There's this thing called trains, it has worked for commuting since 1834.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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Do trains suddenly work really good for emergency medical transport or are you being lazy and just reacting to the headline?
No, I read the whole article, and came to the same conclusion as it, not ready for the general commuter. I'm aware eVTOL has other uses. I apologize if my getting directly to the point comes off as lazy or hostile.
Than why are you reiterating points the article makes itself?
I agree with the article in the sense that eVTOL isn't currently feasible for commuting, but the article doesn't mention that an appropriate solution for the modern and future commuter already exists, and doesn't require eVTOL technology. What the article missed is trains, that's exactly what I pointed out after reading (the whole article and not just looking at the title) because the article doesn't contain a single mention of trains or railways except as a means to mask eVTOL noise or as a usecase to inspect existing infrastructure, not as the solution itself. I framed it as the article ignoring it because that was indeed ignored as part of the solution to the issue of commuting, not organ transport or medivac.
God, I hope not
People have a hard enough time driving cars.
Imagine everyone driving in a quadcopter
If there is one thing my lazy reading of scifi has taught me, it mostly just matters if it looks cool bro
technology works like how orc science works in warhammer 40k because we are supposed to interpret that fantasy universe as aspirational!
They would have to be 100% autonomous
The "autonomous" cars that currently exist are remote controlled by people in different countries to lower the labor cost
Waymo admits that its autopilot is often just guys from the Philippines
Autonomous flight should be easier because there aren't road hazards to deal with or lanes,and system can talk to all the flying cars at once like drone swarm direction.
I know very little about aviation, but this seems wrong
No, ground vehicle autonomous navigation is the final frontier of robotics and always will be. The air and sea are a cakewalk compared to the chaos of land navigation.
This argument only makes sense if there isn't a giant rush of air traffic from quadcopter taxis and civilian transport.
If this were true then why hasn't all air traffic controller work been automated? Surely this would be the first step required before we have general adoption from the public?
UAVs became tried and true equipment long before USVs and ESPECIALLY UGVs.. that is just the reality of it.
You are FAR more likely to die on the drive to an airport than on the flight, independent of whether the vehicles you are in are piloted by humans or robots.
This is precisely why I think self-driving cars are mostly a dumb idea, paradoxically dense urban centers are some of the most chaotic places to navigate, autonomy is a shit solution for it, mass transit works far better.
The mental capacity you have to just walk down a busy street or drive in a busy area absolutely shits on current autonomous vehicle capacity, so the best usecases of autonomous vehicles tend to be up high in the sky or out far away on the ocean...
Also did you read the article? These are being proposed FOR MEDICAL TAXI USE primarily which is not at all what you are implying with your handwaving?
Instead of ferrying commuters between points such as London City and Heathrow, Sindi argues a more realistic near-term application for eVTOLs is medical logistics. “Transporting pathology samples, blood, and organs between hospitals (as validated by the UKRI project, the Urban Ascent Medical Air Bridge). This saves lives and is economically viable because the value of the cargo justifies the cost of flight.”
No you didn't read the article did you..?
You are right, this happened in war, as I stated makes sense above when you don't care about life and cost.
We are testing in production and opening the door to higher adoption.
My questions are, what is this solving that manned helicopters don't already solve? Is a new industry, technology, and regulation set required to solve this issue? Do we have to flirt with flying cars for the general public and "AI" when we discuss medical logistics?
Perhaps I'm to skeptical and cynical, but this seems more like a PR peice designed to sell an idea to me than anything that would really save lives or be economically viable.
edit major one I forgot is the wonderfully weird physics of Blown Lift, aerodynamics is goofier than you think I don't know how else to say it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blown_flap
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2026/march/pilot/blown-wing-ultra-stol
“One of the most impressive aspects of the EL2 is that there’s really no change in handling qualities throughout its speed range. The ailerons remain effective at low speed and there’s no reason to avoid using them at high angles of attack.”
It is the nature of a lot of aviation stuff being so heavily dependent on technical details specific to a project that a lot of information essentially comes out in "press release" esque ways, I try to minimize it but definitely aerospaceglobal reads like that sometimes... but also the information is genuinely good too so shrugs.
To answer your specific question what you are missing here in your cynicism are three major things that break your thinking on this.
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Electric aircraft don't make a lot of sense in many ways since batteries... but also they do since alternative energy is getting extremely price competitive and if you have a massive wind turbine that could be spinning but the grid doesn't need it and an electric aircraft sitting right next to it capable of ferrying medical patients or logistics between two major nodes such as a hosptial to a hospital in a dense city area... well... there is an obvious capacity here that becomes aparent. In other words it can't be both true that electric aircraft with electric batteries are a pipe dream AND that alternative energy is actually very cost competitive when it is available it is just the problem is matching production to demand......
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Electric engines change the kind of aircraft you can make, make sure to understand that what made multirotor drones possible is the clock rates on chips for drones became fast enough to send speed corrections to a quadcoptors four motors to keep it stable. Before that the chaotic nature of the problem of maintaining stability was out of reach of chip speeds and the solution needed to be mechanical A.K.A. traditional helicopter designs. What microcontrollers with high clock rates and electric motors do is make it feasible to have many smaller simple rotors placed at aerodynamically optimal places in a way that it would never make sense with combustion engines. Imagine a similar aircraft with a seperate combustion engine for each propeller or a powershaft going to each one somehow... and you can clearly see it would be a nightmare that only a child would sketch out because it looks cool but importantly with electric motors they are so much more efficient, have so much more torque and are so much simpler that we are looking at a radically different set of design constraints here and you need to understand that.
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The aesthetic that is pushed with this is basically "rich people can get to where they want to go in a more noisey fashion!" and yeah that is a vaporwave promise absolutely, but in dense urban areas there are plenty of very real use cases for short flight fairly light cargo missions that could meaningfully impact people's lives if the capabilities of these aircraft are considered and used intelligently.
I understand the cynicism though, and I am not saying that this isn't also stupid in the ways you are saying but it is nuanced and also the physics is undeniable beyond how stupid the framing of all of it is.
Thank you, I hadn't considered the electric engine part of this, which does seem to bring some huge benefits.
Flying cars would be limited in altitude and would operate more like taxi drones controlled from the ground in safe zones. There's a startup in Vancouver BC building out this plan. There is no way you are handing flight controls to non pilots, people can barely reverse without hitting something
I am not an expert, I'm just noticing the trends of capitalism and technology, so I could be very wrong.
However, I think autonomous flight only really makes sense in war, and even then, only for cheap drones/payloads. Where the operator doesn't care if life is lost or if accidental destruction happens.
I think if we see autonomous vehicles (of any kind) based on current technology, it will continue to be a disaster and more of a sales gimmick or cost saver than something that is actually useful. With sub standard safety standards and deregulation being common place.
Telsas on full self driving run into school buses with a red blinking stop sign.
Waymos have even more tech and are remote controlled by a cheap outsourced labor force.
I'm really not hopeful unless there is a giant leap in autonomous tech and even then, I'm staying far away.
Tesla doesn't use Lidar, their system is actually just cameras and a prayer. It should never have been called autonomous driving, nor allowed as is.
But roadways are imperfect; Missing markers, faded paint, pedestrians, bikes, dogs, all doing unpredictable things.
We trust our autonomous Skytrain here in Vancouver, because conditions are controlled.
To apply it to air you have predefined routes and craft is forces to follow a predetermined flight plan, but centrally controlled. With a mesh net to other craft in the air.
GPS can be shifty in some areas, so there would also have station navigation, etc to guide the craft. And inter craft checking to get a mastered location.
As for falling out of the sky due to failure, yes, that's a huge problem LOL
And what are the advantages over a tram ?
Not much. We already have the skytrain system here (which is a raised rail system connecting cities and intra city travel) and it also connects to the sea ferries to cross the river, and busses.
So a point to point air travel won't add a whole lot of value in my opinion.