We owe a debt to those YouTubers who painstakingly stitch together footage like this Ultimate Helicopter Crash Compilation:
Given the fairly recent availability of inexpensive means of video capture as compared to the length of time the helicopter has been with us, it also represents the tip of the iceberg. The reason that flight statistics are so benign when compared say to driving the car is because they are vastly skewed by the safety of flying in a highly regulated environment in which say airliners operate, or indeed commercial helicopters. It is as if the safety of using an automobile were represented by, say, the number of fatalities suffered by passengers using a train or a bus.
Rather than the crash-bang-wallop ethos attaching any number of videos, its author does hazard too the generic cause behind each set of accidents or incidents. This is worth consideration, because much of this 'real world' operational experience will be carried over to the use of eVTOLs in future.
And the fact is, watching this it is hard not to think that in many scenarios eVTOLs will actually be relatively safer than a helicopter, and especially for the up close and personal spheres of operation at which rotorcraft have long excelled.
These are the tail-end of the operating environment in which the bulk of helicopter missions are flown, as elaborated above in relation to the apparent safety of vertical take-off types as drawn from the statistics. Nonetheless safety in the modern world is a double-edged sword that operates within disconnected spheres. We work in overly regulated environments and drive around in cars that are paragons of safety, whilst at the same time being much more likely to be knifed to death or killed by a drug-fuelled joy-riders than ever.
It is worth considering how eVTOLs will evolve, therefore, because they will do so like all technology in ways we could not envisage and beyond control of society in general and the law in particular, as is the case with AI or indeed the disintegration of society fuelled by seemingly harmless platforms like YouTube or TikTok.
For the centre will not hold, and the technology is likely to devolve between relatively safe and stupendously capital-expensive means of replacing helicopters in moving the affluent between down-town locations... and the rest of us. That rest of us is likely to use comparatively inexpensive electrical means of taking to the air much like those in these videos did, only moreso. The accidents involving eVTOLs will therefore provide a richer source altogether of footage that, should you wish to, you could watch all night.
Could we sleep afterward, though, having helped bring such things to fruition? I think we could, for the reason whatever we don't develop then someone else surely will. It is thus incumbent upon pioneers in the field ~ and I don't count myself among them ~ to make personal air vehicles as reasonably safe as we could expect them to be at the outset.
