The more I read these articles, the more I want to start some kind of citizen regulatory or acceptance body. I'd develop environmental conditions, failure modes and noise sensitivity tests for all of these air taxis to abide by.
As a manned aviator and after having spent 10+ years now playing with drones and working with drones, I am very skeptical of these safety claims and noise promises.
The way the FAA handles rulemaking itself is deeply concerning. They intentionally underfund the departments that need the staff to do the analyses. Then lobbyists set up shop inside the FAA itself. I would encourage you to go to the FAA offices in DC and look at the Amazon presence.
Rulemaking bodies are comprised of "industry leaders" (mind you, that for Part 107 about 50% of these "thought leaders" now have defunct companies). I will point you to Airware as a prime example, who rumor has it never completed a revenue earning flight with their own air vehicle and autopilot.
These industry leaders use their own proprietary technology and investor slide decks to establish as "the way to be safe" and that gets pushed into some weird kind of law that serves little more than the isolated interests of these ridiculous bodies of people.
A popular saying is that "the FARs are written in blood". IE: the FARs come into place because of a pilot error or aircraft accident. Letting these new flying car companies help decide what is safe is going to end up in a disaster.
I would be very surprised if the FAA and Canadian, western European civil aviation regulators don't require something functionally equivalent to being able to operate with 25% of the lift rotors dead or disabled (an even higher degree of redundancy than a four armed, coaxial eight motor/prop octocopter filming platform today, which can lose 1 out of 8 motors and likely land safely), plus also a ballistic parachute. Something like what is mounted in the top side of a Cirrus VisionJet.
In my part of Brooklyn, loud low flying helicopters from Blade and Uber have been a complete nuisance all through the holidays. People have been taking them from south Manhattan to JFK.
They're not supposed to fly lower than 1000 feet but I can read the numbers on the bottom these things so clearly they're flying lower than that to save fuel, maybe around 500 feet.
Wouldn't it make more sense for Uber to try to achieve profitability instead of chasing pipe dreams, which will never fly?
Sure, you can employ dirty tactics to fight regulations, government agencies and cities. But I don't think you can do that when it comes to (ab-)using air space.
Even drones are about to be regulated. This will be shot down, not literally, in a jiffy.
Uber is aiming to be a big player in the future autonomous space, but seeing how difficult a problem level 5 autonomy is proving for cars, they are looking at the sky taxi thing instead because autonomy is going to be actually achievable in that space.
I don't know about the US, but herearound the sky and what flies there is massively regulated.
And those are regulations you don't want to fuck around with.
You may be, for example, flying over military controlled airspace. I don't see it that anybody can just jump into his flying car and just fuzz around at her or his discretion.
There's a reason why flight plans are filed for every flight.
But automating navigation for helicopters is much easier than for cars. At least until every other person has a personal helicopter, but even then the problem is probably much easier to solve.
I'm still amazed that they can afford either of the two projects. I understand their reasoning for wanting autonomous vehicles, it's basically needed for their business to make sense. From the investors point of view however: why not drop the current taxi business, which is just a money burning pit, and then solely invest in the autonomous vehicles?
They are doing the design and engineering work of the craft itself, as a separate thing from the batteries. I think a big assumption on the part of a lot of these is that the battery Wh/kg and Wh/litre ratio will dramatically improve in the future, and they'll be able to take those new batteries from their manufacturers and integrate it into their ready-to-go aircraft.
Lots of other mechanical and airframe engineering work to do in the meantime while waiting for better batteries. Software/automation controls related to operating in busy air space. Stuff like the tilt rotor mechanism, avionics and radio systems, automated navigation, soundproofing, seats and interior, airframe carbon fiber layup, etc. They can create a finished and highly tested craft with all of the engineering problems solved for various subsystems except the batteries.
I don't see any problem with designing something that currently only has 20 minutes of flight time with a battery that is X watt-hours capacity, N size, Y dimensions and Z weight.
An aircraft manufacturer as we know it today doesn't manufacture a lot of the very complex and most costly subsystems of their craft. Best example would be small jet turbines, or petrol powered engines. They rely on engine manufacturing specialists for that. My theory is that it's unlikely a VTOL-air-taxi-manufacturer will become so vertically integrated that it manufactures its own special batteries. Similar to how a small business jet manufacturer today buys turbofan engines from engine-manufacturing-specialists, they'll be buying batteries from companies dedicated to the sole purpose of manufacturing high Wh/kg aircraft batteries.
Provided that the new magical future battery can be similarly cooled and managed and will fit into the available specifications of "X times 5 watt hours", N, Y and Z, they can do all of the R&D except for the battery, and hope that the market and technology catch up with them to create a 80 minute flight time craft.
The article is light on specifics but this stood out to me, most Tesla's take longer to charge. I'd imagine an aircraft would need more power than a Tesla, so how are they transferring energy so fast that automobiles can't do it but aircraft can?
Under absolutely ideal conditions, a Tesla on a 250kW charger for 8.5 minutes can regain 40% of battery capacity [1]
So, if you carry 2.5x the battery you need, so a 40% charge is all you ever need, then maybe? Although obviously, that would add to your weight, reducing your range.
If you were willing to hook up a supply of cooling water while charging, you might be able to do somewhat better - one of the key limiting factors in fast charging is the batteries heating up.
And generally bigger battery packs can charge at higher kilowatts. Here's an electric ferry with a 4.1 MWh battery which can charge at up 6 megawatts. 600 amps at 10,000 volts:
So, like the ferry, these aircraft probably have big batteries that they charge enough to get to the next destination with a buffer for emergencies. The closer you get to 100% state of charge the slower the system will charge in order to protect the battery.
> The article is light on specifics but this stood out to me, most Tesla's take longer to charge. I'd imagine an aircraft would need more power than a Tesla, so how are they transferring energy so fast that automobiles can't do it but aircraft can?
If I had to guess the 5 to 7 minute figure is based on some theoretical magical battery that nobody can buy yet. Something with Wh/density much greater than the current best lithium ion (1000 to 1200Wh/kg vs 245Wh/kg) and capable of much higher C rates for charge and discharge. It's a mock up so they don't have to, or want to share any more detail than a optimistic time figure.
Drones are loud, because they have to move a lot of air in order to stay in the air. There is no way around that noise. Flying taxis and the like are only good for the few people sitting in one. They are very bad for everybody else.
As a manned aviator and after having spent 10+ years now playing with drones and working with drones, I am very skeptical of these safety claims and noise promises.