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In the video they tout the X-57 as a contribution to the “urban air mobility market”, arguing that small aircraft can decrease commute times and avoid congestio
by mfsch 7y ago
In the video they tout the X-57 as a contribution to the “urban air mobility market”, arguing that small aircraft can decrease commute times and avoid congestion. This seems very backwards to me. Cars are already very inefficient in their use of space, since they require large amounts of space around them when they are moving at speed. I expect this issue to be significantly worse for aircraft, with the speed they are moving at, the safety distances needed to avoid crashes, and the volume of air they are disturbing around them. While they can potentially make use of the vertical dimension for more space, they still have to move through the surface layer for take-off and landing and will want to stay close to the ground for short trips. And they potentially add a lot of noise to an already noisy urban environment.
I’m all for ambitious research projects pushing the boundaries of electric flight, and there’s probably reasonable use cases for planes like the X-57. But a sustainable urban transport future looks much more like buses and bicycles rather than small electric aircraft.
- jacquesm 7y agoFacts never stood in the way of PR.
- pritovido 7y agoI believe they will be use for the same thing helicopters are used today: 1-Emergencies and organs transplant. No pilot means more carry load in volume and weight. 2.As a status symbol for top of the ladder executives and polititians. They will go from the top of skyscrapers to their mansions just looking down of those that waste their time in car jams. I see this being useful for short distance travel as well, but not that much in cities, but outside them.
- pilsetnieks 7y agoIt's still a plane, it has no VTOL capability. It cannot be used for what helicopters are used today.
- serf 7y agothe parent of your comment is referring to the phrase “urban air mobility market”, which the X-57 PR video demonstrates as being small aircraft, a few of which were VTOL craft -- not the X57 itself. The PR video was basically hinting at the X57 being a technology demonstrator which will showcase techs (like electric propulsion) that the so-called “urban air mobility market” can then take off running with.
- Reason077 7y ago> "It's still a plane, it has no VTOL capability. It cannot be used for what helicopters are used today." This one, yes. But there are many "urban transport" VTOL electric aircraft in development. The idea is to combine the utility of a helicopter with the efficiency of a fixed-wing, while adding the environmental, reliability, and O&M cost benefits of electric. I believe that, in the coming years and decades, electric VTOL aircraft will replace traditional helicopters for many applications.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoHa. Organ transplants. Only on TV. My sister runs organs as a volunteer. Commercial flights, no special consideration.
- bonestamp2 7y agoYa, I did a ride along with the highway patrol once. 1 hour of that shift was driving to the far end of our coverage area and waiting for another car. Then blazing down the freeway in the opposite direction at 3am at top speed on what they call a "blood run" (organ in a cooler in the trunk). There are no commercial flights at this time of day and the organ was moving about 5 hours by car. This would have been much safer and faster if it were done by helicopter or small plane, but I guess if the car works then they don't have to use aircraft.
- skue 7y agoCompletely depends on the organ. Kidneys can survive outside the body for 1-2 days, while heart and lungs only survive 4-6 hours and are typically transported via ground or air ambulance, depending on distance. Source: https://www.organdonor.gov/about/process/matching.html#expandcollapse https://www.organdonor.gov/about/process/matching.html#expan...
- danman12 7y agoActually a company called FlyBlade does helicopter organ transplants. You should tell your sister to reach out to them. https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/blade-nyu-langone-transplant-organs-health-care https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/blade-nyu-langone-transp...
- mrpopo 7y agoUnless they are willing to do it for free, I don't think their sister who already does volunteer work can consider it.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoAnd at a large Midwest hospital. But with the advent of professional "Hospital Administrators" with a degree and everything, hospitals become a business. Anything they can get for free, they do.
- dgudkov 7y agoCars move in a 2-dimensional space (surface), aircraft move in a 3-dimesional space (without costly highways), so you can utilize space way more efficiently and move more people per square mile. The safety distances will probably reduce due to automated collision-avoidance systems which may become mandatory in dense flight areas. Although, I don't know how planes compare to cars in terms of energy utilization efficiency. A car only needs energy to move. A plane needs energy to move and stay above the ground.
- rumanator 7y ago> Cars move in a 2-dimensional space (surface), aircraft move in a 3-dimesional space (without costly highways), so you can utilize space way more efficiently and move more people per square mile. You still need to land planes 1 at a time, and that involves a clearing period between landings.
- adrianN 7y agoNothing can move more people than a subway, certainly not single person planes that need to land and still consume space when not in use, just like cars.
- fastball 7y agoNobody is saying that small aircraft will move more people than subways. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to modern transportation needs. Compact electric planes are one piece of the puzzle.
- LatteLazy 7y agoWhile I agree about the hope for this being a solution to mass transit in urban areas... Cars don't merely require "space", they require space that has road on it with tarmac and signs and lights and junctions, and they require it in a limited 2D plane and that is the same 2D plane that we need space for buildings etc. Planes work in basically any space and require no infrastructure. There is a metric shit tonne of space for planes right now just waiting for use. The same is never true for cars.
- gmueckl 7y agoYou got it wrong. Airspace over cities is very limited. At some point you get to the height in which long distance flights travel. Also, all aircraft have a minimum required safe distance between them tht needs to be large due to aerodynamics. This it become physically impsible to increase traffic density beyond a certain, low threshold.
- choeger 7y agoThe thing is that cars (and bikes, and to some degree planes) are point-to-point. This decentralized mode of transportation is much more efficient when it comes to satisfy the needs of many commuters. For instance, by bike I save at least half of the time compared to Subway. And I have access to a well-developed subway and I do not need to change. I agree, though, that planes will never be a replacement for cars or even bikes. That is because the utility per € is much higher for the former. A bike is generally cheap. A car is much more expensive but can carry four or more persons very far in pretty much every weather. A small electric plane is going to be even more expensive (conjecture) but otherwise worse than a car.
- jacobush 7y agoAgreed except the fabled concept of the flying car which NASA has been tinkering with for a long time. (Don't know if they still do. Not tinkering with as in actually building it, but thinking about "lanes" in the air, collision avoidance and such.)
- jillesvangurp 7y agoYou are ignoring the fact that cars have to navigate what is basically a set a of 1 dimensional corridors on a 2 dimensional plane. Airplanes don't have these limitations and can fly point to point at their choice of altitude. Currently most of the congestion in aviation is around airports which are necessarily optimized for large jets. With a small airplane, you can fly to a much larger variety of airports, around ~50K world wide and it's relatively straightforward to build even more of them as needed. Noise is a function of propeller size, rotation speed, and engine noise. Simply put, lots of small propellers rotating at faster speeds driven by electrical engines are a lot less noisy than larger props driven by combustion engines. The physics around this are complex and involve things like the speed of sound of the tips of the propeller (you break that limit at lower rpm for larger props), the mass and thickness of the propeller, vortices, etc. Basically, all of that improves with smaller props. Compared to a loud helicopter, an electrical plane at the same altitude could be a lot less noisy to the point where in a busy city you'd hear one but not the other above the ambient noise.
- Zenst 7y ago> Noise is a function of propeller size, rotation speed, and engine noise Yes and also the frequency of sound, which is another factor of complexity as to how that propagates.
- mumblemumble 7y agoI'm guessing that the break-even point on space efficiency is somewhere close to the point where you invent Blade Runner-style levitating cars that require zero extra space for take off and landing, and can move arbitrarily slowly, or even come to a complete stop, without falling out of the sky. Without that, I doubt that that adding some room for vertical stacking would offset the amount of additional lateral space they end up needing. And I believe that effect would be intensified by the the amount of vertical stacking you can reasonably do being constrained by how far a vehicle needs to move laterally in order to gain or shed a given amount of altitude, and the distance of the trip being made. For a traditional fixed-wing aircraft operating over "urban commute" distances, that constraint would be downright tyrannical. For Blade Runner style levitating cars, it would be no big deal.
- 7y ago
- fastball 7y agoI don't see why any electric vehicle can't be part of the sustainable urban transportation future. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Would it be better if we built cities around public transport? Generally yes. Does that mean there isn't a place for electric aircraft, electric cars, and smaller personal electric vehicles (bicycles, scooters, segways, hoverboards, skateboards)? Nope. I don't think anyone in this thread thinks that all of our future transportation needs will be satisfied by flight. And given our current state of global pandemic, I think we can probably agree that even without the pros of other forms of transport, public transit has its own unique downsides.
- meheleventyone 7y agoRight but the comparison is being made against "ground transportation" in the video. Light aircraft are already a component of urban travel (notably helicopters) and merely making them electrically powered isn't going to dramatically increase their utility which again is what the visualization in the video shows.
- fastball 7y agoMaking them electric is fairly important for a carbon-neutral/negative future though. Also even without helicopters being fossil-fuel powered, they have a number of other downsides: not nearly as safe as winged aircraft, louder, harder to fly, etc.
- meheleventyone 7y agoYes it's a great idea to make electric aircraft for all sorts of reasons. Notably this design (as per the paper linked elsewhere) gets 300% more efficient for just switching to electric motors. I'm giving context to the discussion from the parent of this thread. The nascent category of aircraft is being heavily marketed as a replacement means of transport for commuters. Which is why people are talking about them in that context.
- mrfusion 7y agoAnything positive to say about this though?
- fudged71 7y agoI believe the overall goal of urban+suburban mobility is to increase the number of modalities of transport available. So adding scooters, busses, trains, uber, helicopters, planes, boats, etc.