Granted, this is a new type of transport.. but the current metrics on air flight safety do not support this idea. Take offs and landings are the most dangerous part of flight, and still account for planes being more dangerous _per trip_ than most other modes of transport.

Planning to create a plane that fills this space is planning to create a plane that suffers a lot of accidents for almost no real gain over current options.

Buses are incredibly safe. If you want better busses, build those instead. This obsession with floating to your destination above the ground does not seem wise or worthwhile.

It's trivial to create a luxury "bus" in just about any form factor you want to from a full-size motor coach down to a limo. Presumably the economics don't work in most cases. Of course, if you're talking small municipal airports in the US, the vast majority of people living there, especially those who can afford somewhat upscale transportation, probably own a car.

Yes. Most small towns don't even have bus service to the nearest hub airport, because economically it doesn't work. And there is no arrangement of costs that will work out to electric aircraft being cheaper to own and operate than a bus.

In a sufficiently river/sea/ /hill/valley rich environment it might work if one can save on infrastructure cost for extra expensive roads. This is not most of the world though.

You already have bush planes in places like Alaska. A cheaper/better bush plane has probable merit but, as you say, that's not most places.

> And with the planes being so small, there's really no need for TSA security or anything

There's no need for larger planes either for zero-risk travelers.

> With electrification, aviation can become so cheap…

Fuel is not the dominant cost in general aviation. Electrification alone won’t make it cheap.

>Fuel is not the dominant cost in general aviation. Electrification alone won’t make it cheap.

It's not about fuel efficiency. In fact, any electric aircraft with current battery tech is always going to be less efficient than a jet, because jets burn oxygen from the air.

It's about maintenance. The fixed hourly cost of aviation is almost entirely based on the cost of maintenance. And a fleet of electric aircraft will be orders of magnitude cheaper to maintain than turboprops and jets. That can unlock whole new business models of small scale commercial aviation that aren't possible today.

When you say "orders of magnitude cheaper" you can't possibly mean even 10×. There is more to aircraft maintenance than just engine repairs and overhauls. Electric aircraft will still require similar amounts of maintenance on the airframe, control surfaces, avionics, and interior. And some of the powered lift designs have literally dozens of separate motors and rotors, each of which require periodic manual inspection.

Electrification alone won't make air charters cheap. The aircraft themselves, pilot salaries, maintenance, and facilities will all still be nearly as expensive. We are decades away from the FAA allowing autonomous or remote piloted aircraft to carry paying customers in commercial service.