> airspace pollution
Bit of a fake concern, no?
>potential small airplane crashing down in a city
Is that really much worse than a SUV driving into a building?
Bit of a fake concern, no?
>potential small airplane crashing down in a city
Is that really much worse than a SUV driving into a building?
An airtaxi crashes down from a hight and speed. They will crash into and through your roof or into a street or directly into humans.
Airspace pollution is not a fake concern.
Why would we allow one company to fly over my head and another not?
Either it is so niche that it doesn't add any benefit to our society or it becomes so normal that air space pollution is a real issue.
I'm very very happy when I look into an empty/nearly empty sky.
This is a valid concern.
This is something that happens on a daily basis.
https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/driver-crashes-through-gas-...
https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/car-into-kohls
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/vehicle-careens-into...
https://turnto10.com/amp/news/local/massachusetts-wrentham-v...
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/video-shows-suv-crashing...
The NHTSA estimates that there are 16000 crashes per year in the US caused by drivers confusing the brake and accelerator pedals. A huge chunk of these do end up with the vehicle inside a building.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161226060428/https://www.nhtsa...
> An airtaxi crashes down from a hight and speed. They will crash into and through your roof or into a street or directly into humans.
The odds of a SUV driving into humans is far greater than the odds of a falling airtaxi hitting anyone.
SUVs end up inside stores every single day because of unintended acceleration on parking lots.
> Why would we allow one company to fly over my head and another not?
What does that even mean?
>Either it is so niche that it doesn't add any benefit to our society or it becomes so normal that air space pollution is a real issue.
The “airspace” is very big 3D space that can simultaneously accommodate thousands of flights over a city before congestion becomes an issue.
And yes it's totally valid as well to not allow it at all if only a handful of other people can benefit from it.
We are the people and I don't care if a rich person wants to do that. My airspace is more important than that one rich person.
Yes
please don't waste our time.
Risk is a community exercise. You don't (or rather, shouldn't) get to externalize disproportionate risks upon the commons because it makes your life easier.
(An example of such a consideration: what happens when the fire department shows up? They know how to deal with a car accident; are they going to have the presence of mind not to douse a vehicle that looks like a normal personal aircraft in water?)
Why ordinary speeds? Someone driving into a building is likely to be going significantly faster, perhaps because they confused the brake pedal and accelerator.
Things like this happen all the time https://twitter.com/TempePolice/status/1529914550266368000
We currently have a billion cars on the road. Of course we have plenty of accidents.
But that's not a valid comparison.
And perhaps we should also get rid of carsnow your argument is totally invalid
And I'd bet a lot more on the crash safety of aerospace cerrified batteries than those of the automotive sector.
Why? Aircraft are optimized for weight far more than automobiles. Making airplane batteries safer than car batteries would make them even less energy dense than they already are. Add to that fact that cars have a crumple zone built into them, while an airplane AFAIK does not -- at least not one that matters when it crashes into my house at 100mph.
Furthermore, some Tesla crashing on the freeway on the way to Tahoe is unlikely to start a forest fire. But what about some rich yahoo making the same trip while flying their personal electric plane who crashes in the Oakland hills?
These problems are non trivial particularly because every personal electric plane company wants to scale into the millions.
And in any case, even if such accidents would be worse, they’d also be vast less common. It’s more difficult to fuck things up in the air, and the level of training required to operate an aircraft is far higher than the level of training required to operate a SUV.
Drivers famously can’t even keep track of which pedal is the brake and which is the throttle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration
How many SUVs do you know of that are crashing into houses at 200mph?
Also, what is the relative mass of the electric airplane with a bunch of lithium batteries, versus the SUV?
What parts of the house might be hit by a falling airplane, versus an SUV crashing into the house from the road?
What is the fire risk of a bunch of lithium batteries having fallen out of the sky, versus the SUV crashing into the house?
There's lots of factors to be considered here, but overall I'd say there's a lot more risk of damage, injury, and death with the falling electric airplane than with the SUV.
https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/driver-crashes-through-gas-...
https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/car-into-kohls
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/vehicle-careens-into...
https://turnto10.com/amp/news/local/massachusetts-wrentham-v...
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/video-shows-suv-crashing...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/dead-hospitalized-car-plows-dc-res...
https://www.gainsberglaw.com/blog/cars-crash-into-buildings-...
I could find thousands of these.
An airplane falling from the sky is far less likely to hit anyone than a car suddenly accelerating into a store because the driver is flooring the accelerator instead of the brake. These incidents are so common that they have an extensive wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration
You can find some numbers at https://www.storefrontsafety.org/statistics.html They claim this happens around 60 times a day.
Again at least with streets I know that an SUV will only crash close to streets with an air taxi it could crash everywhere.
Kindergarden? Yes.
Can we protect a kindergarden from an accidental SUV acceleration? Of course we can. Easy.
Yes of course, per passenger mile SUVs are far more likely to drive into a building than an air taxi is to fall out of the sky.
> Can we protect a kindergarden from an accidental SUV acceleration? Of course we can. Easy.
But we don’t.
All of the things that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31719861 wrote, and:
> You’d expect there to be far more people at the street level than on top floors.
There are far more people who live near the sky than live near a large road.
> It’s more difficult to fuck things up in the air,
No, it really isn't? Aircraft driver licencing and training is notoriously much harder, longer than the equivalent motor-car licencing and training. Car drivers don't have to learn about stalls for starters. The training is there because a) it's much harder to do right, there are more ways to go wrong and b) potentially greater impact.
The common failure mode for a car is that it stops moving at the side of the road. The equivalent for an aircraft is that it falls out of the sky onto whatever is below. We are not ready for a lot more of that.
remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Glasgow_helicopter_crash