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Rolls-Royce wants to build a flying taxi:
[...F]lying cars are happening again? Make up your mind! I can't handle all this uncertainty. Let's add it all up, shall we?
We have an Airbus and Audi partnership, currently trying to build a city car/flying taxi concept. We have Uber building a flying taxi hub in Paris. Then we have Kitty Hawk, a secret company founded by Google co-founder Larry Page -- it's working on a project called Cora. Yes, it's another flying taxi.
[...] But guess who else is joining the flying taxi race... Rolls-Royce.
Not the Rolls-Royce of luxury cars fame, Rolls Royce the engine company, that split from the car company decades ago.
That Rolls-Royce is looking to get into the flying taxi game and has drawn up plans to create an electric vehicle that could potentially reach speeds of 400 kilometres per hour (around 250 miles per hour). Rolls-Royce believes it could be ready to launch as early as the next decade, a timeline that's consistent with many of its potential competitors.
Wonder if they will give a special rate to Danny DeVito?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @11:55AM (1 child)
Fine, get back to me when they can guarantee at least 99% reliability for all electronic and electromechanical components and subsystems involved in building these, otherwise keep them away from overflying my property (an observation there regarding location/position, about a month back, the military played their usual 'lets fuck with the GPS without warning' games, for close on four hours my phone was reporting its position to be anywhere within a three mile radius of where it sat being charged..including being a half mile offshore mid river, this is not an uncommon occurrence locally, and happens for probably very sound operational security reasons, though it's a royal pain and normally lasts for less that an hour)
Artificially restricted market, there are people out there who want to be pilots, but can't afford it. It's a costly game (approx $70,000 to $100,000 for your license then maybe a further thousand hours flying time after gaining your license before some companies will consider hiring you)
(Score: 2) by SparkyGSX on Monday July 16 2018, @09:40PM
99%? That would mean one of them would crash on your house every other day!
Critical parts on aircraft without redundancy are required to have a failure rate of less than 1*10^-9 per flight hour.
To put that into perspective: the pilot, who on average will live to about 80 years, falls short by about a factor of 100, and that is just counting him dying of old age, not being incapacitated of messing up some other way.
If you do what you did, you'll get what you got