[pdelbarba]

This isn't going to be certified and allowed for part 135 operations inside at least a decade. Boeing can't keep their jets from crashing due to simple trim control software, what makes anyone think the FAA is going to go along with these flights over densely populated areas?

This feels a lot like when everyone was scrambling to start helicopter taxi services which promptly crashed and burned... Helicopters were a mature and well understood technology then, but the realities of operating in urban areas under a variety of weather conditions just doesn't allow for these services to be A) safe or B) economical.

[baxtr]

Maybe that’s exactly what someone said about cars in 1900. BTW: In 2019, 39k people died in car crashes, in the US alone.

[noir_lord]

I wonder what would happen if the car (or something similar had never been invented) and someone came out with a modern saloon today.

"It'll revolutionise personal transport but we estimate it'll kill 40,0000 people in a horrible way per year"

Like many things that are harmful in some way cars got grandfathered in (as did alcohol and tobacco) - if someone came out with an equivalent of alcohol with the same side effects it would be banned immediately as well.

In fact the UK did exactly that with the psychoactive substances laws - we didn't ban a particular drug we banned any drug with a set of side effects - largely because the chemists got really good at tweaking the underlying chemical structure enough to evade the law.

[xnyan]

>banned any drug with a set of side effects

The word you are looking for is pleasure. The only types of drugs that are 100% illegal are drugs that have no purpose besides making you feel pleasurable sensations. Horrible side effects (e.g. chemo) and high chance of addiction (opioids, amphetamines, etc) and more are all allowed as long as the purpose of the effect of the drug is not (solely) pleasure.

Alcohol, and increasingly in some parts of the world Cannabis, are the exceptions (I understand both of these substances have real and potential uses in healthcare, but they are perceived as recreational). These are legal or quasi-legal only because they are both already in wide use and getting society on board to enforce a ban is difficult to impossible (depending on the society, a few do) . Tabacco is also on the list, but seems to be falling off somewhat.

[noir_lord]

I know we had problems with "Bath Salts" and Spice (synthetic marijuana) which was ironically legal at the time and but much worse than the original.

I've no dog in the fight, I think people should largely be able to put whatever they want in their bodies but I choose not to.

There is an argument about individual harm vs societal harm but good luck settling that one.

[wolco]

Cannabis is seen as a medicine and a for pleasure only drug. The fact that it occupies both is unique.

[pdelbarba]

You can throw around statistics but the reality is aircraft receive far more scrutiny. Nobody wants to sit helplessly as one of these things flies them into the side of a skyscraper or watch as one falls out of the sky onto them.

Is that fair? Maybe?

Is that reality? Yes.

This isn't like the invention of cars. We have had all manner of airplanes for over 100 years and know how they work. This is like the NYC helicopter taxi boom in the late 70s and 80s where a number of fiery and high profile crashes put an end to the industry.

[sacred_numbers]

One big difference is that these EVTOL aircraft are small enough that they can use ballistic parachutes for an extra degree of safety. They usually also have more redundancy due to distributing thrust between many small electric motors. There has been a lot more research into autonomous drone flight than autonomous helicopter flight as well, which is crucial for safety and keeping costs low. I could be totally wrong, but I feel like battery, motor, flight control, and composite material technologies are finally good enough for EVTOLs to start making sense. Just like the tech boom of the late 90s there will be a lot of investment, most of which will be lost, but the survivors will have a big impact on society.

[nouveaux]

Maybe. To me, the cost is a bigger factor. If you can show helicopters have the same fatality rate, but has the same price of an Uber, I'm sure a ton of people would use it.

It seems to me price is the larger barrier for most people when it comes to air travel.

[bobthepanda]

The problem is damage to others.

Generally speaking, even if cars crash into buildings the building itself is not immediately unsafe; injured people and a broken storefront, but the building is not on fire or collapsing. Unless something has changed dramatically, planes crashing into buildings generally start fires, and generally cause concern about the structural integrity of said building in the immediate aftermath.

As a result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_New_York_City_plane_crash

> On October 11, 2006, a Cirrus SR20 aircraft crashed into the Belaire Apartments in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City, at about 2:42 p.m. EDT (18:42 UTC). The aircraft struck the north side of the building causing a fire in several apartments,[2][3] which was extinguished within two hours.[4]

> Both people aboard the aircraft were killed in the accident: New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle[3] and his certificated flight instructor.[5][6] Twenty-one people were injured, including eleven firefighters. An apartment resident, Ilana Benhuri, who lived in the building with her husband, was hospitalized for a month with severe burns incurred when the post-impact fire engulfed her apartment.[7][8]

> On October 13, 2006, two days after the crash, the FAA banned all fixed-winged aircraft from the East River corridor unless in contact with local air traffic control. The new rule, which took effect immediately, required all small aircraft (with the exception of helicopters and certain seaplanes) to seek the approval of and stay in contact with air traffic control while in the corridor. The FAA cited safety concerns, especially unpredictable winds from between buildings, as the reason for the change.

Most car crashes do not result in 2 dead, 21 injured, and property damage to several residences.

[LoSboccacc]

it's really disingenuous to compare personal and mass transit. they have different risk aversion because they have different societal roles.

[bfuclusion]

It depends on society's tolerance for death honestly. You're not going to be VTOLing a 737s worth of people so you're probably talking about the number of fatalities in a mid size SUV. People would care a lot less if the routes didn't take them over dense urban areas and the chance of one coming down on their head is super low.

[petre]

It really depends on what it falls on or smashes into and if the VTOL has experienced lithium battery fire or not. If you use it to move between cities it could probably work just fine.

[CalChris]

Part 135 is FAA. Lilium is German/EU.

[looping__lui]

Trust me - Germans wish they had FAA because it is magnitudes more customer focused and actually “reasonable”.

The German LBA is literally Prussian Bureaucracy stuck in the 19th century...

[looping__lui]

Ok - maybe those hating me for the comment: FAA validation for my German license took a day and I got a plastic card license after 6 weeks with a preliminary one right away.

Changing ownership of a plane took me 6! weeks with the LBA.

I guess that there are potentially 10+% of all planes in Germany operated with an American N-registration (owned by a trust) because the maintenance overhead and paperwork headache is so much lower.

Imagine registering your German car with a German license plate in the US and setting up a German entity so you could pull that off - how big would the difference in pain have to be?

[pdelbarba]

If they're operating in the US (given all the pictures of US cities) then they will absolutely be flying part 121 or 135.

[hindsightbias]

Fly routes over freeways so they crash there.

Society will learn to tolerate 4-6 deaths at a time, but not on the 737 scale.

[bobthepanda]

Lots of things are in fairly close proximity to highways, this is not really a solution. Crashing into the tower block next to a highway is still pretty bad.

Lots of things in dense areas also are not necessarily on an easy route near a highway, so if that's the limitation you run into Concorde's old problem of "where can you actually fly this thing?"

[trynewideas]

I'm skeptical about the rest of it, but the article lightly covers using existing transport corridors (waterways, rail tracks, and to a lesser priority arterial roadways) as routes for these medium-range flights that explicitly avoid populated areas.

[bobthepanda]

My issue with this is that most transport corridors are

1. not very wide in the first place. Any air vehicle could cross the width of your standard rail line or highway or river in seconds.

2. Surrounded by intensive land uses, because the transportation corridor itself provides valuable access. So vehicles don't have to go very far off the right of way to crash into something valuable where lots of people are.