Quite false. Rocket-deployed parachutes - first used in the hang gliding community, they prevent the 'chute from fouling on the aircraft’s chassis and work much better than ballistic parachutes - have existed for decades, and can bring full airplanes down safely at altitudes as low as 250 feet, at speeds as high as 187 MPH. For example:
Considering the rest of your comment, I believe you badly need to reevaluate.
Though if this air taxi is intended to be used in dense urban and inner city areas, an unguided parachute landing might be quite hazardous.
Yes.
It’s just that airliners do not fly fully autonomous. They are under supervision by ATC, they fly in designated corridors at heights they do not choose for themselves at random. They are on flight plans and on schedules. Under normal conditions, where they start and where they land doesn’t change, and the airport’s ILS systems provide data for the on board systems. And they have at least two fully qualified and trained pilots on board.
I’m not saying that it’s impossible to scale that up by at least two orders of magnitude in terms of AVs in the air, buzzing around with a considerable amount of randomness, but it is not going to work with “just this one weird trick”. Time, money and lots of engineering still needed.
True. The lead time for substantive changes to ATC systems is ten to 20 years. Most likely, air taxis would not be fully integrated into the controlled air space which is used by commercial flights. Adapting existing systems to do that would break a lot of existing functionality. For example a flight information region at the moment might handle 10000 tracks, much less than would be required with fully autonomous light aircraft in the sky.
So you will have to create new volumes of controlled airspace specifically for taxis, but there will be inevitable crossover because you will have helicopters from police, media, etc operating in both domains. So you put mode-s transponders on your taxis, they have TCAS and ADSB. But now you have to filter those new ads-b tracks out of your ATC system at the point of entry, without filtering away the tracks you do need to see.
But consider airport terminal areas. You want to see the taxis here because they will pop up on primary radars causing needless conflict alerts. So the whole thing pushes you towards a single, integrated airspace with that long lead time.
All that drag when the lift fans are stopped! And after its 45 min., 100 km flight, how long to recharge? Not to mention you can’t fly with the batteries almost depleted, you need some reserve.
It’s a taxi dispatch office?
Except for take off and landing, which is the most dangerous part of the flight and which is still not within the competence of an autopilot to handle. And during the entire flight the human pilot is there, engaged with the aircraft and with the autopilot. Autopilot computers have had training wheels on for the past century.
These air taxis are not supposed to require a pilot at all. Taking the training wheels off is a big jump. Perfecting automated takeoffs and landings is a big jump. I am more than a little dubious that this NZ company is going to be able to do something that Boeing, etc, haven’t been able to do.
A lesson from history: back in the 70’s, helicopter ferry services sprouted up everywhere, and you had skyscrapers built with helipads on the roof intended to be used as terminals for helicopter-based mass transit service. All it took was one fatal crash to put a complete end to every single helicopter transit service in the US - people saw them as unsafe and you couldn’t sell tickets anymore. If this NZ company actually launches their envisioned air taxi service, the first serious crash of one of their taxis could well put them out of business permanently.
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