Ain’t no way you want flying taxis in Manhattan. If two collide or one fails, you could kill dozens of people.

Maaaaybe instead of the tunnels and bridges, to increase throughput during rush hours, but even then we’re trying to have fewer vehicles in Manhattan, not more.

Also, I cannot imagine what it would be like to go through an intersection during the winter. You would be hit with a wall of cross-cutting wind tunneling down 50 blocks that no airborne device is going to handle well. Absolute nightmare.

I’m not an expert by any means, but one of the major impediments I would imagine to flying taxis carrying people is safety; there’s a _lot_ that has to be done before people board an airplane in terms of checks, paperwork, planning, etc.

The dream of “order a flying taxi on your phone and it takes you wherever you want in five minutes” isn’t really compatible with aviation safety culture (at least at the pilot level in the US). That’s not to say it can’t be done, but you probably need a lot of really good PR people to figure out how to say “we want to remove the safety controls from this so we can make money with it” and have people buy it.

i don't think mountain rescue is asking for a better vehicle. traditional helicopters work.

flying taxi startups, drone companies, jetpack companies, and all the other fantastical flying startyps keep trying to say they have applications in mountain rescue, but i'm pretty sure that's providing a lot more benefit to the flying taxi startup's pitch deck than it is to any mountain rescue operation.

China calls it the low-altitude economy, and besides human transportation there is a lot that can be done. Personally, I believe that propeller-driven devices are too dangerous and noisy, but there might be innovations coming out of China that Europe can't

What attribute should they have to make them more suited than helicopters? Silence ? Energy efficiency ? No landing pad ?

> any kind of outdoor rescue

You know we have these things called "helicopters", right?

> Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan)

The things people will do to not build bike paths.

It's hard to pick just one reason, but off the top of my head:

* Any failure tends to turn flying things into unguided missiles

* Noise is extremely hard to control -- I did an FAA helicopter discovery lesson, and oof

* Cities tend to have difficult to manage wind currents and hit-or-miss visibility. I was in a skyscraper across from one hit by a helicopter trying and failing to land in 2019 -- there's reasons for city no-fly zones

* Limited landing sites makes them highly situational in the first place, unless you want your streets to be helipads, which you don't

These are all fairly intrinsic and not mitigable. I can think of more issues more in the sticks, but you get the idea.