China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed

I definitely don't want to belittle the achievement, but I would imagine that creating safe self-driving helicopters is much easier than creating safe self-driving cars. (At least as long as the skies are just as empty as they are today. Once it's full of things like the roads, that will be a different topic)

Can you expand on how you reason it would be easier?

More degrees of freedom, easier collision avoidance. The mechanical part is a lot harder, of course, but the "self driving" part is a lot easier. We had autopilot and auto-land in planes well before we had anything of the sort in cars.

Open space. Fewer obstacles up there in the sky, separated by large distances. Simple trajectories. We've already had autopilot systems for decades.

1 word: birds.

Anyway, detecting and avoiding obstacles should be in the menu. Maybe not as complex as at street level with people and cars doing unexpected things, but maybe with some added complexity that need to have into account like weather, inertia and things near landing sites.

Self-driving car senses objects and must make difficult decisions: Is this radar reflection from stationary light pole or from a moving object? Is this a parked car or a moving car? Will this pedestrain/biker jump on the roadway? What if the car next to me going to turn left sharply?

No such thing exists in the air. The air is mostly empty, there are no stationary objects next to the route. If there is a building, aircraft can fly as far as 500 meters away from it - try finding a driveable road with no obstacles at that distance. There is no people or large animals. There is not even curb to hit.

Importantly, I bet there are no legacy vehicles in the approved routes - and I am sure they will have some sort of V2V tech to ensure that all objects in the air will transmit their position and intention.

A self driving car needs to be able to reliably drive within ~1 foot of arbitrary obstacles, recognize junk in the road, recognize people in the road, obey vague hand signals from random cops, obey every weird traffic sign in the world, obey every traffic law, and disobey signs and laws when convention requires it.

Helicopters don’t have to deal with any of that. There won’t be any random obstacles. No human drivers to contend with. No conflict between legality and practice to navigate.

everything with a mass over 1kg+- in the air, is carrying a "gps" and something that is transmitting its location, and all air traffic world wide is(theoreticaly) assigned a flight path for each trip,witha specific flight level, ie: the planning is 3d, so the density per layer, never gets very high, and there are specific paths taken to change layers, there are never any dogs, or horses, or people trying to deek, there are no signs or maps, and in case of fully automated vtol taxis, navigation will be to mm accuracy, with likely a routine to land fully autonomously on loosing the network, and a backup ballistic recovery parachute, if power is completly lost or another emergency situation occurs. and also likely is that forward speeds will be low enough, that collisions with birds will be a low probability, and rotors will likely be schrouded, keeping the idiots heads attached when determinidly trying for that gota have selfie.

Airplanes already broadcast their position! It's called ADS-B.

I'm not sure you can avoid birds like a skateboad running onto the street. If anything I expect dynamic avoid areas or timed "no fly" zones depending on bird mass. Maneuvering to avoid birds seems like a recipe for disaster.

Not every airplane does that. Commercial planes mostly do, but its not mandated under all circumstances as far as I know. (Speaking for my region only)

All commercial planes have it at this point. And most part 91 airplanes (General Aviation) have it at this point. Without ADSB you cannot fly in or near class A, B, or C airspace and must stay below 10,000 feet. Which largely makes having an airplane useless for most people.

There are still airplanes flying that have no electrical system but even then some of them have retrofitted a system.

This is not correct. There is no hard requirement for GPS nor anything that requires “something that transmits its location”. There is also no requirement for a flight plan or communication with ATC.

I can take off from an uncontrolled airport with no GPS, no transponder, no plan, and no radio and as long as I’m in the correct airspace I’m completely legal and within my right to do so.

There are some differences with these rules through out the world.

I was answering with the purposes of flight-taxis in mind. I doubt that they will fly in high altitude and deem it quite likely that they might want to pass uncontrolled airspace at some point. And if you're flying in uncontrolled airspace you just can't count on the presence of it. In fact, missing transponders are an occasional source of accidents in these spaces. There are lots of gliding enthusiasts that aren't equipped.

P.S.: Commercial planes (esp. big ones) should have hardly any contact points with flying taxis.

This is just plain wrong. With glider planes, you can fly around wherever you like (in the non-restricted airspace) and aren’t required to have ADS-B or FLARM in Europe. Most people don’t do it but you could entirely rely on visual detection to prevent collisions.

If a drone flies at a speed that gives birds time to take notice and react/avoid, does it remove the danger ? I wonder if there is wide variation among species.

No they are not.

I get what you are thinking. Detection, maneuvering and trajectory planning are all much easier than on a road. If you mandate built in transponders collision avoidance is also easy.

But what you are forgetting is everything that isn't normal operations. What do you do if anything fails? A car can just stop, break failures, even steering failures can all be reasonably mitigated. This is not the case when you are in the air. Any failure mode needs fast and accurate reactions, even when critical systems have failed. That is why a passenger plane has two pilots. A modern passenger plane can do most of the flying by itself, yet the pilots need to be there.

Aerospace standards are higher and more difficult to adhere to, ensuring any kind of reasonable safety is extremely difficult. How many of these flying into sky scrapers are acceptable?

This thing has 8 motors. It’s easy to imagine that it could have 8 independent batteries and could be able to perform a controlled descent if two fail. Similarly, it could have redundant sensors and use commodity “majority rules” logic circuits where all calculations are run three times. On top of that, they can already cut over to ground control if the computer can’t proceed.

With all that, it’s “just” a software problem.

>This thing has 8 motors. It’s easy to imagine that it could have 8 independent batteries and could be able to perform a controlled descent if two fail. Similarly, it could have redundant sensors and use commodity “majority rules” logic circuits where all calculations are run three times. On top of that, they can already cut over to ground control if the computer can’t proceed.

Most of these are a total nightmare to implement. There is no such thing as a "controlled descent" into a dense urban center. Even keeping maneuverability with a single defective motor is a hard task, you need to develop and test for this.

>On top of that, they can already cut over to ground control if the computer can’t proceed.

So ground control can do what? The only reasonable way these could ever safely operate is with a high degree of sensor fusion, information about nearby crafts, their trajectories, obstacles, etc. combined together. You can not put a human into that system and have him make split-second decisions.

>With all that, it’s “just” a software problem.

Passenger plane automation is also "just" a software problem. It is just an enormously difficult software problem with exceedingly high stakes. The problem is not that it is "impossible", but that it is extremely difficult and not worth the risk getting it wrong.

Again, what is the acceptable failure rate for these things crashing into sky scrapers? If it is zero, we are very far away from them being able to take flight.

I wouldn't trust anything that can't auto rotate or glide to be safe to fly. A drone style copter falls out of the sky if there is any failures at all at any point in time in flight making it an inherently unsafe method of travel.

If it’s fewer fatalities per mile than cars, they’re probably ready today!

Air travel is more dangerous than car travel on a per trip basis.

These are also much more dangerous than cars in case of a failure.