Self-driving car senses objects and must make difficult decisions: Is this radar reflection from stationary light pole or from a moving object? Is this a parked car or a moving car? Will this pedestrain/biker jump on the roadway? What if the car next to me going to turn left sharply?
No such thing exists in the air. The air is mostly empty, there are no stationary objects next to the route. If there is a building, aircraft can fly as far as 500 meters away from it - try finding a driveable road with no obstacles at that distance. There is no people or large animals. There is not even curb to hit.
Importantly, I bet there are no legacy vehicles in the approved routes - and I am sure they will have some sort of V2V tech to ensure that all objects in the air will transmit their position and intention.
Not every airplane does that. Commercial planes mostly do, but its not mandated under all circumstances as far as I know. (Speaking for my region only)
All commercial planes have it at this point. And most part 91 airplanes (General Aviation) have it at this point. Without ADSB you cannot fly in or near class A, B, or C airspace and must stay below 10,000 feet. Which largely makes having an airplane useless for most people.
There are still airplanes flying that have no electrical system but even then some of them have retrofitted a system.
I was answering with the purposes of flight-taxis in mind. I doubt that they will fly in high altitude and deem it quite likely that they might want to pass uncontrolled airspace at some point.
And if you're flying in uncontrolled airspace you just can't count on the presence of it. In fact, missing transponders are an occasional source of accidents in these spaces. There are lots of gliding enthusiasts that aren't equipped.
P.S.: Commercial planes (esp. big ones) should have hardly any contact points with flying taxis.
More degrees of freedom, easier collision avoidance. The mechanical part is a lot harder, of course, but the "self driving" part is a lot easier. We had autopilot and auto-land in planes well before we had anything of the sort in cars.
A self driving car needs to be able to reliably drive within ~1 foot of arbitrary obstacles, recognize junk in the road, recognize people in the road, obey vague hand signals from random cops, obey every weird traffic sign in the world, obey every traffic law, and disobey signs and laws when convention requires it.
Helicopters don’t have to deal with any of that. There won’t be any random obstacles. No human drivers to contend with. No conflict between legality and practice to navigate.
everything with a mass over 1kg+- in the air, is carrying a "gps" and something that is transmitting its location, and all air traffic world wide is(theoreticaly) assigned a flight path for each trip,witha specific flight level, ie: the planning is 3d, so the density per layer, never gets very high, and there are specific paths taken to change layers, there are never any dogs, or horses, or people trying to deek, there are no signs or maps, and in case of fully automated vtol
taxis, navigation will be to mm accuracy, with likely a routine to land fully autonomously on loosing the network, and a backup ballistic recovery parachute, if power is completly lost or another emergency situation occurs.
and also likely is that forward speeds will be low enough, that collisions with birds will be a low probability, and rotors will likely be schrouded, keeping the idiots heads attached when determinidly trying for that gota have selfie.
This is not correct. There is no hard requirement for GPS nor anything that requires “something that transmits its location”. There is also no requirement for a flight plan or communication with ATC.
I can take off from an uncontrolled airport with no GPS, no transponder, no plan, and no radio and as long as I’m in the correct airspace I’m completely legal and within my right to do so.
There are some differences with these rules through out the world.
This is just plain wrong. With glider planes, you can fly around wherever you like (in the non-restricted airspace) and aren’t required to have ADS-B or FLARM in Europe. Most people don’t do it but you could entirely rely on visual detection to prevent collisions.
