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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

What's the CO2 footprint for using such a service vs taking a cab and sitting in traffic?

It's substantial. Helicopters produce roughly 43 times more CO2 per hour than cars. From a 2016 NYT article:

> The Airbus AS350 series of helicopters, one of the most popular among tour operators, produces approximately 950 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per hour; the average car produces 22 pounds per hour.

> There are often eight helicopters motoring on the downtown heliport at any time. For those living and working nearby, that’s like 340 cars idling outside your window. Conservatively estimated, the 56,000 annual tourist flights have a carbon footprint greater than 6,000 metric tons.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/opinion/sunday/a-plague-o...

Shouldn't you calculate it by passenger-time? The car seats 1-3 people, sits in traffic, etc. A passenger BUS probably does a lot more CO2 than a car too...

Seat utilization is a big factor here, but let's take the worst case for a car vs. the best case for a helicopter.

Assume that the helicopter can make 3 trips per hour (8 minutes flight time, plus 12 minutes turnover).

950 / 3 = 316 lbs of C02 per flight. It looks like the Bell 430 configuration they have has 6 passenger seats, so 52.7 lbs of C02 per passenger.

Even if the taxi has only one passenger and takes 1.5 hours to reach JFK in moderate traffic, that rider will only be generating 33 lbs of C02 (37% less C02 than a helicopter in a best-case scenario for the helicopter).

Buses do produce more CO2 than cars, but are generally 6-8 times more efficient on a passenger-mile basis.

I'm more confused how a helicopter that's 2500 lbs empty can somehow spit out over 900 lbs of emissions every hour for its four hour flight endurance. They've got to be doing some tricky calculations to get there. I'm guessing it looks more like consideration of infrastructure and production than it does passenger-time.

One pound of carbon becomes 3.7 pounds of CO2 "emissions" when it combines with atmospheric oxygen: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/contentIncludes/co2_inc.htm

One gallon of carbon petroleum fuel weighing 7 pounds becomes 22 pounds of carbon dioxide. Essentially in burning fuel you replace carbon plus two hydrogen atoms- atomic weight 14- with a carbon plus two oxygen atoms- atomic weight 44. That is an increase of 3.14x.

Well it is also burning oxygen from air which you don't carry on the helicopter.

Let me see how much high school chemistry I still remember...

    CO2 = C (12) * 1 + O (16) * 2

So 1 lb of C from fuel => 3.67 lb of CO2 out

Suppose AvGas is just Octane, C8H18

    C8H18 = C (12) * 8 + H (1) * 18

1 lb of octane => 0.84 lb of C => 3.09 lb of CO2

So yeah, you get 3 lb CO2 from 1 lb of octane.

It takes fuel (onboard) + oxygen (environment) to create the CO2. I assume that’s where the additional mass comes from.

Air breathing engine.

Why is time relevant here? I'd have thought it would be better to compare the CO2 emitted by one heli trip to the airport from central NYC to the CO2 emitted by one taxi trip to the airport from central NYC, in both cases divided by the number of passengers.

> With concerns mounting over congestion and vehicle emissions, Uber hopes its NYC Copter project will pave the way for Uber Air, a taxi service of electric “vertical take-off and landing” aircraft.

It looks like they ultimately intend to go electric. Still, electric or not, vertical takeoff vehicles consume a lot of energy. Lets hope they plan to use renewable electricity.

Wonder if this route would be perfect for an electric helicopter? It's a pretty short trip (8mins?), and it could charge while people load/unload? Not sure if the tech is mature just yet of course...

This is a rather imperfect comparison, but to try to answer whether the tech is mature enough yet, the Sikorsky 61N in its Pan Am configuration could ferry 25 passengers plus some luggage (though capable of 39 passengers), with a max range of up to 450NM, requiring about 2 megawatts give or take, fuel weighing up to 4000 lbs.

The Sikorsky Firefly is a one-passenger electric helicopter, one of not that many electric helicopters, with a max takeoff weight of about 2K lbs, a little more than one pilot's worth of weight between MTW and its empty weight (no passengers). Over half its weight, 1150 out of 2050 lbs, is comprised of its two batteries, burning up to 140kW for 15 minutes max (IE, not flying like Airwolf).

So the technology is there to make the electric flight about one way before a long recharge with one very wealthy passenger and no cargo provided the passenger is the pilot, presuming the batteries are replaced regularly and it's not too cold.

Maybe they should use solar paneling for the rotor blades? ;)

https://evtol.news/aircraft/sikorsky-firefly/ http://www.flugzeuginfo.net/acdata_php/acdata_s61n_en.php

The photos show a Bell 430, from different sources I calculate a fuel efficiency of around 1.2 L per km up to 333 L per hour.

Depends if you carpool I guess but I can't wait for air traffic to be miserable because of Uber

Not sure why you are being down-voted but air traffic is definitely going to be an issue if we keep going down this route. Same goes to that other article regarding Russian (?) flying cars. Air pollution, noise pollution, crashes will cause them to fall from the sky onto... well, anywhere really, and so on.

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