Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Start the Countdown Until the First Crash of a Taxi Drone Aircraft

Dubai is about to go live with a drone taxi service mostly because they want anything which is expensive.  If you have enjoyed how they have been destroying incredibly expensive sports cars, you will absolutely love what they do with taxi drones.  (RT:  Taxi drones set for July launch of passenger service over Dubai (VIDEO))

How many parts of this are bad ideas, huh?


The drone aims to be in operation by July 2017. © EHANG / YouTube


Dubai is aiming to become the world’s first city to have passenger-carrying drones operating in its skies. Speaking at a summit in the city on Monday the Emirate’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) said they are on track to launch them by July.

The RTA have been working alongside Chinese firm EHang, whose autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) the EHang 184 looks set to taxi passengers across Dubai’s impressive skyline.

“The RTA is making every effort to start the operation of the AAV in July 2017,” RTA executive director and chair Mattar Al Tayer said at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Monday.

- RT


There's some corny cliched crap to start and the actual flight test starts at about +0:25 into it.




The premise is there's a control center which keeps these things from crashing into each other since they couldn't do that autonomously because they have no transponders.  They not only don't know where other taxi drones are flying, they don't have any way to determine it for themselves.

The control center sounds like a peachy idea, at least if you're a gearhead who never goes outside, but what happens when someone else launches a competitive taxi drone service.  You will have a bigger crashfest than the Daytona 500.

Note:  that 500 is where Earnhardt died and it won't be forgiven.  NASCAR did change safety rules after that, however.  It's remarkably safe considering what they do, actually ... as contrasted by some yokel in Dubai driving a Lambo.  You know he's a crash waiting to happen and YouTube is full of them.


Ed:  the competing services need to link their networks!

You're assuming they're compatible, darlin'.  Humans don't build things that way and if you don't believe that check out how Apple changes the plugs on its computers about as fast as the idiots in Washington change Daily Savings Time.

Note:  Washington tried to pull a stunt to dominate Europe into changing their dates for DST but, not surprisingly, the Euros told them to piss off and now the clocks are jacked internationally for two weeks every six months.  The same geniuses are in charge of the money and what geniuses let that happen, huh?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Earnhardt died in a simple crash
He probably would have lived if he wore a full face helmet rather than the open face. They also said he safety harness was routed incorrectly and bunched.
Nascar has worked very hard on safety but they were not at fault

Unknown said...

Thanks as I thought he died from the same problem as Senna in which his head was allowed too much movement.

That robocar is a delight, huh? You know you're happening when it's impossible to tell which part of the car is the front.

Anonymous said...

His head did move too much but if he was using state of the art helmets he might have survived

Unknown said...

That's so damn grim but the other racers always learn from it eventually. It's surprising the crap that's legal for helmets for street. Seems to me you either wear a quality helmet or you don't. These joke helmets in-between shouldn't even be legal.