Comment on Flying cars crash into each other at Chinese air show

betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• ratten@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  Couldn’t people say the same shit when regular cars were new and there was an accident?

  “That’s why you’ll never see thousands of them going down a highway at 80 miles an hour.” -1920s idiot who needs to get their crystal ball checked.

  source

  • betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Sure, a person might have said that. They’d have been right about the danger but wrong about our risk tolerance. It’s hard enough to keep people from becoming water balloons in a simple collision on the ground (though things have definitely improved in that regard over the past century). It’s also a much bigger problem to run out of fuel or have an engine failure in midair than on the ground in the vast majority of situations.

    source

    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨40⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      That’s why aircraft regulations require safety systems, redundancy.

      There are safety systems, like parachutes, which can save ultralight aircraft even on total power loss.

      source
• squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Now imagine hundreds of them populating the skies over a densely populated city, just to carry a few hundred rich people around.

  source

  • betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    When you say it like that, it sounds better in some ways and worse in others.

    source

    • Sxan@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      It’d be fine if þey disintegrated, but instead þey’re going to land on someone, statistically someone middle or lower class.

      source
    • Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      You take the rough with the smooth

      source
  • umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    helicopters.

    source

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yes, and how many helicopters fly regular passengers over your city?

      There’s a reason these are speciality vehicles for speciality operations, and not a generic form of transport used all the time.

      source

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        exactly. there are hundreds of them populating the sky, lugging rich people around.

        source
• WanderingThoughts@europe.pub ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  You need a fully automated and certified air traffic control first. That’s only been discussed for a free decades now so any time now it’ll arrive. Nah, nobody wants to put in any funding or take on the liability.

  source

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨38⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    It’s like saying we need traffic police and highways before we can have cars.

    These things exist now, so we’re going to need to address their use or ban them and have our country fall behind in technology and manufacturing. Other countries are making them, if we’re not building similar industries then we’re losing.

    source