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I wouldn't worry about that. Most people can't even drive cars in "2D" safely, never mind helicopters. The general public will never be given the skies, unless the flights are automated.
It's much harder to hit something in the air.
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We'd be better off with dense cities where automobile is not the primary means of transportation. Like e.g. NYC or many European cities. Cars and large trucks should mostly belong to highways and country roads.
NYC is a very far way from being a carless paradise. Yes, lots of people walk or take transit. But, especially in Manhattan, many streets are choked for a good chunk of the day.
Only 28% of people in NYC commute by car/truck/van. 55% take public transit and 10% walk, 1% bike, 4% work from home, and 2% take a Taxi or other. https://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-york-commute
PS: The van thing is also closer to a bus than a private car.
I'm very skeptical of their claims of "unparalleled safety". Thanks to "autorotation"[1] regular helicopters can safely land in most situations even with complete power failure. The claims of safety of this craft seems to derive from N+1 battery redundancy which isn't that impressive. They say they have 8 independent motors, but don't say how many are needed to stay aloft. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotati…
Should be four or less considering each arm has two props. (Unless the motors aren’t powerful enough)
On the other hand, the chances of four motors failing in the time it takes to set down is probably not high. Back to the first hand, if you do have multiple failures, it is not likely to be an optimal grouping.
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I wouldn't worry about that. Most people can't even drive cars in "2D" safely, never mind helicopters. The general public will never be given the skies, unless the flights are automated.
Don't today's drones and airplanes demonstrate that automating flying is a lot easier than automating driving?
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I think everyone must have felt this way about automobiles. And by and large, it's worked out just as horribly as they imagined: our communities are divided by dangerous moats we call "roads" -- death traps which we must painstakingly teach our children to avoid, if we dare let our children wander outside on their own anywhere near them in the first place.
I don't get the point - are you suggesting we'd be better off without automobiles? Would we go back to horses? What about global logistics? Agriculture?
A part of me thinks this is really cool tech and it would be amazing for anyone to be able to just hop aboard their personal helicopter and fly wherever they want, but then another part of me thinks of the future this would create, skies no longer clear, filled with objects buzzing around and what hell that would be, on top of the already stressful and crazy life we have now. It's the kind of situation where I think…
Also, getting your pilots license is nothing like getting a car license, the training is much harder and requires a certain amount of hours in the car with a licensed flight instructor before they can fly on their own (I believe it's 50 hours in the cockpit). It's also prohibitively expensive as you have to pay for fuel and time. You won't see a bunch of unmotivated teens flying these things any time soon. Having worked at the FAA on the regulation side of things, I can also tell you if that did become a problem airspace and licensing would change.
Why this and not single-rotor collective pitch? There's no good explanation in the marketing material.
That's the whole point of these drone-like copters: instead of one engine and main rotor with mechanically complicated collective pitch, you have many fixed-pitch variable speed rotors sitting directly on an electric motor. The complexity thus wanders from hardware to control software.
I do agree that the mechanicals are much simpler. I can see some maintenance and inspection safety gains but the airframe as a whole seems more dangerous. The over/under counterrotating prop design is both inefficient and prone to cascading failures mandating deployment of the airframe parachute.
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Don't today's drones and airplanes demonstrate that automating flying is a lot easier than automating driving?
That might stop being true if the air is as crowded as the roads.