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