The risk of killing the passenger would be taken when other means of movement or not evacuating someone is even more dangerous. Soldiers wounded or trapped behind the front lines, accidents on mountain trails.
A more lucrative market is for “heavy” goods movement in the last few miles in locations that cannot be reached by road. They compete with mules, Sherpa porters or helicopters.
By “heavy” I mean in similar capacities with people carrying drones.
These risk tolerant niches should provide an environment for a more realistic assessment of reliability and chances of improving it.
Yeah, sounds good. Joby is already relegated to being funded by the military, yet it took them 17 years to fly from one airport to another. There is a saying in aviation design: “If it looks good, it will fly well.” There is no saying of. “If it sounds good, it will fly well.”
The Joby machine looks like it could have been invented by cartoonist Rube Goldberg or maybe Dr. Suess. Not sleek, but rather way too busy and complicated. Let’s see where it goes from here, after 17 years of no actual use whatsoever. 
Here’s the latest “press-release breakthrough” from New Atlas covering the CES show.
Affordable personal eVTOL aircraft coming this year
Nice to see their skeptical tone for a change. It can fly one person for 20 minutes at 50 mph. They note a previous flying motorcycle from the same company last year, which never happened…
Split-wing eVTOL X7 gets improved propulsion and design
It all sounds good, as long as you only accept what the promoters say - as usual…
The latest iteration is to reduce the number of fans, and enlarge them. (This means going toward a regular helicopter.) Interestingly, the design calls for covers to slide over the fans for forward flight, powered by a separate gas-powered rear propeller. Not sure how a failure of the covers to slide properly might affect safety. Anyway, is there anyone here the least bit skeptical of all these so-similar drone-like aircraft attempts? Any guesses as to why, after a decade of press-releases, nobody is yet riding to the airport in one? Let’s remember. the stated date for full service has always been 2025, and the major player is Joby, a former AWE “leader”… Could the lack of EVTOL success be similar to whatever reason nobody is making energy using kites? Can it be coincidental that the supposed “leader” in EVTOL started out in the aero space as a “leader” in AWE???
