Electric Air Taxi Makes Maiden Flight Between Chinese Cities, Cutting Over Two-Hour Car Journey to 20 Mins : worldnews

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I would be willing to break the "never get in a helicopter or small plane" rule to ride in this, 100%

[+] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, there's a huge advantage to having a fully automated system from the start.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's my understanding that take offs and landings aren't great to be automated due to weather conditions.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You're probably right. Some things I would think that would need to be worked out:

Could a drone or lasers take them out?
Could this open up the skies to private cars and where could they travel?
Would there be a sky way? I would think that these would (maybe should) be restricted to over highways.

China might be the best way to test all of this out since they have such control over their citizens, we'll have to wait and see how it plays out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah very much agree with all that. I'd personally prefer if this sort of tech was restricted to automated taxi services that are highly regulated. Opening it up to private cars sounds like a recipe for disaster. Definitely going to be interesting to follow how China develops this tech.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I guess we'll find out soon. I wouldn't want to be the testers though.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

Building the world's biggest high speed rail network and then coming back with flying cars just to flex on the asphalt-heads

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