Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030 Boeing-backed autonomous aircraft startup Wisk expects to be operational by the end of the decade, at which time it will provide customers with air taxi at a price point comparable to an UberX ride, according to APAC VP Catherine MacGowan. "There's a very comprehensive process for us to go through to be approved, to be …
My evil little mind took no time at all to consider this scenario:
Load flying taxi with incendiaries or explosives (no passengers, no pilot) and request a flight to your desired destination.
Icon to the right for obvious reasons...
What countermeasures are in place or planned?
Countermeasures are not needed. Light aircraft, due to their limited weight, can do little damage to buildings and other infrastructure as is evidenced by the many times light aircraft have accidentally impacted buildings. Even "packed with explosives", since the payload is limited, again they can only cause limited damage.
This is why terrorists chose airliners on 9/11, and typically choose car/truck bombs to attack crowded locations or events.
Also, you won't be able to just tell these drones to go anywhere. They'll be limited to specified "vertiports".
No, terrorists chose large jumbo jets because it would add to the terror for future fliers. All it really did was end hijacking forever as the social contract between the hijackers and victims was broken. Do as you're told and nobody gets hurt no longer exists, and the immediate response by the victims is charge the hijackers before they kill us all. I know if I'm on a plane being hijacked, the instant it's announced I'm attacking. Better to die in action than to sit there waiting on it, because either way a hijacking IS a death sentence. Your only choice is whether or not you let them accomplish their goal. If you stop them and survive, bonus.
But now, an autonomous plane that can carry 4 adults plus luggage? You're looking at probably 1200lbs of payload there. I can think of plenty of nasty stuff to do with a self driving aircab that would clear city blocks. And, it has the added terroristic threat of making people afraid when they hear an air cab coming in. There's one particularly nasty thing that could be evil literally for miles. Not posting it though as I'm not giving anyone any ideas.
"...reluctance is understandable given the recent spate of accidents from autonomous cars, which don't even leave the ground and travel far slower than aircraft"
While the height factor would make any potential accident in an air taxi far more serious (indeed probably fatal) than a small prang in a robo-car, autonomous navigation is far, far easier for vehicles that are free to move in 3 dimensions in a much less congested space. Of course there needs to be a sort of local air-traffic controller, and as with other aircraft it is the takeoff and landing that are the riskiest, rather than flight itself. If it's regulated by aviation authorities to the same standard as aircraft (hopefully also to a better extent than FAA-Boeing!!!), combined with the incentives from the company side (essentially one single crash with passenger fatality could send the company instantaneously bust) mean that I expect reliability to be quite high.
On the other hand, delivering flights at the same cost point as an Uber is a WTF?? However much volume the flying taxis are produced in, it's never going to be as cheap as a saloon car, and it clearly takes more energy to go from A to B in the air than on the ground. That's not accounting for extra initial calls for aviation regulation, and additional ongoing costs for the traffic management. In fact the company is probably betting on the fact that people are willing to pay (much) more than Uber prices to avoid traffic (not to mention the 'cool' factor)
They're going to map every aerial cable, around the airports. Sorry, I mean Vertiports. [Spit!] I think they should go with Mark Kermode here (BBC film reviewer), who had a mental block on air and couldn't remember the word airport - so heard himself saying "aeroplane station".
Anyway the revolutionary thing is supposedly going to be price and numbers. And I presume it's very short take-off and landing. But you are going to fly from little city centre airports, if you can get planning permission, to litle private fields and regional airports. So you'll control the height of buildings and infrastructure in the airspace and approaches to the airports, as you normally would. And then the thing will cruise at 2,000ft.
They don't need to. Normal flight is from 2500-4000 ft so there is nothing human built in the way, and mountains tend not to move that often so they can map out such areas to avoid. When landing if they land vertically they won't need to worry about stuff like power lines, that would only be the case if they sort of glide in horizontally.
I'm thinking "vertiport" means they intend to take off and land pretty much vertically. They could sort of "glide" horizontally somewhat while doing so, but only in directions from a given vertiport that don't present issues with TV/radio towers, tall buildings, or power lines. Those are known obstructions, and while they change more frequently than mountains they don't pop up overnight and permission has to be obtained to build them, so there would be plenty of time to update the "forbidden directions" list from a vertiport so affected.
Agreed that there is a lot less to run into in the air. But to offset that, there's the maintenance issue. Broken cars generally limp, coast, or are pushed to the side of the road. Broken aircraft on the other hand DROP. And without a pilot to try to pick a safe landing spot, they will likely drop on something or somebody.
These are likely to be safer than small aircraft or helicopters in that rather than relying on a single propeller like a small Cessna or a single main rotor like a normal sized helicopter, they have a number of small rotors with independent motors.
It is probably specced to maintain altitude with one rotor gone, and even losing two at max passenger weight may not be able to maintain altitude but likely could make some sort of mostly controlled landing (at worst a thud rather than a splat)
Never mind height making an accident more serious.
With autonomous flight & doubtless little in the way of security checks, there is plenty of potential for someone to engineer a crash - and doubtless add lots of extras to make things worse, be that simple explosion to release lots of ball bearings to rain down in a wide area, through to more weaponised stuff like white phosphorous etc.
Depending how poor security is, night not even need a "suicide bomber", miscreant might just be able to load on "bomb" luggage.
Even if passenger in the craft is mandatory & checked by cameras, I'm guessing there would be a (decent survival chance) way out for a parachute equipped miscreant, to avoid "suicide bomber" scenario.
For me at least the airframe sounds interesting. The only thing is, over here it would (if it were an airplane, i.e. with a pilot on board) be classified as a multi engine airplane. The current regulations are a bit old fashined I guess.
Now, if it were a bit lighter, you might be able to get this as "experiemental / ultra light", though this comes with other baggage (my friend who is building his own plane in his garage told me).
At least it serves as an innovation platform for conventional aircraft ...
I've found a rather major problem with Boeing's design here.
It will operate between 2,500 and 4000 feet, with a range of 90 miles, a speed between 110 and 120 knots, and a charge time of 15 minutes.
The range and charge time are fine. But a plane that can't go below 2,500ft and can't go slower than 110 knots is going to have serious difficulty loading and unloading the cargo passengers. Obviously they can get out with parachutes, but how are they going to get in?
Is it a bit like Speed? If the speed / altitude drops below miniums the bomb in the aircraft explodes? I'm sure that if Boeing thought about this more, they could remove that bomb, and have room for an extra paying passenger.
There's an easy method to get passengers onboard too: Link to Wiki
Lift from those vertical take off fans is air mass flow rate time multiplied by change in air velocity. The power required is half mass flow rate times velocity squared. Those tiny little fans limit the mass flow rate requiring a large velocity to get the lift for four people plus luggage, The large velocity gets squared to a huge amount of power - hence the low endurance. The real problem will be the noise during take of and landing (and probably flight at maximum altitude). Reducing the maximum payload to one adult and increasing the fan diameter to 6m would make a start on the noise problem while adding a whirling blades of death issue.
Next up, this does not scale with human air traffic control. It gets interesting when black hats start transmitting on the congestion control radio network. A simple denial of service level attack would have major consequences.
I agree with the technical particulars; it's very energy-consuming to hover and extremely disruptive to everything on the ground which is not firmly fixed.
I often think this sort of thinking is part of the USian 'dream': First, the wanderer prospecting alone in the wilderness, then he rode into town on his horse: broody, quiet, menacing. After that his car had to get faster, bigger, noisier, heavier until we are presented with truly enormous vehicles using as much road as possible. Now the roads are gridlocked, the cowboy wants to go off into the sunset via airspace; as long as he looks the part.
What's the problem in putting thought into swift, efficient public transport? Ideally, door-to-door. Or pub-to-door........ ---->
What's the problem in putting thought into swift, efficient public transport?
One big problem in many areas is low population density:
US: 37 people per km²
England: 400+ people per km²
Netherlands: 500+ people per km²
In the state of Montana (triple the area of England) it's less than 3 people per km²
All of the albove, but while doing so, concider all the effort required to move one taxicab of people (2-6). Now imagine this as a service used to bring one passengers from ONE A320 to their inner city targets... And multiply it with average number of flights seen in one typical airport...
Here is a simulation for your convenience https://youtu.be/bK6O_js_Ucg?si=fF5usFaq3HsKL1tB
A completely autonomous flying vehicle transporting living fleshbags and their luggage, taking off and landing at possibly high traffic areas, with Boeing, a company known for their quality in aviation, backing up the investment. Truly something that is in high demand!
A setup entirely reliant on Beoing build quality, and Boeing's innovative software. These, the people who lied to the FAA about how much pitch authority MCAS required in order to balance out the extra lift their new engine cowlings caused - and then wrote the software so pisspoorly that it actually had infinte pitch authority and would carry on working until it crashed the aircraft. Oh, and also put it on the same circuit breaker as the trim motors, so you couldn't turn the fucker off without losing the trim motors you now desperately needed, because the trim had been run all the way to the stops becuase the software was coded wrong. Would have been illegal, but not that dangerous if they'd coded it as intended.
You want me to trust an autonomous vehicle flying over my city to that company? Hmm. Let me think about that. How about "No"? Perhaps, "Fuck no!"
I think I fancy flying in it even less. Especially if there are thousands of them.
And then when the CEO says they're going to be as cheap as ground taxis - you know the delusional thinking and bullshit is fully operational at this company.
"And then when the CEO says they're going to be as cheap as ground taxis - you know the delusional thinking and bullshit is fully operational at this company."
The part they left out is "until we run the ground taxis out of business, then we'll make up for it." And if it never happens, well that's a problem for the venture capitalists what forked over for the aircabs, innit?
The part they left out is "until we run the ground taxis out of business, then we'll make up for it." And if it never happens, well that's a problem for the venture capitalists
So, exactly like Uber then. Except Uber never got to try and kill all their passengers, because their "self-driving" car was so pisspoorly designed that it couldn't tell a cyclist wheeling her bike down the middle of the road from a tree, and decided since it wasn't sure what the thing in the road was - it wouldn't bother to stop. Which is some strange logic. But then they'd also disabled the emergency braking anyway, because it kept going off at random, so all it did was ping a bell at the driver, much too late for them to have any time to react. So I guess not stopping for anomolies in front of you, makes sense in the context of a system that keeps finding random reasons to stop. At least it does if you're a moron, who doesn't care who gets killed.
I'm sure Boeing's self-flying software will be much better. Oh yes! What was it happened to Starliner again?
"The aircraft would be supervised by a Wisk staff member on the ground, monitoring and taking on the role of communicating with air traffic control for several vehicles at a time"
Sullenberger famously pointed out two fundamentals of safe flying1: [a] constant detailed situational awareness and [b] the experience and willing to make quick decisions to depart from procedure in emergency to save the situation. To achieve these fundamentals, a pilot needs to be right up there in the air with the seat of their pants directly coupled to what's going on.
So two things militate against the ground staff controlling several of these 'vehicles' at once safely. Firstly, the situational; awareness is attenuated, particularly in respect of emergencies (note that all remotely operated drones to date have been expendable kn emergency), and secondly multi-tasking involves task switching which both slows reaction time and further reduces situational awareness. The task of a current air traffic controller (who does indeed typically supervise several planes at once) is much simpler than the task of flying even one plane, but the suggested scenario requires the ground staff to 'fly' several planes at once.
1 Highest Duty, pp 186-190 [Harper Collins 2009, paperback edition, ISBN 978-0-06-192469-9 (pbk.]
.
Please maintain the approximate number of significant digits when converting to avoid introducing false accuracy. (just like every bloody (non-tech) journalist ever)
The figures in freedom units won't be accurate to the inch so:
750m to 1250m (or 1km ±250m), range up to 145km and an airspeed between 200 and 225 km/h
Oh yes it is autonomous, so one extra passenger seat. But it has the same size of a regular heli, has downwash like any heli, suffers turbulence all the same... let's assume the machine can overcome all of this, fine. You can't just squeeze that thing where no human pilot dares to land, can you? You need the same helipads as human pilots do, right?
AND you are turning the potential pilot/supervisor of a fleet into a stressed ATC at the same time when he has to talk to the actual ATC on behalf of each one of the drones of his fleet. One flick of a button and he could be talking about drone A when he is supervisiing drone B on a completely different route.
Think about forgetting the KVM switch and throwing inputs on the wrong server. There is one way that could go right and a couple dozen ways it can go wrong.
Oh yeah, a lot of kinks to iron out.
There are plenty of ultra short haul routes around, mainly serving islands where electric aircraft would make sense.
What they get here is experience of operating loads of cheap little 4 seater jobs instead of going straight to the expensive 25 seater ones. Electric aviation is still young, any knowledge gained is valuable.
Australia has training models with electric motors.
( https://flyone.com.au/skycademy/ )
It is great for that particular application, because short 20 min flights, never leaving the same base, but... it is a fixed wing aircraft.
That training plane becomes a glider should the juice ever run out. One of the greatest barrier-to-entry for commercial pilots training is the cost per flight-hour on actual flying aircraft.
Can this thing autorotate?
Pilotless electric-powered VTOL flight is HARD in a number of ways. Battery life, power-to-weight ratio, achievable range, VTOL takeoff/landing. Add in the regulatory issues of operating drones in airport-adjacent airspace and over populated areas, and the additional issues with getting certification to carry passengers, and you're looking at development, certification, and operating costs that utterly rule out taxi-scale costs. (Not to mention the steep challenge of getting actual humans to trust themselves to a tiny pilotless airplane.)
This one won't fly. Fuggedabouddit.
Comparing automated drones to self-driving cars is not very illuminating.
Roads are far more crowded than the sky. There are no pedestrians or bicycles in the sky. There are no traffic signals or roadsigns to read. All aircraft that fly in controlled airpace carry transponders that broadcast their position and speed to other aircraft for collision avoidance.
It's a far easier environment for automation.
Good luck being successful without any onboard pilots. If the military couldn’t make autonomous flight work in their latest fighter jet without being hacked by foreign military operatives, why would anyone think a civilian company will be able to do it? Whoever rides in those things. Good luck to you. I won’t be. I fly airplanes for a living, and I know what can happen in normal circumstances. Things can go sideways quickly.
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