Airbus reveals the next generation of CityAirbus
airbus.com
airbus.com
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.
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.
But weight is not an issue for light aircraft. For example, the Robinson R44 (4 place heli) is only 660kg empty. The Airbus taxi will be made as light as possible, so I wouldn't expect it to be much heavier.
As long as the supports for the landing pad are placed appropriately with the building structure, it shouldn't be any problem. More likely there would be the concern of accidents and the significant collateral damage they could cause.
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.
This CityAirbus takes what, 4-6 people seated? A bus easily takes 40+, a tram 60+ and a metro 250+* - and that's just seats, they all fit hundreds of people if you include standing passengers.
It would take ages and hundreds/thousands of flying taxis to clear a stadium, while it takes only tens of metro trains.
* Numbers taken from public transport options in my home town, will of course differ around the world
Obviously this will not be comparable in capacity to a metro, but it can conceivably be comparable in capacity to bus lines which tend to operate at very low load factors in US cities, by virtue of being much faster to complete the same journey.
The point you're making is exactly the problem. The reason bus lines aren't used more is because they suck in a lot of cities. Improving the public transportation infrastucture (and no, not taxis), would solve this problem - as demonstrated in many European cities.
Here's a good video that compares the city planning of Houston to other cities, and explains why it sucks. It focuses more on cars vs. bikes, but the same basic point also applies to public transportation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54
"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.
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.
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.
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]
- people driving don't have to take time to find parking lots
- the cars themselves don't need to be parked in the city, freeing up space
- depending on how many people are traveling together and what they are transporting different sized vehicles can be used
That being said: the most efficient form of transportation any human can do right now is the bicycle. It is fast too. During rush hour I am faster than car, bus or subway on my commute (German city) and as I am sitting on the computer for long periods anyways, having a little movement is great. And for weather there is appropriate clothings.
"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!
Lawnmowers are significantly louder.
In a suburb of Portland Oregon I routinely hear helicopters up to about 2000 feet. I hear many planes at over 5000 ft. When jets take off from PDX and climb over my house I can easily hear them at about 16,000 feet.
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.
Additionally, one has to consider the flight path would ideally be more straight, allowing for less overall mileage per trip than a land vehicle.
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.