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Comment by oliv__ | Hacker News Reader

A part of me thinks this is really cool tech and it would be amazing for anyone to be able to just hop aboard their personal helicopter and fly wherever they want, but then another part of me thinks of the future this would create, skies no longer clear, filled with objects buzzing around and what hell that would be, on top of the already stressful and crazy life we have now.

It's the kind of situation where I think I'd actually rather the tech never exist.

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This would have to fall into the ultralight classification for someone to fly this without training. The FAA could easily classify this otherwise if they perceived any problem.

Also, getting your pilots license is nothing like getting a car license, the training is much harder and requires a certain amount of hours in the car with a licensed flight instructor before they can fly on their own (I believe it's 50 hours in the cockpit). It's also prohibitively expensive as you have to pay for fuel and time. You won't see a bunch of unmotivated teens flying these things any time soon. Having worked at the FAA on the regulation side of things, I can also tell you if that did become a problem airspace and licensing would change.

Its way to heavy to fly as an ultralight under Part 103, which has a 254 lb maximum dry weight. Its probably too heavy to fly as a light sport, which has a 1,200 lb max gross weight limit, compared to the SureFly's 1,500 lb max gross weight; if you derated the max gross to make it LSA legal, then you'd only have a useful load of 100 lb, including fuel.

You can get a private pilot's license with 40 hours total time. (Most people do it in around 60-80.) I don't have as good a feeling on the stats on time until solo, but the average is almost surely under 20 hours.

Agree that this isn't going to be a hobby for the average unmotivated teen.

I share this concern, and it will probably be awful in the beginning. However, that being said, I thought i'd hate living next to an airport, and I live by one right now. The sounds of planes over my head are often ignored and I enjoy looking up and seeing a plane coming in for a landing. So what I thought I would hate I actually grew to enjoy. People adapt, that's actually what we're really good at.

An average plane carries around 150 to 200 people and planes are used only for long distances. Living in a world where the affordability of these are like cars, would be far worse, I imagine.

Unlike cars, these machines would not be tightly packed into roads, concentrating the noise and pollution; likely they'd have to keep a serious distance.

Also, with a top speed of 70 mph and range of 70 miles, it does not look like a great daily-commuter vehicle. This device looks like a good fit for an expensive urban fast-jump service, or a good solution for places where roads are hard to build, like going to a forest hike or a mountain trip.

I think there are a lot of places (SF, Los Angeles) where if you could travel 25 miles at a consistent 50 MPH speed that would be a huge improvement over many people's commute. It would be great for my commute personally. I can see reasons why this would not work as a commuter vehicle, but speed and range don't seem to be the issue.

If you're outside 70 miles, you've got bigger problems. But considering that rush-hour traffic can bring average freeway speeds down to the 5 and 10 MPH range, I'd say this would be a huge improvement for daily commuting. At great expense of course.

The only thing is, something invented for a niche market on Sunday will be made much cheaper on Monday, will be widespread and causing mayhem by Tuesday, regulated to the hilt on Wednesday, the sole domain of big corporations by Thursday, and used for aerial assassinations at-will by the military by Friday.

(My little sequence there takes a cue from this talk, posted on HN yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16106331 )

70 miles one way, so it's likely 35 miles round-trip after which you're dry.

Winged aircraft is so much more economical, but it's necessarily large.

Curses, foiled by the old "one way/round trip" trick!

70 miles by air is a long distance. You really want ~1 hour of reserve in an aircraft, but it said 70 miles per tank so you might have 70 miles with a 70 mile reserve.

Remember weight is the real limit. So, having a single passenger frees up ~150 lb for extra fuel.

I wouldn't worry about that. Most people can't even drive cars in "2D" safely, never mind helicopters. The general public will never be given the skies, unless the flights are automated.

It's much harder to hit something in the air.

But much easier to hit something on the ground (powerlines, houses, highways).

It's much easier to be cocky and negligent if the last 100 times you drove you never encountered something to hit.

As any pilot knows, the stomach unfriendly words from Tower are: "Caution, Wake Turbulence".

The air, being a sparse fluid, can change fast. Especially so if another aircraft has flown through it recently. It's not that there isn't anyone there, it's the air they left behind is all non-laminar now. Doubly being suddenly downwind of stationary objects like towers, wind farms, and mountains.

Also, quick point of caution: One reason early flyers died a lot because they flew so low. Even after a few meters of height, just about any crash is likely to be deadly. Paradoxically, the higher you fly, the better off you are (in certain cases). In flying, your height can be measured in 'mistake recovery time'. The higher you are, the more time you have before you hit the ground, the more time you have to fix a mistake. If your engine cuts out, you have a longer glide time to look for a lake. You can get a fuel pump restarted or unfrozen. You have more time to grab a parachute and bail. Etc. It took a long time and a lot of lives to realize this. As such, personal drone-choppers will be more dangerous and I fear we will have to re-learn the lesson of height being a friend in aviation.

It comes with a parachute

Which doesn't help at all when you hit wake on final. Chutes take a surprisingly long time to grab the air and slow you down.

If anything, that makes it more dangerous. Besides a sense of 'false' security, chutes do take a certain amount of height to catch air and become safe. IIRC it's about 100m and turbulence will affect that in strange ways.

In the end, I still fear tech like this will not be as stringent as needed.

Don't today's drones and airplanes demonstrate that automating flying is a lot easier than automating driving?

True. But there is a reason pilots are still a requirement.

That might stop being true if the air is as crowded as the roads.

As long as they're all outfitted with transponders, and piloting is automated, I don't see that being an issue.

The air won't have pedestrians and bikes!

Para/hang-gliders, small drones, birds. There's plenty of stuff you don't want to hit :-)

Cue legislation to make kites, balloons and RC aircraft illegal

No they don't. Drones are generally only allowed to fly at very low altitude in most US airspace because they can't reliably see and avoid manned aircraft operating under VFR.

I work in the field. Basically, yes. On average it is easier to fly than it is to drive, mostly because there's far fewer things to crash into. But on the other hand, almost any failure can become catastrophic - falling out of the sky will usually have much worse consequences than, say, bumping into the car in front of you.

I empathize but I think that attitude is an artifact of the age we grew up in. I'm sure equestrians felt the same way when those rackety automobile contraptions started zooming around.

I don't know. Just because I haven't been exposed to it yet and it's not the new normal doesn't necessarily mean it's an objectively better world.

And speaking of automobiles, I feel like a lot of cities are actually fighting back against that now, creating pedestrian-only areas etc... I like the autonomy and mobility that cars offer as much as anyone else, but I sure do enjoy the peace of a quieter country side, and I'm afraid with this technology, even that would go away: there would be no place left to escape the madness.

In my opinion, progress is what makes the world a better place overall for humans, as in better quality of life, not what makes the world a shinier place with new toys, even though we might be getting better and better at creating those.

At the end of the day, the cons far outweigh the pros here for me.

Those rackety automobile contraptions! Don't get me started! :)

I am half serious though, cars are annoyingly loud and (obviously) dangerous. I'm loving the eerily quiet electric vehicles. And cities creating carless areas of town or carless days.

I still feel that way about cars. Those horse riders were right.

I think everyone must have felt this way about automobiles. And by and large, it's worked out just as horribly as they imagined: our communities are divided by dangerous moats we call "roads" -- death traps which we must painstakingly teach our children to avoid, if we dare let our children wander outside on their own anywhere near them in the first place.

I don't get the point - are you suggesting we'd be better off without automobiles? Would we go back to horses? What about global logistics? Agriculture?

We'd be better off with dense cities where automobile is not the primary means of transportation. Like e.g. NYC or many European cities.

Cars and large trucks should mostly belong to highways and country roads.

NYC is a very far way from being a carless paradise. Yes, lots of people walk or take transit. But, especially in Manhattan, many streets are choked for a good chunk of the day.

Far more people use the subway than drive to work.

Only 28% of people in NYC commute by car/truck/van. 55% take public transit and 10% walk, 1% bike, 4% work from home, and 2% take a Taxi or other. https://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-york-commute

PS: The van thing is also closer to a bus than a private car.

It's not a paradise, but it's a city where you can live nicely without a car, and without a slightest desire to own it. Public transportation (non-ideal as it is) and the occasional uber / lyft / cab trip cover the needs of daily commute. Also, walking is easy, and a lot of things are within an easy walking distance, not only on Manhattan but also in most of Brooklyn and Queens.

I live in a major city (Toronto) and don't own a car, but this is still something of a fantasy - major cities are incredibly reliant on automobiles for moving goods in and out of the city even before you consider moving people.

And with that said, Toronto is far from being a city where we could live without cars for human transportation - without Uber getting around would be hell.

Cars as a secondary transport are fine. In NYC I take a cab / lyft once in a while, but it's like 3% of my trips.

Delivery trucks are, or course, incredibly important in a city. But they are also much more efficient than cars moving 1-2 people, so they need a bit less road capacity.

Also, city traffic is pretty favorable for electric vehicles with recuperative braking, so the coming crop of city buses and delivery trucks is going to have a significant portion of all-electric or hybrid vehicles. This helps the air pollution problem.

Very much a personal opinion. I hate living in dense cites. Dealing with owning a car in the city makes it worse, but I prefer living in a less dense area and owning a car. In fact I own 5.

Not having to drive a car daily is freedom. Living in a city with functioning and affordable public transport is, well, a blessing of sorts.

It's not a binary choice between "current system" and "no cars whatsoever".

We might not be better off, but the rest of the planet sure as hell would be. Not to mention that the history of overpopulation would be very different without those things.

I didn't read the comment as a suggestion of being better off without automobiles - merely an observation that the same reservations were felt by people transitioning from horses to automobiles...

>I think everyone must have felt this way about automobiles. And by and large, it's worked out just as horribly as they imagined: our communities are divided by dangerous moats we call "roads" -- death traps which we must painstakingly teach our children to avoid, if we dare let our children wander outside on their own anywhere near them in the first place.

Yep, JFYI, an excerpt from "Autophobia":

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/467412.html

"more deaths per capita in horse accidents in NYC in 1900 than in auto accidents today"

https://legallysociable.com/2012/09/07/figures-more-deaths-p...

On the other hand think about the positives: all the terrestrial traffic and distributed refueling and service infrastructure that might no longer be needed; it would revolutionize everything from personal transportation to shipping and logistics. And yeah it would require a vastly enhanced and much more autonomous traffic control system.

These helicopters still require refueling. In fact they're generally going to be less fuel efficient than passenger cars, even after accounting for traffic delays and routing.

If we can have self driving cars, sure these can be self flying then you don't have to worry.

With your AR eye glasses and earbuds, it can clean out the clutter showing you a clear blue sky and eliminate all the buzzing.

I wouldn't worry. Most people can't afford $200K cars that burn an entire tank of gas an hour.

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