Rarely engage in public discourse and like Howard Hughes prefer to stay inside with pizzas slipped under the door, but have chipped in on the prospects of UAM as agin those for drones generally. UAM is, or was until AI came along, what investors were most exercised about at least until war broke out (again) in the Middle East.
Where aviation is concerned, we live in a mass market world in which you're either big or else nothing at all... whether that applies to manufacture or services. Look at what you use on a daily basis to get by, and who owns and operates it. Aviation is no different, and the reason for instance the world's richest man is in a flame-war of his own with one among Ireland's richest: who runs the third most profitable airline.
The vast majority of people will never fly in any shape or form throughout their lives or else if they do, it will be in an airliner. General aviation is dying on its feet, sport aviation thrives if only on a largely kit-built basis. If air taxis are to succeed on any scale it will be in China, for the reason that aviation has largely just opened up, the space is available for infrastructure and there are no holds barred in terms of both the planning and regulation required.
My father was a telephone engineer and bemoaned how places like Ireland could go down the digital route altogether faster because they were not ham-strung with the existing technology. Africa went a step further and skipped land-lines altogether in favour of going direct to mobile (or cell).
China has money and means to skip that bit requiring helicopters and do the same with the electrical transition, whether that applies to VTOL types or those airplanes now able to lift off and land on the sort of shorter runways that places like the UK is closing down at pace: desperate as it is for revenue from retail parks and housing.
A case in point of how the UK has turned itself deliberately, starting with Thatcher's efforts to sell off the family silver, from a manufacturing to a servant economy that services the whims of nations and wealthy individuals from elsewhere. Flying taxis fit into this nicely, catering to one more of those whims the world neither needs nor can afford.
Thus it was that talented and well-qualified architects show-cased its 'urban airport' concept in Coventry, backed by 'green' grants that look daily sillier as the prices rise at the petrol-pumps and we all turn off our gas-boilers in favour of an extra layer. The city of Coventry proved two things in WW2 viz. the effectiveness of bombs and guided missiles in destroying a place but ~ in the aftermath at Dresden ~ it's total incapacity to destroy the will of a nation in their defence.
The local council and government thus fell over themselves to provide land for the 'world's first vertiport', selecting an edge-of-town car-park and displacing its clients without I am guessing, a by-your-leave. The vertiport I suspect once the lager had been drunk and the finger-food consumed would like Thatcher's Britain remain as a monument to making the country great again, but instead reverted to a car-park.
In fact it is perfectly placed on the southern edge of the ring-road for town-centre and railway station adjoining... which is why it will be full of cars daily instead of a tent designed for electrical helicopters arriving and departing one at a time.
And here's the rub. Most people live in cities, and of those most in the suburbs and most have a car to maybe get to places like vertiports to take a flying taxi; except now there is nowhere to park, like a next-century version of the school-run.
So what does Daddy do? He says "Fuck it kids, let's drive to Disneyland and stop at a Maccies instead, eh?".
My co-correspondent is based in Holland and not Oz as I thought. Love the Dutch, the only people prepared to co-invest in the company that supplies the world from Taiwan with the chips it increasingly relies upon.
But I worked there as an Airbus captain at V-bird, a partner of an airline Dutch-bird. It went bust, as do most airlines unable to launch themselves into the mass-market stratosphere ~ but after it did, Dutch journalists wrote with some credibility that the two airlines had principally been a perfect means of laundering very large quantities of cash for (mass-market) drug cartels.
Pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap appears to work for drones in particular in an uncertain world, but less so for taxis which like the defunct high-speed rail-link would mostly have been used to ferry the wealthiest football-fans between London and the north, where the better teams play.
From the get-go there's always been more of the smell of money round aircraft than of castor oil, or more lately kerosene.
But combine the mass-market with computers and you've got what the airlines call 'yield management', meaning prices for EVERYTHING fluctuate with demand; see below for cost of a helicopter shuttle to the British F1 Grand Prix some three months away and ask yourself if that'll change if electrified?
It's one small race-meet for a man, but one giant spell on a sun-bed for humankind.
Ed. The founder of Vertical Aerospace was inspired to produce eVTOLs by one such helicopter ride whilst attending an F1 race in Brazil... maybe tho' he'd just Googled 'is driving across rio de Janeiro dangerous'.
