[jbangert]

I don't think the pilot factors in that much into the cost of operating a helicopter. Even a small helicopter (e.g. Robinson R-44 which is a bare bones trainer) needs a ~250k complete overhaul every 2200 hours/12 years in service. Add $60 dollars per hour in fuel and 60-100 per hour of miscellaneous other maintenance, and your variable costs quickly approach 300/hr. Add in all the fixed overhead, and a tiny helicopter that can take 2 passengers and limited baggage will run $400 dollars per hour easily (which is about what they rent for). A bigger turbine helicopter is significantly more expensive.

Most of this is because helicopters are complex machines (you're spinning really big blades pretty fast. Then using the blades + bearing to also lift the weight of the helicopter + more. Oh and you're changing the pitch angle of the blades. Oh you mean changing the pitch angles of the blades WHILE THEY GO AROUND...) and any failure in any of these parts is usually fatal so they have to be built and maintained to a very high degree of reliability.

Airplanes are much simpler (the spinning propeller attached to an engine is one part. The wing generating lift is another part. the flight controls are yet another part) and have more opportunities for redundancy ( a wing has multiple spars, and is attached to the airplane with many bolts. All helicopter blades meet in one hub, which is attached on one axis).

Combine that with aircraft scaling up more (you can build 500 person aircraft, but only 20 person or so helicopters), going much faster (a 120 dollar/hr propeller plane will outrun many/most helicopters) and the cost to go a given distance by plane will always be much cheaper than a helicopter.

[yingw787]

I'm less comparing the helicopter approach with airplanes, and more comparing them to multirotors, where I think a lot of the autonomous flight hype is coming from, and where the use cases substitute rather than complement each other. In that sense, the fixed costs are less "baked-in" to the product. You can swap out helicopter blades for better composites, and add in a glass cockpit, but the fundamental control system still holds. You can't really change the number of motors in a multicopter without a full-scale overhaul of the avionics suite. And I sure hope the FAA wouldn't let a multicopter with some number of failed motors take off just because it doesn't immediately fall out of the sky.

I would agree with you operating a helicopter will always be expensive. I don't anticipate autonomous helicopters to be price competitive with something like cars. People pay the premium for vertical flight to gain the benefits of vertical flight. In addition, I'm pretty sure that given the high fixed price, that market would rather pay more to get a premium product rather than accept an inferior product (e.g. insufficient range, speed, flight time, safety, etc). I was more saying making helicopter flights marginally cheaper will make said flights marginally more available to more people.

There might be game changers down the line. For example, Sikorsky has a lot of experience with experimental control systems like hybrid helicopters that may reduce operational expenses, and if they can prove SARA/derivatives are as reliable or better than a human pilot and convince the general public/unions to fly without a pilot, they might design helicopters that are more maintenance-oriented. But as with all things, it's more important to make sure new innovations are deliverable and provably progressive.

[eruhgfdxxx]

Nah, helicopters are relatively simple machines, literally every person in this site can understand the basics of helicopter technology (of course, getting proficient and enabling a career in heli-tech is a whole different story). The only difficulty is making them bulletproof, but nowadays the crashes due to technical problems are rare.

Also, helicopters are generally used for other purposes than planes. Transporting thousands of men thousands of kilometers is probably not a job for helicopters but that does not imply that helicopters are useless.