forms (by foot, by bike, or light transports like tramways).
Flying cars are also mostly "fail catastrophically systems", it's good that motors are redundant, but there are not the only items that can fail. Batteries, the control surfaces, the inboard computer, or the whole structure can fail. Flying is also quite hard, specially in difficult meteorological conditions, building automation to handle such cases will be extremely hard (I've no competences in the area but the picture of a vertical landing in windy condition, seems a bit frightening).
Interesting statistic: on a per journey basis, airplanes have 2 to 3 times more death than cars, (on a per km basis it's very safe), imagine what it would looks like with a lot of small commutes.
I'm not convinced it's really the solution... I see it at best as a cheaper and more accessible helicopter ride.
Roads are quite straight over long distances, and planes don't fly in straight lines if there's something in the way (eg a storm). I wonder if there'd really be that much difference on a journey longer than a few hundred miles.
Would be a real blessing for vanishing amphibians, hedgehogs, snakes, endemic terrestrial crabs, big cats... On the other part could be a problem for birds, bats and flying insects also, of course. And will boost the feral cat problem.
For good or worse, from a environmental point of view would be a real game changer.
Convenience and flexibility always seem to win in the end.
San Jose -> SF is the example in the article that Uber gave.
I've always imagined micro airports. They'd be like train stations. Need to get from Irvine, CA to Pasadena, CA in 20 minutes?
With this approach the flight paths could be deterministic and the cars could be reused all the time.
These are all symptoms of a badly designed city. What a place like this needs is better infrastructure, especially public infrastructure such as bike lanes, buses, and trains so that a lot of that traffic isn't necessary. Getting more people into cars will only create more problems. All you're doing is moving that traffic and congestion into the sky. If you said we needed an airbus, I'd point you to my friend who is named "airplane".
There's also a lot more sky up there than there is land down here.
Agree. Not every improvement in technology is actual progress. Let's skip flying cars and wait for teleportation.
- Solve traffic
- Live in Santa Cruz, commute to SF
- Buy a mansion in Modesto, commute to Palo Alto
- The views!
These will be VTOL, electric, autonomous air taxis, not road-drivable cars.
Obviously, these will be blocked by swarms of flying cars.
It could work in that scenario... My biggest thought for drones, is it won't work from the distribution centers, simply because they are too far out from a lot of the drop off locations.. but combined with trucks, you could have the trucks drive less in-out, and drones for drop off. Would need a handler in addition to a driver though, depending on automation capability.
This would also need to be supplemented with uber-like service for deliveries that don't fit well for drone drops.
Or we could be more ecologically and energy conscious...
Or something called a "speed limit"?
Can't believe this is the top comment on HN. Reddit? Sure, but I expect better here...
It's not about space ...it's about congested roads. Dedicated rail (or tubes for high speed over long distance being the exception) for mass transit is not the way to think about our improving our cities anymore. There will be a hardware - and software - solution.
Bad existing public transportation doesn't mean that all public transportation will be bad.
Opening a new dimension will be like switching from a horse to a first Ford car - day and night in terms of speed. Practically no more traffic jams because you can always travel at higher/lower travel channels.
> They are probably less efficient because you have to overcome gravity
Yes but eventually it might get narrow. At least you wont be stuck in traffic burning gas but constantly moving.
> they are probably going to be pretty noisy
If you plan a picnic on a silver cloud 10k feet above the ground then yes. For majority of people living in cities on the ground, it won't. I can imagine first flying cars will be very noisy just like first cars were pollution monsters... but let the Government impose fines and never-ending restrictions that will make sure car makers invest large chunks into quieting them down.
> falling out of the sky and smashing into the ground is a new failure mode
First and foremost, the only way you will fly in a car when it is 100% autonomous. There will never be a car that you can control manually. Perhaps only military/LEOs/etc, but for us civilians it won't do. Most likely by the time they fly above your heads - 10-15 years from now? most street cars will be automatic as well.
You will never own the car by the way. You won't be able to make any modifications etc. You will pay equivalent to your current car payment but you will only rent (good thing is you can always get new model without hassle of selling your old one).
In terms of smashing, I bet the first design to fly human will be made with airbags covering the whole thing, similar to the recent rover flying to the Mars. By the time you "smash" to the ground, you will be one huge bouncing ball of air.
Flying cars will move us into another lap of human evolution! No doubt about it.
Wouldn't you move it 1,000 feet up, 2,000 feet up, 3,000 feet up...
There's a lot more space in the air than on land.
Plus, in 3D you can make two non-intersecting non-parallel straight paths. Can't do that in 2D.
But that's mitigated by the fact that the failure modes and much, much worse.
I can drive safely at highway speeds with a couple hundred feet of separation between cars.
FAA rules on safe separation between planes laterally is about 3 miles, or about 50 times the distance, or 2500 times the surface area.
Plus planes compete with one another for access to airports, so you haven't actually solved any congestion issues -- the bottleneck is still near the ground.
Flying cars won't use the same airspace as turbine powered airline planes, so a new airspace designation could exist just for cars. And drones. Because drones and flying cars will be competing for the same airspace so all of them will need to use the same system.
Added: Flying cars (and to some degree drones) do compete with the same airspace as existing general aviation flights. And that's a big problem. The legacy aircraft would have to avoid the new airspace, most won't ever get an upgrade to fly autonomously; alternatively, the flying cars will have to be programmed such that they can always yield right of way to legacy aircraft.
At ordinary commercial airline speeds, it's the equivalent of a "20-second rule" (i.e. it's the distance covered in 20 seconds by a 500-600mph vehicle).
Gravitational potential energy is a little more reliable than aircraft engines. if you lose propulsion, you can convert altitude to airspeed at your leisure, subject to the glide ratio. But only if you have it :).
Whatever else goes wrong, being further away from the ground gives you more time to deal with it.
Shameless plug: my blog post from last year on this topic: https://pointersgonewild.com/2015/09/15/all-hope-is-not-lost...
So far. In a future where people commute in flying cars while delivery drones descend from some flying warehouse I'm not so sure this stays true.
The saving grace is probably that up there we don't have to accommodate legacy vehicles. We can just force all airborne vehicles to talk to each other with some universal collision avoidance/traffic routing protocol.
It's not exactly what you described, but in the US, the FAA already has a requirement for aircraft to broadcast their position and velocity in all but the least congested airspace by 2020 [1]. This has been in the works for over a decade [2], and among other things, the information provided by this system can be used to augment existing collision avoidance schemes [3].
[1] https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/adsb/faq/#o2
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillan...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...
Birds, hills, turbulence.
For fun take a lot at the outer trim tabs when flying in rough skies. The computer adjusts them like 20 times a second to keep the wings stable, kinda cool to see
As long as the flight software keeps the cars/planes a decent distance from each other traffic will never be an issue when flying.
A much bigger problem will be parking, since no traffic means everyone will fly everywhere all the time. Parking will be an extreme issue for city centers. The wait in traffic will probably turn into a wait to park
Parking shouldn't be an issue? We'll have vertical parking structures that can be entered/exited on every level.
airflow near walls is turbulent, and the funneling effect may suck the aircraft towards the wall.
Solvable problems - you just have to build a landing pad away from the side of the building.
And, if our flying cars are helicopters or multicopters, we've got more problems, because we can't actually stack that many helicopters over eachother, due to the interference of their air columns. :-/
As long as you have designated drop zones, everything else becomes mathematically simpler.
Since ground-based cars will in all probability continue to be a thing, roads are not guaranteed to be empty, but are guaranteed to be plentiful and nearly everywhere. Autonomous cars can be signaled as some road strip is reserved for emergency landing, and within seconds they can vacate the road strip and block it from conventional vehicles (assuming a sufficient portion of ground vehicles becomes autonomous).
Even if a flying car could fold up to be the size of a current car while parked (which is not at all an easy matter) it will not be that small in a landing configuration.
That said, the planes will have to keep moving a little above stall speed. Can you imagine the air traffic control nightmare of these 1000's of carplanes?
So these are enough to defeat the mass aspect. They may well be viable in Australia, our back with large vistas of flat land and little weather on which 10,000 or more landing strips can be built. Well, we have that now in Australia, but we use airplanes to go from place to place over longer distances and we use cars/trucks for local use. ALl this said, Larry will make his plane, he may sell a few to the idle rich, but they will never become commonplace.
"Can you imagine a mechanical horse carriage where all 4 hooves moved in unison?! Balderdash, I must say. There's no way 4 legs could ever move that fast and that synchronized! It'll never happen. Now, Jeeves, go ready my carriage. We're going to meet a weird entrepreneur by the name of Henry Ford."
You're right. With old "state of the art", and yes I do say old, having 100+ planes in a square mile would be very trying. But we're talking of no encryption, no authentication, no anti-jamming, no anything really. And that's from a 2012 presentation at Defcon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk
If a single engine on a quadcopter loses power, it crashes [2]. There is work being done on mitigating this, but I don't see why you'd go for a quad versus tri- or helicopter.
(Quadcopters are better than other aerial platforms at one thing: maneuverability. To get this agility they sacrifice speed, efficiency and payload weight.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation
[2] https://www.quora.com/Can-a-quadcopter-fly-without-one-rotor
You're wrong about a quadcopter not being able to fly with 3 rotors, see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsHryqnvyYA
That looks like it would be quite a ride with a human on-board, but would probably suck less than crashing.
If one motor fails, the quadcopter could turn off the opposite motor and reverse the direction of one of the remaining motors, so that it is left with two opposing motors spinning in opposite direction. The torque of two motors might be enough to keep it flying. Some steering would be possible with the assistance of the third working motor which could spin in either direction as needed.
Pretty sure you won't survive that transition since your craft will be completely out of control in the seconds it takes to kill all rotational velocity and spin a rotor up again, at least for large sized rotors.
There's enough open source information laying around on the internet to figure out the power draw of the Ehang in flight and from there you can figure out roughly how much the batteries on it weigh (spoiler: it's many 10s of kilograms for the 23min flight time they claim [1]).
Don't forget that these batteries will degrade with time, especially in such a high-load performance regime. This will further limit your flight time until you replace them. On top of that, having 8 tiny props is always going to be less efficient than a fixed-wing or helicopter-like design.
If you're a Chinese billionaire, you don't care that your "flying car" has these limitations, but these same limitations (among many others) preclude the Ehang from becoming an actual practical method of transportation.
There is just zero need for this right now, and is just silly nonsense. Work on making our ground systems 100% safe, efficient, and reliable first.
With self driving, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than autonomous cars. Any point in a 30 mile typical travel radius is a <15 minute flight.
Update ground infrastructure, improve public transportation, make renewable energy a priority, get our cars driving themselves.
My parents live in a rural area 16 mikes from our city center. Due to terrain and roads, it's a 30 mile/60 minute trip. With a flying car/shuttle, its no more than 20 minutes.
What would the average person say about a self-driving cab that is currently being piloted by Uber at that time?
I'm honestly surprised about the downvoting and snark here. There are Air Force officers sitting in trailers in Nevada right now controlling swarms of semi-autonomous drones, performance surveillance and blowing stuff up. Why is a simple air taxi beyond the imagination?
Now even if we did all that, with current technology flight is both incredibly noisy and less fuel efficient than driving (commercial airliners are primarily efficient because hundreds of people travel in one vehicle).
It's not really a physical limitation, after all maglev trains gain fuel efficiency and noise reduction by floating. But our existing technologies for free flight just aren't good fits for cars.
You want to end traffic with modern accessible tech?
Build ten layer freeways.
Today only the Uber-rich can afford short haul flying. With a airtaxi/flying car scenario, just about anyone could fly across their metro area for some special occasion.
Nuclear batteries can provide enough electricity for flier for years. We just need to develop safer nuclear batteries (LENR type?), which, in turn, requires better understanding of nuclear physics, which, in turn, requires to shoot some «shut-up and calculate» guys.
I agree with you that electric motors are awesome (they're what I do) and you're right that you can easily put 2-4 of them on a fairly conventional aircraft for amazing redundancy.
The problem with the quad-rotor configuration is that the motors are doing all the work. With real wings you get a better lift to power ratio but you also lose VTOL capability.
Having said all that, I'd still like to see a small short field aircraft automated to the point that the general public could use it.
Joby and Zee are using wings plus VTOL. They shut down the VTOL rotors for level flight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhZJgOA-hyI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohGAQfseJzM
Sure looks simpler. You also get short field takeoff and vertical landing.
How about a roadable one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CajAq6ndJYE
"This kind of design wouldn’t work with conventional aircraft engines because 10 engines would be way too heavy. But electric motors can be made extremely small and light, allowing even a car-size vehicle to have 10 of them."
You also can't put combustion engines in the end of small actuators, like it's on the article.
The benefit of electric is the ability to very quickly alter thrust for that quad-rotor type of control.
They're wacky moonshot ideas sorta ring of the boy who cried wolf at this point. they never live up to the hype.
I'm still curious about how highways for these types of aircraft will be implemented. I imagine the goal is ubiquity and at some point, with thousands of these things flying around, flight paths will be the bottleneck.
http://moller.com/ - this project seems dead =( hopefully either I'm wrong or something more interesting takes its place
VTOL plane with 8ish electric fans
Hybrid gas/electric
Rotary engine in back for charging batteries and longer flights.
The cusp of their argument is that several technologies are coming together to make VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) feasible within the next decade. VTOL aircrafts are theoretically much more energy efficient than helicopters, and a lot of the cost associated with planes is due to their low production volume. If a company like Uber started to use VTOL aircrafts, the price would rapidly decline to closer to what cars cost now, and the cost of a flight would be low enough that more than just the wealthy could use them.
Uber showed that they are not willing to comply public agency on regulation-related restrictions. VTOL vehicles, they are more dangerous than cars. Uber's attitude, when handling such technologies, make me scared.
Like the Chavez family, for example:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/28/silicon-vall...
At the Hiller Museum in San Mateo one of the docents was talking about how helicopters seem so great but they are so hard to fly with the pilot managing rotor pitch, rotor speed, and countering torque with the tail rotor. A typical quad/hexa/octo copter type vehicle is much easier to fly. (as is a gyrocopter but it cannot really take off vertically)
They're easier to fly because they have software providing artificial stability. If you had to control each rotor individually it would be virtually impossible. There's no reason in principle why a helicopter couldn't have similarly straightforward controls.
Why not provide a joystick for translation motion, rudder pedals for rotation, and a lever for ascending and descending? Allow the human to provide simple inputs, like: tilt the stick forward to go forward. No other inputs required. Aircraft will remain at the same altitude while it tilts forward and gains airspeed.
The computer consumes all of these controls, understands what the human wants to do, and then makes the necessary low-level adjustments. I suppose one obstacle to this plan is that the helicopter would need to be entirely fly-by-wire, and there would be no fallback to manual control. This would likely make the helicopter more complex and expensive.
http://www.helicoptermaintenancemagazine.com/article/underst...
more power efficient in cruise flight.
For General Aviation safety, read the Joseph T. Nall report: https://www.aopa.org/-/media/files/aopa/home/training-and-sa...
To summarize, helicopters and airplanes enjoy a reasonably similar lethality. Approximately 15-20% of accidents (total) are fatal to one or more occupants. However, if you break it down to fatal-accidents-per-100,000-hours then helicopters are worse (1.5 vs 1.0) at least in 2013.
When it comes to general aviation safety, however, the far and away most important factor is the pilot. Unless you get damned unlucky, the vast majority of accidents are either avoidable or survivable if the pilot doesn't do something wrong. In helicopters, a controlled autorotation will be survivable most of the time. In airplanes, a controlled forced landing is the same.
Of course, you can have your cake and eat it too -- I recently purchased a Cirrus SR22-TN (airplane) which has a Ballistic Recovery System aka a parachute. If anything goes wrong you can pull the chute and the entire airplane will descend to the ground. :-)
In a airplane, a loss of engine power translates to slowing down. If you're on top of things, you will notice this and nose-down in order to maintain airspeed. If you fail to notice this, your airplane will stall, but even that can be recovered from by nosing down in time.
In a helicopter when you lose power this translates very quickly (with 4-5 seconds) into loss of rotor RPM. Within 1-2 seconds you must change the angle of the blades in order to enter the autorotation configuration - if your rotor speed drops below a certain RPM before you make this change, you drop out of the sky with no chance of recovery. Making this an automatic reaction is a big part of helicopter pilot training.
Once you have entered autorotation/glide, the next challenge is finding a suitable place to land. In both cases you ideally need a flat hard open surface, though airplanes generally need a longer area than helicopters. Unfortunately a helicopter has a very poor glide ratio - ~5:1 (5 feet horizontal for 1 ft vertical) while a light airplane has something like ~9:1 glide ratio. Furthermore most helicopters cruse at much lower altitudes (1K-3K ft above ground level) vs. light airplanes cruising 4K-8K ft AGL). So you end up having 1/2 to 1/4 the time and distance to find a suitable landing site.
When it comes to the actual landing itself, gliding vs autorotation are different but one is not necessarily more dangerous than the other. In both cases you have a well-defined set of ideal airspeeds, descent rates, etc. which will lead to everyone surviving the experience. And in both cases you don't earn your pilot license until you have demonstrated that you can consistently do this correctly.
One more nuance - light airplanes (eg: Cessnas) are easier to glide than heavier/faster airplanes because everything happens slower. Since light airplanes are also the cheapest to operate, they are most often found in the hands of new/inexperienced pilots - it is good that they are forgiving.
Meanwhile light helicopters like the Robinson R22 are actually much more difficult to autorotate than larger/heavier helicopters - everything happens faster and is less stable. Unfortunately since these helicopters happen to be the cheapest to operate, they also very often find themselves in the hands of new/inexperienced pilots. This was such a big problem that there is a special piece of federal aviation regulation (SFAR 73) which puts additional training requirements on pilots specifically for the Robinson R22 and R44 models.
In the big picture though, general aviation is incredibly safe. The vast majority of non-commercial accidents can be attributed to some form of human error - either poor pilot judgment or lax adherence to maintenance requirements.
People seem to be arguing that helicopters are safer. I'm not an aerodynamics expert, but my intuition tells me that will be proven wrong eventually. They just are misjudging a newish way of doing things. Anyway, I don't see any point in arguing about it. Eventually the drones will get bigger and bigger and someone will have the balls to allow it to be tested properly. And eventually people will catch on.
If you could guarantee survival from terminal velocity I think a drone taxi could become a viable mode of transport.
One flying car, capable of moving 4 x 100 kg (passengers and baggage).
One self-piloting feature, allowing (or mandating) autonomous movement to the destination.
One timing device and detonator.
400Kg of whatever kind of explosives you can get.
Behold: Uber's cruise missile.
Come to think of it, you can probably load up a lot more payload for less money in a ground vehicle.
We can only hope that the next two technologies scheduled for public availability are permanent batteries and antigravity.
Is Larry going to be the first billionaire mental asylim patient?
That's the only answer.