[pavel_lishin]

> It could transform the way people commute to work, eliminating traffic and the effect of accidents.

Hopefully, the same people who are causing the accidents in cars won't be able to directly control the helicopter.

A car wreck slowing traffic down to 10% on a freeway is preferable to death looming from the sky because someone really needs to check twitter right now.

[glhaynes]

I'd wager that on the evolutionary path to personal aircraft, the development of self-driving cars is as necessary a step as the development of manually-driven cars and manually-piloted aircraft. Or to say it a different way: there'll never be widespread manually-piloted consumer aircraft.

[ChuckMcM]

This is the ultimate reason for not having flying vehicles. You lose one and it's injury and death all the way down.

That said, gyro-copters have excellent fail safe properties (then can autorotate/glide to a landing without power) when controlled by someone, or something, committed to operating them safely.

[starpilot]

The FAA requires that all helicopters be capable of autorotation. We actually design and test for this extensively, by adding mass to the blade tips to store inertia, pilots regularly practicing power-off flight etc.

Autogyros fly in constant autorotation (hence the name), the main rotor being unpowered.

[lmm]

It's a lot easier to avoid hitting anything in the air, because there's a lot more space up there, and a lot more directions in which to dodge. During the war we sent teenagers with <20 hours of training to fly in combat (and while many of them died it wasn't because they were crashing into each other or the ground).

[nknighthb]

It's not so simple. A worst-case scenario for a flying car might be nose-down terminal velocity into a crowded building. Or even faster, if the driver were deliberately accelerating into the building, trying to use the car as a kinetic weapon.

Scheduled commercial airline flights are quite safe, which makes people think "flying is safe", but general aviation, which lacks many of the strong controls that scheduled airlines have, is much worse[1]. I would expect flying cars under manual control of typical drivers over a crowded city to be much, much worse still.

[1] http://www.ntsb.gov/news/2012/120427.html

[pavel_lishin]

While that's true, there weren't a lot of cars on the road to hit during that time, either.

Imagine the commuting public of the New York City region, all in the air above Manhattan.