How many SUVs do you know of that are crashing into houses at 200mph?
Also, what is the relative mass of the electric airplane with a bunch of lithium batteries, versus the SUV?
What parts of the house might be hit by a falling airplane, versus an SUV crashing into the house from the road?
What is the fire risk of a bunch of lithium batteries having fallen out of the sky, versus the SUV crashing into the house?
There's lots of factors to be considered here, but overall I'd say there's a lot more risk of damage, injury, and death with the falling electric airplane than with the SUV.
https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/driver-crashes-through-gas-...
https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/car-into-kohls
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/vehicle-careens-into...
https://turnto10.com/amp/news/local/massachusetts-wrentham-v...
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/video-shows-suv-crashing...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/dead-hospitalized-car-plows-dc-res...
https://www.gainsberglaw.com/blog/cars-crash-into-buildings-...
I could find thousands of these.
An airplane falling from the sky is far less likely to hit anyone than a car suddenly accelerating into a store because the driver is flooring the accelerator instead of the brake. These incidents are so common that they have an extensive wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration
You can find some numbers at https://www.storefrontsafety.org/statistics.html They claim this happens around 60 times a day.
Again at least with streets I know that an SUV will only crash close to streets with an air taxi it could crash everywhere.
Kindergarden? Yes.
Can we protect a kindergarden from an accidental SUV acceleration? Of course we can. Easy.
Yes of course, per passenger mile SUVs are far more likely to drive into a building than an air taxi is to fall out of the sky.
> Can we protect a kindergarden from an accidental SUV acceleration? Of course we can. Easy.
But we don’t.
All of the things that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31719861 wrote, and:
> You’d expect there to be far more people at the street level than on top floors.
There are far more people who live near the sky than live near a large road.
> It’s more difficult to fuck things up in the air,
No, it really isn't? Aircraft driver licencing and training is notoriously much harder, longer than the equivalent motor-car licencing and training. Car drivers don't have to learn about stalls for starters. The training is there because a) it's much harder to do right, there are more ways to go wrong and b) potentially greater impact.
The common failure mode for a car is that it stops moving at the side of the road. The equivalent for an aircraft is that it falls out of the sky onto whatever is below. We are not ready for a lot more of that.
remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Glasgow_helicopter_crash
And in any case, even if such accidents would be worse, they’d also be vast less common. It’s more difficult to fuck things up in the air, and the level of training required to operate an aircraft is far higher than the level of training required to operate a SUV.
Drivers famously can’t even keep track of which pedal is the brake and which is the throttle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration