Given how most critical systems seem to be hackable, I’ll pass.
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Terrafugia’s product only folded the wings to fit on the road, you’d still need a closed off stretch of road or better yet a runway to take off, Sounds like the company is folding up US operations rather than go through the effort to make their product pass crash tests while still being airworthy.
The Airports that serve general aviation aren’t always near light rail and better served by the bus system. With the exception of Boeing Field.
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When I first worked for Digital they use to have their own Helicopter fleet which was available to all employees who needed to travel between facilities. I use to take it every once in a while. They would always land and takeoff like a plane at an angle. I asked the pilot one time why they didn’t just go straight and down like we use to do for LZ landings in Nam.
"Air-Traffic controllers get real upset when they all of a sudden see something on the radar just disappear off the screen. Kinda freaks them out. So they are required to slowly rise and descend at an angle like a small fixed wing plane. This will drastically limit where a vertical craft can land and take off from.
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If we end up with a big fleet of multirotor taxis, the ATC picture will change. They already accommodate medical, police, and even news choppers, all of which perform VTOL’s. And it’s not like the air taxi has to go vertically up to 1,000 feet or anything. It can take off, clear the buildings near it, then start moving forward.
Further, the air taxis won’t disappear off the screen no matter how long they hover. We’re already moving toward full adoption, excepting grandfathered older aircraft, of ADS-B, in which the aircraft reports its own position, speed, altitude, etc to ATC without even needing radar.
Beyond all that, if controllers decide they’re still nervous about air taxis, they’ll doubtless be told to get over it. The FAA has been nervous about small drones for a long time, but they knew they couldn’t get away with just banning them, so they made a bunch of regulations to foster their safe operation. They went a bit too far in those regs, but they did not issue an outright ban because their function is to facilitate use of airspace even with emerging technologies, not forbid it.
Drones don’t have people in them. And the FAA is still nervous about them. A couple years ago they shut down the airports in England.
Gatwick Airport drone incident - Wikipedia
My personal opinion is Driverless vehicles will be far more likely to become a reality.
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There is a name for these folks.
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No, but there have been several incidents where idiots with unmanned drones fly them in ways that endanger aircraft that do have people on them. There’s one where a drone got close enough to a commercial jet that the drone went out of control from the wake turbulence. And another where a helicopter just barely missed hitting it. So there’s a good reason the FAA is nervous about them, yet they’re not able to just blanket-ban them.
I think driverless vehicles probably will come about before air taxi/cars, but I do suspect that we’ll see VTOL electric multirotor transportation come about at some point.