It didn’t actually stop helicopter commuting. Executives and rich people take helicopters all the time, and I think there’s helicopter service from Manhattan to the airports.
Use of helipads in NYC seems to have been stopped after 9/11. Now anyone rich enough to be able to commute by helicopter (Mike Bloomberg?) has to use one of the ground-level helipads by the water.
This was a factor during Bush the First’s Gulf War.
The US showed up with heaps of high-tech attack helicopters, which performed very well…at first.
But after the war continued for a little while, most of those helicopters spent most of the war sitting idle in the repair hangars. They just couldn’t get enough mechanics to keep up with the maintenance requirements.
The Williams X-Jet was much less scary:
Most quads can run on three blades. A six is probably even more fault tolerant. Less vibration too with these.
Even old saws can be sharp.
That’s not a Foreign Object! I’ve very attached to that foot! 
Thanks for the technical stuff.
Johnny Cab is the future
You need enough Bicycle Repair Mans to balance them.
“Imagine commuting a thousand feet above traffic…”
Based on a false premise for privileged elites right there.
“Imagine commuting in traffic, a thousand feet above the ground.”
Visualize 3D gridlock.
can be, ayuh, can be
And conventional taxi “services” are like the mafia.
Oh wait, that isn’t actually a metaphor
There are never enough BRMs around.
Um, that’s absolutely untrue. Thousands of workers commute to work by helicopter. They work offshore (Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea especially).
There’s the occasional crash, but it’s safe, reliable, fast, and relatively economical (compared with alternatives). I’ve commuted to work by helicopter myself.
In one of John W, Campbell’s novels (The Black Star Passes, I think), his Cities of the Future have a 100 MPH down-blast at the street level from all the layers of helicopter traffic above. (Solved by the scientist-hero’s heat-momentum engine that probably turned the problem into a sub-zero 50 MPH down-blast… Oops!)
Why we don’t commute with helicopters
Beeeeeeeee-caaauusssse it’sssss…
… hard to fit a helicopter into a vanpool vehicle?!
There is another small point. Flying helicopters is hard. Few people have the aptitude to do it well. For one thing, if you stop a car in the road it’s just a stopped car. If you stop a helicopter it’s a crash. Imagine the average driver in a helicopter. The point above about the terrible efficiency is at least as important, but the difficulty is the real killer - literally.
I give you the Ehang 184, which is currently undergoing acceptance testing as an automated taxi service in the skies over Dubai, and is the subject of a $1Bn agreement with US-based Lung Biotechnology for time-critical delivery of organs for transplant.
(Back in February, officials in Dubai were predicting a July 2017 launch of the commercial taxi service, but it appears that testing is still ongoing at present.)
Do you have a handy dandy reference? I don’t doubt you, but it’s a bit of logistics trivia I haven’t come across before, and I’d like to read more about it.
I know helicopters in general have a high Ratios of Maintenance Man Hours. Like at least 4 hours per hour in the air. I imagine under sandy combat conditions, it would be worse.
This PDF predates the war, yet it already bemoaned they didn’t have enough Apaches combat ready.
http://www.gao.gov/assets/150/149732.pdf
I read somewhere else they basically take the whole thing apart and put it back together at 500hrs of flight time.
