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Comment by stetrain | Hacker News Reader

Even just analyzing it on a person-mile-efficiency basis, moving from personal cars to personal aircraft is the wrong direction.

Trains obviously do well at that metric, but I'm not opposed to exploring other options on that side of the spectrum.

Pitching a market move towards smaller, less-efficient vehicles is anti-sustainable.

The better pitch for this kind of technology is probably on the order of modernizing flight training to improve safety and relevance of the pipeline that creates commercial aircraft pilots, rather than significantly expanding personal travel by personal aircraft.

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Growing GA should also create a pipeline for commercial pilots which we desperately need. But let's be honest, flying commercial is a pretty poor experience. Getting to a major airport, getting through security, waiting to board, and then deplaning and waiting for bags at your destination adds hours to travel time. Door to door, I can get from LA to SF in the small plane faster than commercial even though I fly at ~1/3 the speed.

We want our airplanes to be more efficient than cars, but to get there we need to first scale the market.

> We want our airplanes to be more efficient than cars, but to get there we need to first scale the market.

Why is it that you think it's feasible to put all this effort to "scale the market", but getting to something like "building efficient passenger rail" or even "offer a comfortable, fast intercity bus" is out of your reach?

The US doesn't "need" flying. It needs a more efficient way to move passengers. To suggest that small planes are ever going to be more efficient than mass transit is delusional. The US needs to move away from "personal" transportation and invest in multi-modal, public mass-transit. And yes, there are still plenty of opportunities for engineers to do that.

> Why is it that you think it's feasible to put all this effort to "scale the market", but getting to something like "building efficient passenger rail" or even "offer a comfortable, fast intercity bus" is out of your reach?

Because personal planes will get them the attention and support (and more importantly, money) of wealthy customers and investors, and building rail gets you none of that because you're just suggesting using known technology and resources to solve problems, and that's boooooooring.

Why solve the actual transportation needs of a populace that cannot move efficiently when you can build yet another stupid toy for the rich?

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