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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

Then get a helicopter. ;-)

I have a medical helicopter flying over my house roughly every second day and that's more than enough. If all the cars marked as "organ transport" that I see around here went by helicopter instead I wouldn't be able to hear my GF talking at home... And of course - the cost and emissions, and the inability to land at small fields...

I don't see how a big, bulky, human-piloted helicopter could be in any way better than a specialized, lightweight unmanned vehicle.

I bet the money that will be wasted on this project (before it inevitable get shelved) will be way more than the costs of just buying out the land affected by the noise from helicopter organ transport so people that are bothered by it can move (and maybe resell the land at a discount to those who don't mind the noise, whether it's due to better soundproofing or converting it to office space that wouldn't mind it).

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.

I live in the centre of a capital city. Not even the state could get enough money to buy the affected land here.

> 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.

I think in the here and now, autonomous drones sharing airspace with other aircraft is not really a solved problems. Otherwise agreed.

Hence the "superhighway" to ensure the drones sticks to a pre-defined volume which other aircraft won't be straying into.

At current situation, reliability of transport. Drones may be 99% reliable (making up the number), but thats not enough when that 1% means somebody on waiting list is going to die due to failed transport.

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?

For what it’s worth, a lot of vehicles marked “organ transport” are just people trying to avoid speeding tickets and aggressive behavior from other drivers.

> inability to land at small fields...

Helicopters can operate with VTOL.

Or just get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

Helicopter pads are not available everywhere.

I suppose helicopter pilots are a bit hard to come by also

Where do you think an organ transport helicopter would need to land? In a larger hospital or next to your local butcher?

Almost every hospital, at least everyone that does transplants, will have a landing pad.

But that's the point - this would enable new use cases, like for example performing emergency organ replacement at a smaller hospital, when transport is too dangerous for the person, or when a helicopter is not available.

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.

> Almost every hospital, at least everyone that does transplants, will have a landing pad.

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.

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