Comment by xnx
1 day ago
Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan) and applications (e.g. mountain rescue).
1 day ago
Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan) and applications (e.g. mountain rescue).
Ain’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.
> If two collide or one fails, you could kill dozens of people.
How is that any different from an automobile navigating the ridiculously crowded streets?
Presumably, if you're going to bother with flying vehicles, it's to free up space on the ground below.
To fill with other uses, say pedestrians.
Taxi falls, pedestrians get crushed bellow, but now the vehicular speed isn't 20-30 mph tops, but the terminal velocity of the vehicle.
mv^2 is mean.
Much worse, obviously.
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Right. This wouldn't be point to point on the Manhattan grid, but from Manhattan Island back and forth to the airports.
Helicopter. Already exists.
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I’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.
aviation 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...
i 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.
Traditional 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.
China 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
Everything that flies is driven with a loud dangerous spinning thing (propeller)
Birds.
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What attribute should they have to make them more suited than helicopters? Silence ? Energy efficiency ? No landing pad ?
Lower 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.
Yes, I too want my space alien anti-gravity flying saucer. Those eggheads need to hurry it up.
They 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.
> any kind of outdoor rescue
You know we have these things called "helicopters", right?
We also had carriages before cars. What’s the deal of so many “X already exists therefore any replacement is pointless” posts?
Because 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.
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At least with respect to aviation, we don't have any non-combustion power-trains that can remotely come close to the power-to-weight ratios of turbine engines.
The earliest cars were replacing the animal muscle power of carriages--a trivially easy feat given that the most primitive steam and combustion engines easily 10x both the raw power, power-to-weight, and power-density of a team of horses.
> Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan)
The things people will do to not build bike paths.
Unfortunately 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.
Weather 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.
...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.
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