Comment Re:5-10 years after the technology has proven itse (Score 1) 85
This is a non-starter before we even get to thinking about regulations. I doubt the Uber guy is thinking about typical light aircraft (and weather capability immediately makes doing that completely impractical outside of places with 350 VFR days per year), but probably on the lines of scaled-up quadcopters that can carry people, flying around cities - no doubt based on the recent prototype seen at CES.
It works fine for small RC drones, but the thing is: quad/hexcopters (etc) basically brute force themselves into the air. They are tremendously inefficient and scale badly. To keep the rotor inertia down low enough you can use simple fixed pitch propellers (rather than complex (expensive) collective pitch rotors like a helicopter) they are going to have to be small and high RPM.
The racket will be unbearable. If you think city noise is bad right now just with road traffic, it will be ten times worse if you had even just hundreds of quadcopters big enough to lift people flying around. There will be no refuge anywhere in a city from the unbelievable and annoying racket these things will make - due to the differeing rotor rpms on just one vehicle, there will be an annoying set of beat frequencies generated by the lift systems to add to the ungodly racket from the fundamental frequency.
Today you can go into a city park, even in a big noisy city, and get away from the noise. Walk a couple of minutes into any of the big London parks and it's pretty peaceful. This will be a distant history if there are hundreds of people-carrying quadcopters (or indeed any -copter type vehicle) flying around the city. People living and working in the city just won't stand for it. To add to that, most people don't like flying to start with and only do so because it's the only practical way of crossing an ocean or going somewhere 2000 miles away. In a city, given the choice, a lot of people would rather take a metro system than board some kind of absurdly noisy automated flying machine.