Airbus reveals the next generation of CityAirbus

Also, whether in my small village or in a fancy suburb, there seems to always be someone with a 2 cycle, muffler-free piece of lawn equipment running. Leaf blowers are the worst, but weed trimmers and now even leaf vaccuums are common.

Or, if you live in an urban area, especially in NYC, there's rarely a moment that you don't hear an emergency vehicle siren echoing throughout the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, it's just a noisy world. At least this aircraft is electric and has some goal of keeping noise as low as possible.

If they managed to get into that range for a vehicle that must weigh many hundreds of times more, I guess that'd be very impressive.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/11/5940

Concerts, for example - if you have a lot of these flying taxis, you can have people park in auxiliary lots that are 20 minutes away by car, then get shuttled over via air taxi. Depending on how many taxis and how fast the turnaround is, you could eliminate a non-negligible amount of traffic into/out of parking lots. Same with sporting events, etc.

And then on a similar note, airports - I believe something like this was proposed for LAX. In the same way that people park at off-site parking lots and take shuttle buses, they could park off-site and take air taxis.

These scenarios work relatively well because they put the air taxis in nonstop use for some period of time, and they have the space/infrastructure to set up spaces for them to land and load/unload folks.

But electric flight is without a doubt going to revolutionize commuter airlines. With an electric powertrain, you get rid of the vast majority of costs associated with flying which are the intensive maintenance and overhaul schedules required for turboprop/turbofan engines. You can then economically fly small traditional aircraft with electric powertrains carrying ~10 passengers up to 250 miles at 200mph with current battery tech, and takeoff/land from tiny municipal airports with no need for TSA. At that point flying becomes like hopping on a bus, and just as cheap. Living within 250 miles of a metro area and commuting every day will be a nonissue. Something like the Eviation Alice [0] is far more likely to be the future than any of these VTOL concepts.

[0] https://www.eviation.co/

"Urban" and "flying" will never happen.

I'm regularly astonished that we trust people with shopping carts, given how well they use them. Nobody is going to trust any density flying over our heads. Not even with auto pilot. Sorry Fifth Element fans.