That’s pretty cool and probably the only way to have air traffic like that. I couldn’t imagine having street drivers up in the air with no laws or ways to guide them. In Seattleland in the summer, there’s probably 3 or 4 odd landings or crashes with small planes. I just hope they hire real pilots and it’s not automated.
Yeah, there’s a huge advantage to having a fully automated system from the start.
It’s my understanding that take offs and landings aren’t great to be automated due to weather conditions.
For something like a taxi they’d pretty much have to be though. I haven’t really been following this stuff too closely, so don’t know how challenging weather conditions become for quadcopter automated landings.
I missed this the first time through, they’ll be manned:
Once the conditions are ripe, East General Aviation hopes to operate manned eVTOL commercial routes between Shenzhen and Zhuhai in southern China and launch more routes in the future, said Chairman Zhao Qi.
Oh I missed that as well. I guess they’re not ambitious enough to try and make it automated yet. I just assumed they were unmanned because every time I see demos of this stuff it just has a cab without controls in it.
At least at first, people have to trust that there is a human that wants to stay alive as well, piloting the thing. Even if they’ve worked out the weather issues, not having a human at all would be pretty unsettling for most people.
I can see that, knowing that a pilot has skin in the game is definitely reassuring. I do think that at some point we will get to the point where such taxis are completely automated. It does seem like this is a simpler problem than self driving cars. You have a lot more space to work with and there aren’t pedestrians, or random obstacles to worry about. The weather is the only really hard problem here. And if all flying taxis are automated then they can be aware of each other and plan routes around one another.
And electric flying taxis might actually work better for longer range travel than road based ones since they can cover a lot more distance in a short time. If you have predictable routes then you know exactly how much battery you need. Landing stations could even provide swappable batteries, so a taxi could land, swap out for a charged battery and be ready to go.
I guess we’ll find out soon. I wouldn’t want to be the testers though.
Yeah it’s a lot easier to go fast when you’re the only one on the “road”. Let me know how it goes when you have hundreds of air taxis waiting to take off and land. And I don’t even want to think about how you’re expected to handle traffic in front of you.
You have vastly more space to work with in 3d than 1.5d. Also, these things are going to be automated from the start, so you don’t have to worry about human drivers acting unpredictably. All the taxis can be aware of one another and plan a route that avoids other vehicles. It’s a much simpler problem when you don’t have humans in the loop.
Ultimately the problem with quadcoptors is catastrophic failure. Manned or unmanned, electric, gasoline, or dark matter powered. If a quadcoptor has a mechanical failure of just ONE of it’s 12 or 16 blades, there isn’t a general strategy or design principle that will ensure survival of the aircraft.
In contrast to an airplane, where the wear elements are separate from the structural/airframe elements such that in almost all cases of failure, it’s not catastrophic. Indeed most cases of failure the aircraft is recovered (along with all the passengers.)
So while quadcoptors are amazing feats of engineering, I don’t think they are suitable for a public transit system.
For that alone they will eventually fail outside a niche product . Give it time once the shiny, jingling keys effect subsides.
Both planes and helicopters are survivable if main engine(s) fail, granted with a few caveats. These things will drop like car batteries from a cliff if they fail.
I would be willing to break the “never get in a helicopter or small plane” rule to ride in this, 100%
