(Electric azimuth thrusters are becoming common in large ships for roughly this reason, too.)
That's a tangent from most sensitive vehicle to weight to the _least_ sensitive one.
https://www.defensenews.com/land/2025/01/22/army-tries-out-n...
I mean I could be wrong, im certainly not an expert in future military design and strategy, but I just don't see any advantages once you start scaling these to the size needed to move humans. The only potential I can see is multi-rotor designs being easier to learn to pilot over a collective rotor design, but I don't see any modern military considering a few weeks off a pilot's training being worth the trade off in range, capacity, and safety.
There is an existing market for passenger eVTOL to and from airports. Using that as a beachhead makes way more sense than trying to develop a de novo niche.
The tradeoff is you have to build a cargo business. That costs money and leadership attention. Racing for the beachhead, given sufficient access to capital, is the more focused strategy. (This is a good example of how bootstrapped versus financed companies can be radically different in their technical debts, time to market, culture and discipline around validating hypotheses.)
Now look at a photo of a human standing next to a shahed-136 size UAV for a totally different size scale.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/11/in-europe-the-p...
it's doable to do it today, economically, and solve tons of problems .
in a similar to ev rollout:
solve problem for wealthy people, get the premium, scale cheaper options. Nothing new. Technology of today is ready.
I'm skeptical that air taxis could ever meaningfully reduce traffic congestion to / from JFK. Compared to cars, these would seem to require a significantly larger landing pad and passenger unloading space and need much more safety margin in-between drop offs. Maybe this is competitive vs the private helicopter market?
I love aviation, but I also don't see air travel as being a scalable/affordable solution to this problem. Then again, it's only meant to alleviate traffic burden for a certain segment of the population.
In general if you have an affordable enough option you'd never walk into subway, with your several luggages, to travel longer. Train is a decent plan b.
I'm moderately wealthy and lived in New York for a decade. I take the train between JFK and Manhattan. (Specifically, the LIRR.) It's faster, more reliable and–for me–more comfortable than taking a car. (It's also safer.) If I have my cat with me or I feel like having fun, I'll take a Blade, but that's realistically only shaving like 20 minutes off the travel time.
Cars for sure are less convenient.
I've also taken the A from Harlem to JFK once. It was fine. Tougher to read a book, like I can on the LIRR, mostly because the frequency of stops means having to constantly be aware of your belongings.
And agree on helicopters. We already have helicopters. Switching them to eVTOLs is a move forward.
Wow, that makes it sound significantly more feasible than I would have guessed.
Yes, it is better compared to helicopter. cheaper, less noise. e.g. you can place it more applications, for less money.
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/04/28/jeep-dodge-maker-validates-so...
[2] https://www.evlithium.com/lifepo4-battery-news/calb-solid-li...
I mean sure long term the goal may be to wait for battery density to increase to keep moving upmarket and eat longer and longer flights from traditional aviation, but I don’t think better batteries are a requirement for the initial batch of vehicles.
But batteries have an advantage over turbines, especially small turbines: specific _power_ density.