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Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan) and applications (e.g. mountain rescue).
by xnx 10mo ago
Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan) and applications (e.g. mountain rescue).
- ph4rsikal 10mo agoChina calls it the low-altitude economy, and besides human transportation there is a lot that can be done. Personally, I believe that propeller-driven devices are too dangerous and noisy, but there might be innovations coming out of China that Europe can't
- bethekidyouwant 10mo agoEverything that flies is driven with a loud dangerous spinning thing (propeller)
- nandomrumber 10mo agoBirds.
- tsimionescu 10mo agoBird flight doesn't scale significantly. You can deliver very small objects via bird, and perhaps build a bird-like drone that does the same. But you can't build a human-carrying bird.
- fc417fc802 10mo agoWe haven't figured out how to scale it _yet_.
- tsimionescu 10mo agoIt's very possible, and in fact most likely, that it can't scale. Insect flight is an even better example - the mechanisms that allow most insects to fly simply don't work past a few grams of weight. So, it is simply impossible to create an insect-like drone that can carry a human. I expect the exact same is true for birds - the kinds of effects that allow birds to fly with so little energy compared to a propeller-based aircraft are almost certainly not scalable, due to the fundamental properties of air as a gas. As far as I know, bird flight is made possible by complex turbulence effects induced by the microscopic structure of their feathers. It's very unlikely this effect could skale to 100kg of weight.
- antipurist 10mo agoHuman-carrying birds have been built. Piloted ornithopter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-qS7oN-3tA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-qS7oN-3tA Human-powered ornithopter: https://youtu.be/0E77j1imdhQ?si=Dd5hLla27Pz8gJNe&t=100 https://youtu.be/0E77j1imdhQ?si=Dd5hLla27Pz8gJNe&t=100 Also, Quetzalcoatlus northropi could've been powerful enough to carry a human.
- shtzvhdx 10mo agoThat's not a bird. Thats an airplane flapping its wings.
- meindnoch 10mo agoCould work for delivering high-value low-weight items, like illicit drugs. Not much else.
- aziaziazi 10mo agoWhat attribute should they have to make them more suited than helicopters? Silence ? Energy efficiency ? No landing pad ?
- xnx 10mo agoLower noise, lower operating cost, lower purchase price, easier to pilot, more reliable (fewer parts), safer (redundancy), no emissions, faster time to air, configurable to requirements, etc.
- rpcope1 10mo agoYes, I too want my space alien anti-gravity flying saucer. Those eggheads need to hurry it up.
- exsomet 10mo agoI’m not an expert by any means, but one of the major impediments I would imagine to flying taxis carrying people is safety; there’s a _lot_ that has to be done before people board an airplane in terms of checks, paperwork, planning, etc. The dream of “order a flying taxi on your phone and it takes you wherever you want in five minutes” isn’t really compatible with aviation safety culture (at least at the pilot level in the US). That’s not to say it can’t be done, but you probably need a lot of really good PR people to figure out how to say “we want to remove the safety controls from this so we can make money with it” and have people buy it.
- metalman 10mo agoaviation occupies a great deal of my attention, and there is a logic to everything that is done, based on actual provable, repeatable results. anything involved in high volume passenger aviation has to pass reliability tests that will dry your eyes out just reading through the synopsis, nothing is making it to the PR stage. I splain little bit, pick some fancy country full of rich people flying around, tell them that the US has just ripped the lid off airspace restrictions (again¹), and is now letting some kind of ubber drone thing loose , and quite litteraly instantly there will be calls for all flights going to the US to turn around as all insurance policys for commercial flights to the US will be null and void. ¹one of the few times the US has been forced to back down admit fault, and agree to changes. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/12/17/united-states-army-american-airlines-crash-ronald-reagan-airport/87818797007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/12/17/united...
- tyre 10mo agoAin’t no way you want flying taxis in Manhattan. If two collide or one fails, you could kill dozens of people. Maaaaybe instead of the tunnels and bridges, to increase throughput during rush hours, but even then we’re trying to have fewer vehicles in Manhattan, not more. Also, I cannot imagine what it would be like to go through an intersection during the winter. You would be hit with a wall of cross-cutting wind tunneling down 50 blocks that no airborne device is going to handle well. Absolute nightmare.
- xnx 10mo agoRight. This wouldn't be point to point on the Manhattan grid, but from Manhattan Island back and forth to the airports.
- edoceo 10mo agoHelicopter. Already exists.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- s1artibartfast 10mo agoWell yeah, it would be like a cheap helicopter you can rent. What is so bad about that.
- MadnessASAP 10mo ago"Cheap" and "Helicopter" That's where the problem is.
- aetherson 10mo agoIt's certainly not crazy to imagine that you could cut the costs of a helicopter-like aircraft that was purpose-made for relatively short, relatively low-speed, relatively light load duties.
- notatoad 10mo agoi don't think mountain rescue is asking for a better vehicle. traditional helicopters work. flying taxi startups, drone companies, jetpack companies, and all the other fantastical flying startyps keep trying to say they have applications in mountain rescue, but i'm pretty sure that's providing a lot more benefit to the flying taxi startup's pitch deck than it is to any mountain rescue operation.
- calmbonsai 10mo agoTraditional helicopters also have the effective lift-weight ratios to tackle the density*altitude of mountain rescue that these "air-taxis" have _zero_ hope to achieve with the the vastly lower power-weight of electrical drive-trains and their lift-inefficient multi-rotor designs.
- andrepd 10mo ago> Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan) The things people will do to not build bike paths.
- jfengel 10mo agoUnfortunately Manhattan doesn't seem like a great place for bikes. The weather is just too variable. Some daredevils will be out in any weather but for most people it's just not feasible about half of the days of the year. Not that helicopters make any more sense. The city needs some car bans, and yes, bicycles are part of replacing that. But only mass transit will be able to move enough people when there's a foot of slush on the ground.
- medstrom 10mo ago...ChatGPT? Such an odd take, to point at weather being variable. This is a coastal city at a fairly run-of-the-mill latitude, people build functional bike networks in much worse.
- calmbonsai 10mo agoI'll point you to my prior comment re:bike-commuting in D.C. versus the same in Boulder, Colorado. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367940 There needs to be an entire wholesale change in both infrastructure and culture to make bike-commuting workable in most extant cities. Relatively speaking, the infrastructure is the easy part. I think we'll get to the heat death of the universe before bike-commuting in Houston, Texas would ever be "a thing".
- tirant 10mo agoWeather in New York is perfectly fine for biking. If you can walk outside you can bike. Both means of transportation are equally resilient to bad weather. What you need is protected bike lanes, so you can bike relaxed and holding an umbrella if necessary, as millions of people do every day in Netherlands and other European countries.
- rpcope1 10mo ago> any kind of outdoor rescue You know we have these things called "helicopters", right?
- signatoremo 10mo agoWe also had carriages before cars. What’s the deal of so many “X already exists therefore any replacement is pointless” posts?
- stoneforger 10mo agoBecause the need is fulfilled adequately. They are not solving anything new or revolutionising anything old, these are dumb ideas for dumb people to throw money at hoping it sticks.
- ta20240528 10mo agoIs it? Are we — as a species — really going to spend until eternity grovelling around on the ground? If not, then we need personal aircraft.
- nandomrumber 10mo agoWhat is there to do not-on-the-ground? Other than wait to be on the ground again?
- ta20240528 10mo agoLoops ?
- rounce 10mo agoThen get a PPL
- well_ackshually 10mo agoUnless you figure out a way to turn off this pesky thing called gravity: yes. Even birds spend the majority of their times on the ground.
- ErroneousBosh 10mo agoThey make no sense at all. You can't fly within 500 feet of any person, vehicle, or structure. At 500 feet, literally any failure of the aircraft means you die about seven seconds later.