My ex-boss is involved in the project to get organs delivered fast via drones that were basically just flying minifridges. This might be pretty useful for that.
I don't see how a big, bulky, human-piloted helicopter could be in any way better than a specialized, lightweight unmanned vehicle.
Yes, in the very long run, drone transport for these things would be better due to emissions/etc, but IMO the country has more pressing problems at the moment.
> Yes, in the very long run, drone transport for these things would be better due to emissions/etc, but IMO the country has more pressing problems at the moment.
A country always has thousands of more pressing problems, the issue is that nobody orders them the same way. The best you can do is to solve more than one problem at a time.
Costs benefits are obvious but there are always drawbacks, especially when every fail may mean 1 dead person.
And that you bought your property so badly placed is unfortunate, but the result of your own choices (or more like lack of thorough research). If you bought it next to highway so should all car traffic in the area be banned?
Helicopters can operate with VTOL.
Almost every hospital, at least everyone that does transplants, will have a landing pad.
Also, you might be transporting organs from a smaller place to a big hospital - donors that got into an accident probably didn't take care to have it near a helipad.
Perhaps before they had that, this same line of thinking might have concluded they didn't need one, as they already had a car park.
But yes, quick delivery for organs is great - if this is enough commercial demand to make a drone superhighway worthwile/viable though is another question. Also these drone superhighways drop at a specific point at the end of the highway - so you still need to pick it up from the superhighway 'Skyway hub' and get it to the end customer.
When I looked at the Coventry Skyway project last it looked like it was started by a team who had nearly no experience in aviation or logistics so it did make me a bit sus.
There is an awesome (volunteer) organisation in the UK called Blood Bikes[1] that operate all over the UK.
The training is pretty intensive, it's something I'm considering doing after I get a full license (and 2 years and advanced) because it's an amazing thing to do.
Watch an actual organ being transported through London [1], back in the mid-1980s. Situation is worse today, if you talk to EMR drivers.
I didn't say it would solve it.
And let's not forget to tax the damage they cause in terms of pollution. Keeping things in the air requires way more energy than moving them over land. And there are other negative externalities (noise and visual pollution), and also physical danger (these things might crash or collide).
What are you comparing this to? Does this include the energy and pollution needed to move a human, and a vehicle to safely accommodate that human?
> And there are other negative externalities (noise and visual pollution), and also physical danger (these things might crash or collide).
Are these not also the case for human-driven vehicles, which endanger more people (if a motorbike crashes then the rider has low odds), and create noise and visual pollution? I assume the latter means "I don't like how it looks"; if so then does a road look nicer than a drone your eye can't resolve unless you're fairly close to it?