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Comment by mytochar | Hacker News Reader

It's nice to see that not all of the claims made that turned out to be false were in the negative.

e.g:

Automobiles will start to decline almost as soon as the last shot is fired in World War II. The name of Igor Sikorsky will be as well known as Henry Ford's, for his helicopter will all but replace the horseless carriage as the new means of popular transportation. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter.... These 'copters' will be so safe and will cost so little to produce that small models will be made for teenage youngsters. These tiny 'copters, when school lets out, will fill the sky as the bicycles of our youth filled the prewar roads. - Harry Bruno, aviation publicist, 1943.

Furthermore, I notice that's by an aviation publicist; and that just happens to lend to my other comment / question:

How many of these people were paid to have the stance that they had?

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Isn't the big miss there that they turned out not to be that cheap, nor that safe? Living in a city with bad traffic, I'd love to get a small copter.

But if everybody else had a small copter too, wouldn't the air traffic be just as bad?

Not really, because you have another dimension to expand into, so you can imagine adding as many levels as you need. Also you avoid all the obstacles that cars have to navigate at ground level (rivers, buildings, trees, etc).

On the other hand, there's some work to be done to define good copter "rules of the road". A simple solution is to say you can only go north at lvl1, east at lvl2, south lvl3, west lvl4. That would pretty much eliminate lateral collisions, so then you've only got level changes and takeoffs/landings to solve and it's done.

On the other other hand, there are bad drivers, there'll surely be bad pilots. Perhaps self-driving copters is the answer!

Given that airports require air traffic control to coordinate all the takeoffs and landings of airplanes, and the number of airplanes would no doubt be much smaller than the number of helicopters that would fly in a similar physical area at mass scale if helicopters replaced cars... I don't know how much the increased dimensions would really help. Airplanes trying to make their own decisions at airports would be disastrous, even if all the pilots agreed on what constituted right of way.

Birds (in spite of, or rather because of their birdbrains) seem to be doing ok at this.

I think birds fare about as well as an aircraft when striking other aircraft. Doesn't really seem comparable.

They fare infinitely better. Imagine the kind of traffic that you see around a large tree at dusk that birds use for sleeping around a major airport. The carnage would be beyond your wildest nightmares.

I think I didn't communicate clearly. What I meant to say is that I think birds fare as well when birds strike aircraft (jets, helicopters) as when aircraft strike other aircraft. There's a measurable difference between a 200g soft thing bumping into another one, as opposed to a multi-ton rigid structure full of high explosive liquid and fast moving things having a little tiff.

I get what your saying about the organized chaos, but the risk slight accidental impact imposes isn't even close.

Would be awesome, though, gotta say.

The whole trick is in avoiding the collisions in the first place which birds manage with considerable grace, even when there are a lot of them. I live in the middle of a bird sanctuary and there are on a good day a few million of them nearby and to see them take off in enormous flocks without any mishap or central control is extremely impressive.

The obvious fact is that we engineer our aircraft (especially choppers) in a way that is totally contrary to the principles of flight (which penalizes weight and power-to-weight even more) but it's a direct function of the fact that we'd like to be on board as well and we're a lot heavier than the heaviest birds. All that machinery is our technological workaround for not having wings and it comes at a significant price: that as soon as anything at all goes wrong we are painfully reminded that the sky is not our natural element. So there are very few ways that we manage to recover from any mid-air collision and the speed for fixed wing aircraft and the potential energy of rotary craft pretty much guarantees destruction and death or at a minimum serious injury of all occupants in case of accidents.

There may be some way in which we could re-visit flying designed from the ground up with recovery from collision and failure of (sub)systems in mind. I wonder what form it would take.

we are painfully reminded that the sky is not our natural element.

Isn't that also something else? There are evolutionary characteristics in bird brains that enable them to react the way they need to survive in the air? Even with the best machine learning algorithms, would we really be able to replicate that intelligence within a single generation? Maybe, stranger things have happened, but I doubt it. Certainly, I doubt human pilots would be able to replicate it, I think AI would have a better chance, but that's still scary.

I saw a 3D flocking demo in the 80's that looked eerily natural. Mindblowing at the time and the whole thing revolved around only 4 parameters and some simple formulas. Emergent behaviour at its finest so replicating that would not be all that hard. Getting the machinery in place to obey the signals is a lot harder.

And also unsafe. I'd rather not have to navigate the friendly skies knowing a distracted driver is climbing too fast and is going to crash into me, or is texting and nudges the stick and crashes into me, or falls asleep and...

Nothing in air will ever take off (sic) because of the potential energy involved. It's not passive enough.

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