Leadie, the reason I reckon "Autonomous Air Taxis" will never happen in Oz is much the same as your above comments. The Labor heartland is Balmain, with Sandra Nori, the worst anti-helicopter person in their arsenal. Labor is basically BANANA - Ban Aviation Anywhere Near Almost Anything. They killed the Darling Harbour heliport, they caused the rotary industry such grief that the ONLY place to land a helicopter in Sydney, apart from KSA and Bankstown, is the Parramatta Heliport, which in itself was resisted fiercely by the Labor constituents in the area. If Shorten Curly gets in, aviation is doomed.

So, the chance of any air taxi landing anywhere is zilch. Zot. Nada. Nil. Nuffink. But the CGI dudes get paid to dream up the Jetson stuff, and some others will be tempted to invest in it. Good for them. It might work in Dubai, where the prince will TELL people to land anywhere. But not here.

Not against hydrogen. Not against ammonia. Just realistic.

I might agree with you, AC, that autonomous air taxis have a lot of hurdles and remain an unlikelihood, however eVTOL will happen and it will be largely electronically flown (stabilized and guided) to the point of being at least semi-autonomous. I think the personal ownership model (along with emergency service use etc) is a more likely early scenario.

I'm almost with the ALP on helicopters though. In all objective honesty they are pretty obnoxious things from a noise perspective when flown over suburbia and they don't seem to have a quiet/stealth mode to mitigate this..

So, Andy RR, where exactly is your personal eVTOL going to take you? Being an e-vehicle won't stop the ALP from preventing any landing anywhere. And being electric doesn't stop the fan noise, especially when the vehicle is using teensy little fixed-pitch rotors spinning at howling-mad-murdoch revs.

A Charlie,
For once I agree with you.
Tootle pip!!