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Comment by dmbche | Hacker News Reader

Do you know how planes land at an airport? They circle waiting for their turn. Why would that problem vanish?

... because the entire point of VTOL (which is what the parent commentary was about) is that you can take off and land vertically and therefore don't need one of a few, scarce, super-long runways? ... and the waiting you're talking about is entirely because of those?

On top of that, small VTOL craft that can hover and would be at lower speeds closer in (esp. autonomously flown) would just need less mutual clearance compared to jets, which also have an altitude band they have to stay in, as well as no ability to slow to a crawl and coordinate finely.

Gotcha, just spitballing - my mistake taking it seriously

You asked me why the problem of circling waiting for your turn would vanish when using VTOL aircraft. I don't know how to respond to that with anything other than, "That's the entire point of VTOL. It doesn't need one of those scarce runways that planes circle waiting for.".

That's fine sir, you don't need to know everything about a subject to spitball. On you go

My bad! You do list that you're an aeronautics person. I would genuinely genuinely love to understand what I'm missing – I'm sure there's some context here that I'm lacking!

If you want many things to land approximately at the same time and place, you need a little bit of play to schedule the arrivals/departures and ensure that you don't have collisions. There is a limit to the amount of aircraft you can safely cram in any amount of space.

Any aircraft you imagine will circle at landing and possibly loiter for minutes while waiting for their turn at using the airspace. (Edit0:See helicopters)

Building an open skyscraper for aircraft to land on will not save you since crafts will lockdown a large part of the building to land/depart safely. And it's not clear to me that it would be profitable.

Then many other problems about energy density and aircraft weight limiting the whole scope of who would possibly use those crafts.

Have a good one!

Edit1: I don't know for you, but my city doesn't have enough parking for cars. I'd be surprised if there were enough parking for EVTOL everywhere - you could very well need to loiter waiting for a spot to open, could need emergency landing if you run out of power, many many un-perfect things that make the card castle fall apart

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