Re:Quantum Air buys Bye's electric airplanes
by aedocw on Sunday August 25, 2019 @11:45AM
(#20793555)
No one who has ever flown a plane in moderately busy airspace (like desirable urban centers) would talk about transitioning ATC to something without humans.
As it stands, in non-controlled airspace, it already works like this. Pilots announce their intentions and coordinate with each other. This only works in areas with very low traffic.
Re:Quantum Air buys Bye's electric airplanes
by rbanffy on Sunday August 25, 2019 @12:18PM
(#20793764)
Nobody would suggest human coordination in this scenario. It's more like machines negotiating directly or assisting the negotiation so that all craft in the given volume agree on what it looks like and what it'll be in the next few minutes.
There are some very interesting research topics in there in how to achieve this distributed consensus and how to deal with malicious actors trying to disrupt the air traffic in the region.
Battery prices can be offset by cheaper electricity and/or carbon taxes.
Less noisy planes should also be able to operate in areas jets aren't, such as extremely desirable urban centers. eVTOL is even better in that, but developments that would make it rival fixed wing are coming, eventually. If a V-22 can do it, so can civilians.
ATC is the choking point - we'll have to take a lesson from the phone system, which transitioned from having human operators routing calls to all of us recognizing dial-busy-ring tones and being able to dial numbers ourselves.