There is a business use case here in NYC. NYC to the Hamptons or out east long Island. The locals in the Hamptons are complaining about noise pollution from helicopters making trips to the Hamptons from NYC. If this makes little or no noise the current helicopter service companies will use them and people will pay $800 ( off-peak) - $2,500 ( peak) one way trip from the west side of manhattan / Chelsea area to east Hampton / Montauk . If you got the money that is :-)
I would have to look up the details, but there are EASA certification standards covering noise level measurement. Looking at the pictures, I think they achieve low noise levels by having e-motors and mid sized props (multiple). That avoids engine noise, reduces individual prop noise and having something between rotors and turbines should be quieter than a conventional helicopter on the one side and something like jet on the other hand.
They are really surprisingly not loud. Not silent either, but not annoyingly, or disturbingly loud. Not comparable to the much, much older Bell UH-1 which we called 'Teppichklopfer' (carpet banger?). So it seems they know something about making helos less noisy.
I say this from the experience of having seen them come down maybe 200 times in the last 15 years? Sometimes just practicing it seems, with inner city, suburban, or park and field background noise floor.
As much as I want to live in a world with the Jetsons, what's the business case here? Presumably it's going to have to launch vertically from the top of buildings, which means that you can go from skyscraper landing pad to skyscraper landing pad. How many taxi users are trying to travel within a financial district? I imagine much more commonly they're trying to go from high-density to low-density (like FiDi to West Village) which this operating model could only support if you build a serious amount of elevated architecture.
Not to mention having to pay for insurance premiums of a miniaturized airplane that is zipping around a heavily inhabited urban area.
There are probably enough people of financial means who are willing to pay for expensive and much faster taxi service, especially if they can go to the roof of the building they're currently in to depart.
There are lots of reasons why this won't work, but it could work... and it could be quite useful in the right scenario.
Lots of useful long distance flights leave early in the morning, meaning to get to the airport for those flights you have to leave VERY early. But with an air taxi like this, it might allow you to save a couple of hours and a lot of headache.
It's not really mass-marketable though, and I doubt we could expect to see a constant stream of little air taxis buzzing around.
Chances are the roof of the building they're currently in will never have a heliport. Most buildings weren't designed to support the extra weight of a helipad (including equipment) plus aircraft, and the roofs are already covered with antennas and HVAC equipment.
In the foreseeable future there will only be a handful of heliports per city center. Most passengers will have to take ground transport to reach one.
True most buildings aren't designed for it, and they are already covered with antennas and AC units and such.
But weight is not an issue for light aircraft. For example, the Robinson R44 (4 place heli) is only 660kg empty. The Airbus taxi will be made as light as possible, so I wouldn't expect it to be much heavier.
As long as the supports for the landing pad are placed appropriately with the building structure, it shouldn't be any problem. More likely there would be the concern of accidents and the significant collateral damage they could cause.
There was a regular helicopter service on top of skyscrapers, like a bus. There isn't anymore, because things that go up, must come down.
"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.
The best case I've heard is helping to reduce traffic to places that expect a large influx of folks at the same time.
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.
Charging $3 for bus riders is controversial within the public transportation sphere, nevermind the $20 a car taxi can cost. Unless there's something about flying taxis that would make them price competitive with a $3 bus trip, it's hardly public transportation.
If there were automated and electricity was cheap its easy to imagine them being cost competitive vs a bus trip of the same distance just because they're so much faster. Making them price competitive is just a matter of how much the state is willing to subsidise them.
They are only faster because we refuse to build infrastructure for public transport. A Bus rapid transit system using one dedicated lane of traffic can move up to 30k per hour. Maybe we should use automation to build efficient public transit, instead of imagining hundreds of millions of private automated cars clogging the roads and robo taxis flying over those clogged roads. Build some light rail and buses with dedicated lanes, and use automated 4 passenger vehicles for “first mile, last mile”.
No they are not. Taxis aren't public transport either.
This CityAirbus takes what, 4-6 people seated? A bus easily takes 40+, a tram 60+ and a metro 250+* - and that's just seats, they all fit hundreds of people if you include standing passengers.
It would take ages and hundreds/thousands of flying taxis to clear a stadium, while it takes only tens of metro trains.
* Numbers taken from public transport options in my home town, will of course differ around the world
Taxis are not mass transit, but they are public transport per the definition.
Obviously this will not be comparable in capacity to a metro, but it can conceivably be comparable in capacity to bus lines which tend to operate at very low load factors in US cities, by virtue of being much faster to complete the same journey.
I'm not going to argue with you about the different definitions of public transportation, but for sure "taxi" isn't what comes to mind when someone mentions public transportation.
The point you're making is exactly the problem. The reason bus lines aren't used more is because they suck in a lot of cities. Improving the public transportation infrastucture (and no, not taxis), would solve this problem - as demonstrated in many European cities.
Here's a good video that compares the city planning of Houston to other cities, and explains why it sucks. It focuses more on cars vs. bikes, but the same basic point also applies to public transportation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54
At four people per vehicle, I doubt that you could achieve anything like a satisfactory throughput in this scenario, given reasonable traffic separation. Unloading will be one bottleneck, as each vehicle will need as much space as several buses, when you take into account sufficient separation to avoid unsafe aerodynamic interaction.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. You need a big clearance for landing and take off, with dedicated space and easy ways for people to get to it. This is crazy expensive real estate, doesn’t scale usually beyond 1 target (unlike a parking structure), is scarce, and is ultimately the biggest constraint here that cannot be overcome by technology.
The VTOL concept for air taxis is silly; this is just a 3d rendering for a press release, and battery energy density just isn't there yet for them to be useful.
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.
In related news, Brazilian GOL Airlines just pre-ordered 250 eVTOL from Vertical Aerospaces for a 2025 delivery. So I think the market is heated-up right now.
Brazil, and specially São Paulo, is a huge market for helicopters and air-taxi services in general, not to speak of regional air services, for which the VA-X4 aircraft is somewhat constrained with a mere 160km range.
> Those modern transportation 'solutions' are a sign of local maxima of current city design. A bad design that cannot scale any further.
Exactly. And for some reason the "solutions" always have the nice feature that they get those using them out of the sight of the rest of the lowly peasants living in those cities.
As if it hasn't been demonstrated how public transport can do wonders for highly populated if done right (e.g. look at japan).
And with driverless cars around the corner, now is the time to integrate them correctly. The idea should not be to get in your Tesla at home and cruise on the highway and into the city to park at your office. They idea should be picked up at your house by an Auto that drops you at the lightrail station just in time to catch the next train into downtown, where you can hop in a 10 person driverless shuttle that drops you at the office after a couple other stops.
I mean, the real solution is to stop subsidizing suburbs, that are bleeding cities dry with the massive costs of infrastructure requirements and maintenance.
>“The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates the cost at $5 trillion — but that's just for major infrastructure, not the minor streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that serve our homes. The reason we have this gap is because the public yield from the suburban development pattern — the amount of tax revenue obtained per increment of liability assumed — is ridiculously low. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability. The engineering profession will argue, as ASCE does, that we're simply not making the investments necessary to maintain this infrastructure. This is nonsense. We've simply built in a way that is not financially productive. We've done this because, as with any Ponzi scheme, new growth provides the illusion of prosperity. In the near term, revenue grows, while the corresponding maintenance obligations — which are not counted on the public balance sheet — are a generation away.” [1]
The advantages to self driving cars being used this way are even better:
- people driving don't have to take time to find parking lots
- the cars themselves don't need to be parked in the city, freeing up space
- depending on how many people are traveling together and what they are transporting different sized vehicles can be used
That being said: the most efficient form of transportation any human can do right now is the bicycle. It is fast too. During rush hour I am faster than car, bus or subway on my commute (German city) and as I am sitting on the computer for long periods anyways, having a little movement is great. And for weather there is appropriate clothings.
I see comments like this quite often without any suggestions for how it would happen practically. Let's talk Los Angeles, for example - where would you put light rail lines to sufficiently cover the low-density 400+ square miles of city sufficiently well to be better than cars? How would you acquire the requisite property & rights of way to run the lines? How would you fight the guaranteed NIMBY protests from local voters? Where would you get the tens of billions of dollars it would take?
"Fixing" a city is hard. And I haven't seen too many examples of it actually done, in comparison to cities that were built with public transit in mind from the beginning.
Rethink taxation so people living in suburbs pay proportionately to the cost of running services to them, and you'd very quickly see a denser city. Dense habitation is just way more efficient, more ecologically friendly, and more cost effective. If this was reflected in the law, you'd very quickly get a situation like you have in Germany, where you basically go from multi-storey apartments to farmland with no suburbs in between.
Leipzig has a pretty sharp divide, for example. If you walk west, you hit platenbau, then it's a bunch of farms. I figured a lot of east cities are like this (Gera, for instance, Halle, etc). It could be a matter of perspective - in London, you can drive for about an hour through suburbs before you see a single building more than two stories.
Hm. Could be. Never been in those parts, so far. My experience is much of Rhine-Ruhr Area and then 'the North', mostly Hamburg, sometimes the less crazy parts of Berlin ;-)
Yeah, definitely the rhine-ruhr area has some suburbs, but it's still way more dense than the UK. I get the feeling there's a big divide between west and east basically because of ideology: in the west, the state encouraged women to stay at home (no free kindergartens, tax-splitting between married couples, etc). This in itself makes a house with a garden way more attractive - if you're stuck at home looking after kids, then it's really nice to be able to do stuff in the kitchen while your kids play in the garden. They also had way higher car ownership. There's also stuff like building law (you can generally only build stuff that fits in the locale, so there's more space for potential suburban houses than apartment blocks) which I guess wouldn't be a factor in the east. Also high car ownership, (obviously) higher rates of house ownership, etc.
ironically LA was built with public transit in mind from the beginning. many housing developments were sold with light rail to downtown as an amenity to sell the houses. once the houses were sold, the rails were dismantled for being unprofitable.
If you live anywhere where people love Harleys and Dodge Ram trucks with aftermarket exhausts, then 65 is luxury levels of quietness.
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.
They don't say how/where they measured, so the figures are basically worthless. 65-70 dB(A) seems on the low end of consumer unmanned quadcopters[1], e.g. "Maximum sound pressure level for fast flyover at 15 m height: 62 dB(A)" for a DJI Phantom 2 weighing less than 2kg.
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.
You need to live in a quieter area. Too much noise pollution in NYC.
In a suburb of Portland Oregon I routinely hear helicopters up to about 2000 feet. I hear many planes at over 5000 ft. When jets take off from PDX and climb over my house I can easily hear them at about 16,000 feet.
Depending on the weather I hear aircrafts at 32,000 to 40,000 ft. Trough closed windows (double paned isolating stuff) at night. Mostly traffic from/to Paris, France and from/to Asia, which goes over here.
There will be a difference between a hovering helicopter and one travelling at cruising speed. I assume you experience more of the latter while I the former.
If memory serves well, Airbus' programms, they have two competing ones, are quite old (around 2018 or so when it officially started, so the idea is most likely older).
The same lies that are peddled to us about pretty much everything. The emissions are just moved downstream, and could even be worse in certain places, as compared to other transportation systems. I am curious to see how they fare in energy usage as compared to an electric car, electric bikes and electric trains.
Lie may be a bit strong. True zero emissions from resource extraction to delivery is nigh impossible, but there's still sizable benefit to be had from electrification.
Most notably, even if the craft is charged with electricity generated by a coal-fired plant, overall efficiency is still improved simply because power plants are much more efficient than any kind of internal combustion engine. And of course, the vehicle will only become more clean as fossil fuel plants are phased out, where fossil fuel vehicles will only ever be fossil fueled, barring the unusual electric conversion.
That said, the ideal solution is electric mass transit like the train systems seen frequently in east Asia. Unfortunately, those are unlikely to appear in North American cities any time soon due to the thick jungle created by corrupt local politicians, NIBMYs determined to freeze-frame their neighborhoods at any cost, and price gouging underperforming construction contractors.
