Video
eVTOLs: Future of Air Travel. 🚁
Pete Cooper looks at how EMS Paramedics, a company in North Carolina, uses eVTOLs to get a paramedic to an emergency, and why that can cost less than a helicopter. He then explains where he thinks AI could help a paramedic who is also the pilot, covering flight planning, hazard sensing and landing in tight urban spaces.
Video summary
Pete Cooper points to EMS Paramedics, a company in North Carolina that he says has a real business case for eVTOLs. After a serious accident, he argues, seconds matter. A helicopter needs a crew, is expensive to run and needs infrastructure to take off and land, while he says an eVTOL is cheaper, easier to operate and could land in a couple of parking spaces, on a road or in a park. The paramedic is also the pilot, and the aim is early care such as oxygen or stopping bleeding rather than taking the patient to hospital.
Pete notes that the control software in these aircraft is traditional rather than AI. He believes AI is what would make the paramedic-pilot model practical, because pilot training takes years and few people will hold both skill sets. He describes three areas where it could help: fast flight planning that pulls in weather and other conditions, machine vision that spots hazards in the air and on approach, and autopilot support so the paramedic only makes high-level decisions. He singles out landing among people in busy urban spaces, with spinning blades nearby, as the hardest safety problem.
Video transcript
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Good day. Well, if you're anything like me, you've had a fascination with personal flying transport. Well, eVTOLs have taken things just a step closer to that dream. Well, being able to fly over the top sounds like a dream come true. There's a company out of North Carolina called EMS Paramedics that actually has a use case. A real use case, a real business use case for using eVTOLs. And what's coming down the pipe is how AI is going to have a big influence on that. So, what is this service? Well, as you know, if someone's in a serious accident, let's say a car accident, and they're injured and they're losing blood, then seconds matter because it can be life and death.
So, getting on site quickly, getting medical support quickly on site is obviously very important. Now, helicopters can do it, but they require a crew, they're very expensive, they require infrastructure for takeoff and landing. EVTOLs are significantly cheaper, easier to operate, and require much less infrastructure, effectively landing in a couple of parking spaces, on a road, or in a park is certainly feasible. Now, the idea here is that the first responder or the EMS practitioner, the paramedic, if you want to use that term, is also the pilot. Because of these eVTOLs and their the way they operate, they're very very easy to learn to fly.
And so, by training a paramedic to fly them, really makes this whole solution quite viable. Being able to take off and land quickly and bring service to someone that needs that first responder attention. Not necessarily to take them to hospital, that could have happen with an ambulance, but getting life support, maybe oxygen, stopping the blood, those very first critical moments could be happening very very quickly. So, none of this has got to do with AI at this point. Software that controls these is traditional software with you control logic.
And eVTOLs have really come of age thanks to you know the idea of the drone but also battery technology which has revolutionized what we've been able to do in this field. But to really make this viable I believe AI has a very important role to play. Think of the burden that's been applied to that one paramedic who's not a trained pilot in the traditional sense. Now to be a trained pilot takes years. To be an airline pilot takes many many years and many thousands of hours. It's complicated. It takes a lot of skills in flight planning, a lot of emergency procedures.
All these things are required of that one person on top of them being a paramedic which they've also had to have years of training. To try and find people with those combination of skills pilot and a paramedic is going to take years and years of training and it's going to be very few that qualify for both. However, with the eVTOLs and with AI we can simplify this. I believe it's actually possible to make operating an eVTOL as easy as driving a car. And perhaps even a little easier because AI can take a lot of the burden away from the pilot in this this kind of a scenario. So what are some of the burdens? Well, flight planning.
You know, traditionally we would spend maybe a couple of hours in the case of training a someone maybe half an hour for an airline pilot to prepare a plan. That's half an hour just to go 20 minutes down the road. It's not going to work, right? So that has to be done very very quickly. So flight planning can be done very quickly with AI. Flight planning requires a lot of information to be pulled in about the weather, the circumstances. That can all be done and simulated and and really gear up the eVTOL to get going. On route, sensing.
Sensing of the environment through AI AI fusion cameras, what's around, what might be hazards in the air, hazards on the at the takeoff, and most importantly, the approach and landing. Airfields are out in the open. They are out in fields, large areas of flat ground with with approach paths all around. Pilots are trained to follow a very set pattern. There's everything structured around keeping it safe and taking up a lot of space to get an aircraft into the air and back down again. That's not going to be possible in this kind of a scenario. The EVTOL is going to have to go into a parking spot on a road or in a park. There's people coming and going all the time.
And what's lethal are those spinning blades. You could be causing more accidents than you're actually helping with those things. So, safety is really really critical with these things going into dense urban environments. And AI can really help there with machine vision capabilities. Also helping to autopilot and fly the plane so that the paramedic can really be very lightly engaged in executive functions. Are we going to the right place? Have I got the things that I need? Can I avoid major hazards? That can all be handled also with AI tools. I think There's just three areas.
I think AI is really going to have a huge part to play in making these EVTOLs really quite viable because, quite simply, there's a big burden of work. But largely repetitive work, but work that needs to be done and that can be handled by AI. Really exciting to see that perhaps we are just at the start of this revolution where we'll be flying around flying cars and EVTOLs just like the Jetsons.