The High-Stakes Race to Build the World’s First Flying Taxi
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In that kind of area, there's not the population density to support any kind of mass transit (or even really taxis) and the distances are too far for biking to be practical. Readily available electric VTOL would revolutionize rural America. Not much to worry about in terms of air congestion, either.
The market is probably there if someone could pull off a 1-2 seat VTOL that had maybe a 60 mile range.
As people already pointed, redundancy. Those systems have a lot of engines.
The simplest ones have fixed engines, and the most complex ones have then engine move in a single axis. Both are much simpler than an helicopter.
Electrical motors inherently require less maintenance, what isn't as large a change as it seems.
All the e-VTOL designs I have seen can glide, what places them on the same category as airplanes, that require much less maintenance than helicopters.
They are mechanically simpler, but aerodynamically and electrically vastly more complex. These designs are only possibly due to modern engineering, otherwise they would have been invented before the helicopter.
Electrical complexity is more reliable by orders of magnitude, and aerodynamics won't fail mid-flight.
That said, if it is an LSA, at least in the US, it would have to meet the normal LSA or E-LSA regulations. Including the service schedule, which is less onerous and non-LSA general aviation, but still far more than a car.
The real issue is unit sales being so low. The R22 is a popular and ‘cheap’ helicopter ranking #8 in total sales, but it’s sold less than 5,000 units worldwide over 40 years.
PS: Fixed wing aircraft are popular because they have a huge range of inherent advantages. VTOL sounds great, but the downsides are enormous.
And don't rule out eSTOL. I think we'll see more of that.
Helicopters have an operating cost per hour an order of magnitude higher than a comparable payload conventional aircraft. The purchase price per payload capacity is also nearly an order of magnitude different. It's not the operator cost that determines the difference in price between helicopters and CTOL.
Similarly, an electric helicopter would qualify as eVTOL. People generally aim for something more efficient in flight, but that’s a separate question.
Even so, only about 1000 single engine piston airplanes are sold every year.
https://www.controller.com/listings/aircraft/for-sale/list/m...
(Additionally, a lot of general aviation aircraft have moved to turboprop in the last few decades.)
You're right, they last forever, and so the market for new aircraft is tiny. Really a vicious circle: high costs lead to low volume leads to high costs.
If the trip is much shorter in the air, it may bring the energy consumption closer to ground travel, but even then if we're talking electric energy, renewables are set to make that so cheap it doesn't matter compared to other factors like convenience (it's already that cheap, and dropping every year.)
Commercial air travel is far safer than most forms of ground transport , so it's at least possible that personal air transport could one day be safer than driving.
The big thing really is the advancements in materials science and energy storage density. I don't think we're there yet. But in the next 50 years, very likely in my opinion.
The one thing that may not be fixable is the noise. But this is primarily important for rural living. Air taxis could pick you up and drop you at the subway station outside the city, where the nose won't be that big of a concern.
renewable energy sources combined with electrically driven transportation never meant we would do less travel or use less energy over all. it means what all break through events in power generation and efficiency meant, more of it for more uses and more people.
clean easily obtainable energy is going to lead to an explosion travel and who knows what forms it will take
Jet travel is sort of energy efficient because it's a flying bus with 100+ passengers. VTOL flying cars are not.
""" Doing the math
In other words, take these comparisons with a grain of salt: In 2013, traffic accidents killed 32,719 people, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The fatality rate was 1.1 deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles traveled. Assuming an average vehicle speed of 50 miles per hour (a big assumption), the fatality rate for automobiles translates to 1.1 per every 2 million hours.
Taking the preliminary 2013 fatality rate in general aviation of 1.05 fatalities for every 100,000 hours of flight time and scaling it up to 2 million hours gives a comparison rate of 21 general aviation fatalities per every 2 million hours. This suggests that stepping on a private plane is about 19 times more dangerous than getting into the family sedan. """
from: https://www.livescience.com/49701-private-planes-safety.html
Cities that can go vertical rather than horizontal has tons of benefits. It means less environmental impact, less distance for people to travel, more efficient energy usage, and probably a ton more.
Imagine New York City with landing pads not just on every rooftop, but every few stories spiraling around the outside of the building. People could live without ever needing to travel to the ground level.
While it's a popular image in near-future scifi that doesn't look too costly at details, flying taxis with any current VTOL technology don't plausibly enable this, AFAIK, because while they can fly over cities easily, close proximity to solid vertical surfaces substantially disrupts the stability and effectiveness of VTOL systems.
That's why helipads tend to be either on top of or a distance from buildings now; even with a smaller number of VTOL aircraft, pads aren't at those places because it's the most convenient place for them, but because it's the only safe place.
I'm still hoping for some sort of pneumatic tube.
Traffic causing problems like people blocking intersections, not moving when the light is green, or improperly merging, won't happen anymore.
Cars will be able to talk to each other and set up optimal routes. They'll be able to more efficiently match up users with carpools. I'm sure you can imagine more.
These things won't happen for a long time and definitely not with the first generation of truly autonomous cars. Once every car on the road is self driving though? Things will definitely change.
That can only be solved by increasing capacity, either with more lanes or more roads in the same direction, but this is typically not feasible.
Busses and trains are better now but they suffer from a major problem of not taking people where they actually want to go.
I don't think it's an either/or problem. We'll have autonomous busses, trains, and cars all working together to make travel MUCH better.
If not for the fact that airplanes are noisier than a fox stuck in a trashcan rolling down hill, we'd already have flying taxis of a variety of different forms that take off and land on top of sky scrapers. The youtuber mustard did a recent video exploring one such concept:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkJOm1V77Xg
Using ducted fans and an electric motor both reduce noise, so time will tell if we've finally achieved a "city acceptable noise level" out of one of these designs at long last.
It always appeared strange to me when countries have strict noise limits on aviation, but most countries do not seem to mandate noise limits for cars
A Surefly Octocopter is 1850 pounds; what does a large HVAC unit weigh? Surely a roof that's strong enough to support large HVAC units is strong enough to hold an Octocopter.
There is at least one prominent tech firm that appears to think they can mitigate these issues in a year or so, which is... unrealistic.
edit: what nradov said.
http://www.helijapan.org/pdf/general/general05/Friedmann/Jap...
"The lack of noise while in flight is another thing Kitty Hawk is highlighting about its new aircraft. In a video posted on its site, Kitty Hawk notes that a helicopter hovering at 1,500 feet emits about 80 dBA, while Heaviside only puts out 38 dBA."
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/3/20897336/kitty-hawk-elect...
I think it's a feasible design. Hopefully they actually start flying it crewed and scale it up to at least 4 seats. If they can execute, I can believe it'd be significantly cheaper to operate than a helicopter.
Generally, small airplanes are moved around a lot more by wind gusts - which means some people get really motion sick in smaller airplanes. That could be quite a shock for people who are used to bigger airplanes.
Does anyone know how these really small multi-rotor air taxis are with turbulence?
I hope someone takes up the challenge. We've got Eviation's Alice, but most of the other players are focused on these eVTOL aircraft or hybridized jets (the hybrid part is a big challenge in itself and offers only modest efficiency advantages).
Here is an article about someone who spent $120 back in July: https://www.businessinsider.com/blade-continuous-helicopter-...
If so, I expect this sort of aircraft to become quite viable quite soon; if not, then I would be surprised.
The more "off-nominal" an aircraft is, the harder, and thus more expensive, it is to certify. Commercial aircraft (which a "flying taxi" would be) are also much more expensive to certify than general aviation aircraft.
Drone-style "air taxi" aircraft are very different from a systems, reliability, and redundancy point of view than fixed wing (can glide) or rotary wing (can autorotate) aircraft. The FAA is comfortable with those types of aircraft. Convincing the FAA that single and multiple failures (e.g. battery failure) won't cause a drone-style aircraft to fall out of the sky is going to be very expensive.
As an example, it took many years and multiple attempts to get the FAA to certify composite aircraft. Ref:
* Lear Fan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LearAvia_Lear_Fan
* Beech Starship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beechcraft_Starship
* Cirus VK30 / ST50 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_VK-30#Variants
* Piaggio P.180 Avanti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaggio_P.180_Avanti
I don't believe there were any commercially successful aircraft that were primarily composite before the Boeing 787.
Changes (depending on how significant they are) can be covered by a "supplemental type certification" which leverages the underlying type certificate and only has to show that the changes are OK.
Supplemental type certificates are much less expensive and is used to certify different models of a given aircraft (e.g. the 737-800 Max is a STC on a STC on a STC ... all the way back to the original 737 Type Cert[1]).
There are also ongoing maintenance monitoring and updates that go into maintaining an aircraft's "airworthiness certificate". The manufacturer must monitor the fleet of aircraft it produces and produce maintenance instructions over the lifetime of the aircraft, including addressing unexpected fatigue and wear issues.
https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/design_approvals/rotor...
Looking at Wikipedia's entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_lift I don't see any commercially successful aircraft. There are some military aircraft[1], experimental aircraft, and a some unsuccessful commercial aircraft. None is "drone style" yet.
Being the first to type certify a new style of aircraft is very difficult and expensive, which was my point with the list of composite aircraft. Composite aircraft (in my mind) seems much less of a change than powered lift. Maybe ballistic recovery systems[2] will make powered lift certifiable with a reasonable level of effort. The nice thing about BRS is that it is already flight proven and accepted as an emergency recovery system.
[1] The military is willing to take more risks - helps that the jets have ejection seats. The Osprey had 12 hull-loss accidents with a total of 42 fatalities (no ejection seats and it cannot autorotate). Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Boeing_V-22_Osprey#Accide...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Recovery_Systems
There are also noise issues associated with scaling up personal air transport.
People do routinely fly personal aircraft in sparsely populated areas like much of Alaska. Scaling that up in somewhere like the northeast US or Bay Area seems... unlikely.
What if we used a combination of drone technology and powerlines...instead of a drone needing to have its own batteries on board, what if there was a power line suspended across the river that it ran along, similar to a street-car. The drone, let's say it holds 2 or 4 people per trip, would basically be a mini flying-on-a-line taxi. It would travel only along the power-line, thus no navigation or control systems needed, no pilot needed.Presumably it could have a much lighter frame due to no battery needed, and you could power it off the rapidly decarbonizing grid.
The downsides I see now are the safety risks if a part flies off, the noise may be intolerable, and you'd need to construct the lines and hold them up somehow. And obviously, you'd need to engineer the product and face the realities of the physics, which I don't know much about.
Because they are not technically sound, and they are not commercially sound.
There are existing air taxi services, and they tend to go bust during every economic downturn.
But even if the principle is valid, you can only conclude the then clause (conclusion) from the if clause (premise), not the reverse.
While most breakout successes may be mocked as impossible, most things mocked as impossible do not turn out to be breakout successes.