AP News: Hundreds of flying taxis to be made in Ohio, home of the Wright brothers and astronaut legends
AP News: Hundreds of flying taxis to be made in Ohio, home of the Wright brothers and astronaut legends
The same Ohio river valley where the Wright brothers pioneered human flight will soon manufacture cutting-edge electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.
can we just please get some normal, boring, safe, efficient trains that actually function instead of this gizmo bullshit?
Joby’s production aircraft is designed to transport a pilot and four passengers at speeds of up to 200 miles (321.87 kilometers) per hour, with a maximum range of 100 miles (160.93 kilometers). I
Back in my day we called these contraptions “helicopters”
And those were considered for use as "flying taxis" and they failed for the same reason these will: Flying and landing in cities is dangerous, which is why airports are built very far away.
It's also expensive as fuck.
Even if you have electric flying helicopters, the rotary component makes them very expensive to maintain as blades and components need to be replaced sometimes every 500 hours or less and require constant safety checks and inspections.
Imagine how many taxi cabs have a malfunction of some sort every year. Now imagine that taxi cab crashing into a building or crowded street if it had a malfunction instead of just cruising to a halt on the side of the road.
Get outta here with all your common sense making, hater.
Can helicopters achieve those kinds of speeds?
I'll never understand the eternal hype around "flying cars". Fuckers out here can hardly drive on a 2d road. Now you want to introduce a third axis on them?
I guarantee that if the general public gets their hands on a real "flying car", it'll take about 2 weeks before some drunk idiot commits a mini 9/11.
The FAA mandates extensive training for anyone who wants to fly, regardless of the form of the aircraft. And even more training for commercial pilots (i.e. paying passengers).
Nothing in this article suggests that pilots of this vehicle would have less training than pilots of other aircraft.
I worry a lot more about drunk drivers than drunk pilots.
The FAA mandates extensive training for anyone who wants to fly, regardless of the form of the aircraft.
Apparently not if the mass and maximum speed are both low enough. The Jetson One (which has been taking preorders for at least a couple of years but still isn't shipping) says it won't require a license in the US.
It looks pretty impractical, produces an obnoxious amount of wind during landing and takeoff, and has a range of only 30km, but, still... it or things like it probably will actually be a reality for some rich people pretty soon.
Right? Cool, now the road goes over your house! Along with the Amazon drones.
Drink idiots hit things in cars all the time.
Make the test to acquire your license actually difficult to the skill level required instead of the "you can take two left turns and park shitty, here's your license" level of difficulty that most states use for road vehicles.
I got my driver's license when I was 18, after studying for the test and practicing for several months on a learner's permit.
Now I'm 40. I've never been retested. I have completely forgotten what's on the exam. I've developed a whole bunch of bad driving habits, particularly with the advent of smart phones. And nobody is going to challenge my license renewal so long as I can pass an eye exam every 10 years.
Trains and Trams please and thank you
No. Only the promise of a single-person direct-to-destination fee-for-service that ends up being a giant scam.
We will never build mass transit in this country. You can't make us.
Where America is going to come unstuck is with the electric car.
Either you guys are going to have to build up more electrical infrastructure which you don't want to do, or you're going to have to develop public transit options, would you also don't seem to want to do.
Then the GOP will somehow try and turn it into a political issue (because they are lunatics) and nothing will get done, and then no one will be able to go anywhere because they will be stuck living in a country that is designed for a mode of transit that no longer exists, and no one has bothered to update it in any way. And then your kids are going to overthrow the government because they won't be able to understand why everyone in Europe can go wherever they want.
You forgot your /s
Fuck that just built trams and trains
there are literally rails behind my house why is there not a tram on it to go across town idk. Cargobonly passes once every hour lmao
Do you have any idea how much time and resources it would take to construct high speed rail across the US compared to small local airstrips for VTOLs?
Do you have a idea how much more efficient it would be?
Yeah and think of how many more people a single five-person helicopter can move per hour! An obvious choice
Do you know how much more utility and efficiency actual public transport has?
Flying is a horrible option for short range public transport.
Jesus fuck. It's just like some auto execs to pull shit like this. Completely fuck up transportation infrastructure on the ground to your own benefit and everyone else's detriment, then use your winnings to build taxis that can fly over the carnage you've wrought. We are living the Cyberpunk future.
Fucking waste of resources.
We already have "flying cars". They're called helicopters, and you need training and a license to fly them. Just like you'll need for this thing and just like you need for a normal road-going car.
Let me just look up how many times the Wright brothers crashed before they succeeded…
[googles]
Oh, my…
You're right, failure is possible so we should never try anything, ever.
lol, I definitely didn’t say that 
Ohio is also the state which has the highest per-capita production of astronauts, with only New York and California producing more in terms of raw numbers.
I wonder, what is it about Ohio that encourages people to flee the planet with such zeal?
Ya, it's almost like once you've seen Ohio you have this urge to get off the ground. The planet even, if possible. You no longer want to touch anything else attached to Ohio.
You’ve clearly never been to Cleveland.
Considering it has a scatological sexual act named after it, do I really want to?
So, we're just gonna burn more fuel. Wtf. We need legislative change to prevent shit like this.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Around the world, electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL aircraft are entering the mainstream, though questions remain about noise levels and charging demands.
Still, developers say the planes are nearing the day when they will provide a wide-scale alternative to shuttle individual people or small groups from rooftops and parking garages to their destinations, while avoiding the congested thoroughfares below.
Joby’s decision to locate its first scaled manufacturing facility at a 140-acre (57-hectar) site at Dayton International Airport delivers on two decades of groundwork laid by the state’s leaders, Republican Lt. Gov.
Its financial package wasn’t the largest, but the chance to bring the operation to the birthplace of aviation — with a workforce experienced in the field — sealed the deal, he said.
Bevirt said operations and hiring will begin immediately from existing buildings near the development site, contingent upon clearing the standard legal and regulatory hurdles.
Toyota, a long-term investor, worked with Joby in 2019 to design and to successfully launch its pilot production line in Marina, California.
The original article contains 862 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I'm hoping regulations get in the way of this. The FAA is barely comfy letting people fly a drone beyond line of sight with a waiver, fully automated flight for untrained passengers is going to take some doing.
Wasn't there some controversy with who had the first flying machine? There was supposedly some guy in CT that flew an aircraft before the brothers?
EDIT - found this article Three states bicker over 'first in flight' claim
Go to India and they will tell you that Right Brothers stole an Indian genius sketch and killed him
I'm making this claim based on the Wright Bros exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and space museum...
One of the genius things that they did was invent scaled testing (I'm not 100% sure I can make this claim, but I'd be happy to learn it I was wrong). Rather than building the device and testing it, which killed a lot of people through history, they built miniature components and tested them individually to prove concepts, and THEN built their production version in iterations.
Like, to test airfoil designs, they built a table top sized wind tunnel, put a miniature airfoil in, and evaluated its performance, and made determinations for the final product. This SIGNIFICANTLY lowered design costs and prototyping at the time.
This also happened to result in an airplane.
Probably helped lower some risk, too.