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Tagline: Cheap Transportation with Unmanned Aerial Drones
Mission: Replace oil and roads with electric aviation. Move small packages initially, and scale up to large freight and eventually people.
Technology: Electric aircraft are cheap and GPS enabled autopilots using Arduino are less than $500.
If electric aircraft are cheap, electric cars are much cheaper; flight takes a lot of energy! In a country with existing roads, is this difference really smaller than the cost of building and maintaining roads over time, thus "replacing roads"?
Cars use less energy, but aircraft are faster. Also, roads take up valuable ground-space which could be used for buildings or walkways. Roads can only take up the same area of the ground very expensively with underpasses and so forth, whereas air lanes can be layered without costing extra.
I think he meant less energy per unit distance, not per unit time.
If that's the case then the question is a good one -- at what point does the infrastructure and maintenance savings get offset by the energy cost? However, there is also the inherent advantage of getting there faster; in many cases it is worth more to get a person or package from point A to point B quickly than slowly. My guess is that even robotic cars (which can safely go faster than human driven ones) probably won't shave as much time off your commute as robotic planes.
Another benefit of flying is that the space utilized by drones is currently unused (compare that with the difficulties autonomous cars face with regulations... and those are cars, not small-sized transporter units considered unexpected by most car drivers)
It may be underused now, but not enough so to allow for a personal plane for everyone commuting to work, plus another billion drones delivering mail and whatnot. And air control often has to reroute or delay flights due to unexpected congestion or weather, despite space being "unused".
Also, flight is already far more regulated than ground travel. It's much easier and cheaper to get a driver's license than a pilot's license. Politically and socially, self-driving cars will be accepted much more easily than single-person aircraft, whether flown robotically or manually.
You don't need a license at all to fly ultralights.
I didn't know that that was possible in some countries. I assumed unlicensed aviation was currently limited to powered paragliders. Thanks.
o.O
I think you're also not allowed to fly them over inhabited areas, if that concerns you.
Air mail already exists. Some people pay the premium for faster delivery. I don't think price benefits from going electric, or robotic, would be significant enough to change the existing market incentives. The last-mile door to door mail delivery by road is quite efficient, with several deliveries daily by the private companies (UPS, DHL etc). Of course the situation is less good in less developed/urbanized/rich areas, but that is due to less demand, not so much because DHL couldn't provide the same service there if demand existed.
Ditto for personal commutes to work. Robotic planes may be faster overall - although I would like to see evidence; someone who knows how existing aircraft are routed should comment on the plausibility of one-small-airplane-per-person doing a daily commute in a densely populated area. But since flight costs much more per distance traveled, people won't pay the premium. Also, faster and cheaper ground travel (e.g. trains or metro vs. cars) has its place.
Would a fleet of lighter-than-air drones be less costly for this application than the currently popular drone models?
What is next for this idea?
Is there a certain company profile that you are looking for to take it up? Is this something you intend on implementing yourself?
If you want someone else to do it, and are open to anyone doing it, I recommend giving more detail about the idea. Who/what is needed?
If its something that you only want to explain in more detail to a a person of your choice, either because of wanting to partner with them business wise or for another reason, I recommend imagining who it is that you want to be implementing this idea or partnering with you, and writing something that you think would catch this person's attention that you are a good person for them to invest their time and energy working with.