A year after it was pronounced airworthy by the FAA, and 14 years after it was first announced, the Samson Sky Switchblade is officially off the ground. This street-legal three-wheeler converts to a 200-mph (320-km/h) airplane at the touch of a button.
People can barely drive. Personal car-planes will be chaos.
I think the target audience will still be licensed pilots that own their aircraft. But instead of buying a small plane that need to be stored in a hangar, you can drive this to your home garage from the local airstrip/airport. Or use it to drive around town at your destination and then drive back to the airport for takeoff on your way back. So if you don’t own a Cessna or were planning to get one, this is probably not for you. Very niche, still cool IMO.
They need to be fully automated when flying.
It makes sense because flying in largely open 3 dimensional space is comparatively easy for computers but harder for humans, whereas driving on roads is the opposite.
The only reason it’s harder for the computers on the roads is because there are a lot more stupid humans in close proximity than there would be in open air. Under a well designed fully autonomous system cars wouldn’t need 95% of the things we humans need to drive effectively.