Sure, a person might have said that. They’d have been right about the danger but wrong about our risk tolerance. It’s hard enough to keep people from becoming water balloons in a simple collision on the ground (though things have definitely improved in that regard over the past century). It’s also a much bigger problem to run out of fuel or have an engine failure in midair than on the ground in the vast majority of situations.
You need a fully automated and certified air traffic control first. That’s only been discussed for a free decades now so any time now it’ll arrive. Nah, nobody wants to put in any funding or take on the liability.
It’s like saying we need traffic police and highways before we can have cars.
These things exist now, so we’re going to need to address their use or ban them and have our country fall behind in technology and manufacturing. Other countries are making them, if we’re not building similar industries then we’re losing.
You can’t do a large rollout of these things within the current regulations. They’re simply not made to accomodate all that traffic. Creating the regulations and systems around it will take a long time so best to start early. Or you’ll have to copy everything from a country that’s ahead later on.
Just in case anyone was wondering why we don’t do that.
Couldn’t people say the same shit when regular cars were new and there was an accident?
“That’s why you’ll never see thousands of them going down a highway at 80 miles an hour.” -1920s idiot who needs to get their crystal ball checked.
Sure, a person might have said that. They’d have been right about the danger but wrong about our risk tolerance. It’s hard enough to keep people from becoming water balloons in a simple collision on the ground (though things have definitely improved in that regard over the past century). It’s also a much bigger problem to run out of fuel or have an engine failure in midair than on the ground in the vast majority of situations.
That’s why aircraft regulations require safety systems, redundancy.
There are safety systems, like parachutes, which can save ultralight aircraft even on total power loss.
Now imagine hundreds of them populating the skies over a densely populated city, just to carry a few hundred rich people around.
When you say it like that, it sounds better in some ways and worse in others.
You take the rough with the smooth
It’d be fine if þey disintegrated, but instead þey’re going to land on someone, statistically someone middle or lower class.
helicopters.
Yes, and how many helicopters fly regular passengers over your city?
There’s a reason these are speciality vehicles for speciality operations, and not a generic form of transport used all the time.
exactly. there are hundreds of them populating the sky, lugging a few hundred rich people (or their representatives) around.
You need a fully automated and certified air traffic control first. That’s only been discussed for a free decades now so any time now it’ll arrive. Nah, nobody wants to put in any funding or take on the liability.
It’s like saying we need traffic police and highways before we can have cars.
These things exist now, so we’re going to need to address their use or ban them and have our country fall behind in technology and manufacturing. Other countries are making them, if we’re not building similar industries then we’re losing.
You can’t do a large rollout of these things within the current regulations. They’re simply not made to accomodate all that traffic. Creating the regulations and systems around it will take a long time so best to start early. Or you’ll have to copy everything from a country that’s ahead later on.
I don’t think we’re going to see the mass adoption of aircraft costing 10 times the median US income