Vertical Magazine's most read story of 2022, judged upon page visits? ZEVA's efforts to equip every garage with a personal aircraft. There are parallels between this effort and that of TELEDRONE:
(a) Were among around twenty air vehicles to appear at GoFly's final
(b) Feature a standing passenger (tho' prone in ZEVA's case underway)
(c) Balance thrust against redundancy with the use of eight propellers
(d) Were begun five or six years ago (2017 and early 2018)
(e) Are members of the Vertical Flight Society
(f) Yet to fly a passenger instead of mannekin.
Read into it what you may, but it does suggest a decidedly untapped potential. Yet the question during what remains of the 2020s is whether personal air vehicles will persist given advances in technologies that made them possible... or will we revert to forms of flying car or taxi with any number of seats left unused for the majority of journeys?
The 100% occupancy rate of PAVs is better for the future of our planet, regardless of our own. While trains or buses are decidedly efficient when full, they rarely are. Beside this, as I write they don't run at all in the UK due to a labour dispute, in common with bus drivers. In aviation things appear better due to ineffective unions, but I've flown empty airliners in my time, while a recent book on Concorde highlights the fact that it often flew with just three dozen seats occupied and required a half-tonne of fuel to be burned for every tonne it had to carry.
Whether the affect this has had on the climate was worth the cost of transporting a spoiled brats between London and Bermuda in half the time is worth pondering. This spoiled brat joined them during an hour's practise at take-offs and landings, however, and remains torn. He's convinced of a case for PAVs, however.
