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NASA Tests Flying Scooter For Commercial Take-Off
Ant writes: "
NASA will
discover tomorrow
whether a
prototype
airscooter - a
jetpack-like device
propelled by fans -
could really be a
viable mode of
transport.
If successful, the
airscooter trial at
Nasa's Ames research centre in California could form another
stepping stone in the development of personal, individual
aircraft that allow commuters to speed over traffic jams, doctors
to fly to emergencies and soldiers to leapfrog minefields.
The SoloTrek Exo-skeletor Flying Vehicle (XFV) is designed to
allow a pilot to stand upright, with fans 3ft in diameter above his
head that lift him into the sky, allowing flight at speeds of up to
80mph for up 1Å hours on a tank of petrol." Despite the cool graphic, note that what's being tested is an engine, not the whole rig pictured -- that's just a tease. Consultation with the UK branch office revealed no clue of how long "1Å hours" is. Any ideas?
1Å = 10^-10m, (or 0.1 nm), an old unit most often used in measuring wavelengths of light.
Physicists, especially in relativity or particle physics, often use factors of c (speed of light) and sometimes G (gravitational constant) and h-bar (Plank's constant) to change the units of quantities. A common example is to say that the rest mass of an electron is 511,000 electron volts - measuring mass in units of energy. This appears to be such a case.
We can convert length (Å) to time by dividing by the speed of light. The speed of light in Å/hr is 1.07x10^22, hence 1Å hours is 9.3x10^-23 hours.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
This is just what we need. Dead people raining through our rooves.
-Moondog
I think the 1Å is a typo - according to the hard-copy newspaper, the actual time is 1½hours.
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I think personal flight will become widespread, but not for a long time. I think just now there are some factors holding back personal flight, viz.:
1)Expense - way more expensive than cars. But, in 50 or 100 years I would expect people to be much wealthier and personal planes much cheaper. Plus, for personal flight you really need a VTOL capable aircraft, which adds to the cost greatly.
2)Becoming qualified enough to fly one. You can't just let any fool fly an aircraft - they're dangerous! But, in the future I would expect the job to be done by computers, which negates this little awkwardness.
3)Air Traffic Control. We have got enough problems as it is controlling our skys, but this would also be taken care of by computers and also improved GPS systems in the future.
4)The inherent absurdity of using an aircraft to pop down to your local newsagent. But then, we probably once thought this of cars. All it takes is for personal aircraft to become an attainable status symbol and - whoosh! - they'll take off all right, no matter the absurdity. It's happened with lots of other things, right?
I expect that the age of the plane will eventually arrive, allright. Until they are replaced by matter transporters.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
You ever had a single flying lesson? Screw MS Flight Sim (which is what gave me the flying bug to begin with), but an actual hour or so behind the yoke or stick of a real airplane. Probably a Cessna 152 or 172.
You generally don't get into the left seat until after you've had a bit of ground instruction, save for "discovery flights". One of the biggest things pilots learn is weather and a bit about how air works. Yes, air. A great big, honking, bloody ocean of fluid dynamics. The instant you are airborne, physics as you are used to it changes, and drastically.
The FAA and most other civil aviation authorities require a minimum of 40 flight hours to get a basic pilot's license, allowing you to fly certain basic types of low-power, single-engine aircraft in very nice weather. And unless you live in a few places in Florida, Texas and Nevada, you don't get a whole lot of continual "nice" weather.
Flying is easy, but it's hard. It's complex as hell, conditions can change instantaneously and if you screw up, you make the news, posthumously. The largest block of deaths in General Aviation are pilots with less than 150 hours of experience, and you have at least 45 of those behind you before you even get your ticket to go out on your own, unsupervised.
Nobody with a pilot's license believes any of these "everyone will be flying a personal craft in the next 10 years" stories. We never have and we never will, because we learned, the same way that Linux users learn not to do anything as root except locally, that experience is a mutha.
And don't even bother talking about the idea of automatic, computer-controlled flyways and such nonsense. You may love your OS, but you would not actually risk your life on it. It only takes a drop of about 20 to 30 feet to kill you.
Spare me, please.
BadDoggie, PP-ASEL/AMEL (Aircraft, Single-Engine Land, Multi-Engine Land)
Once you have flown, you will walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, there you long to return." -- DaVinci
Actually there is little reason to believe anyone would want to fly by any means when a perfectly good steamer line goes between London and New York on a weekly basis. With brandy and whist to pass the time, one scarcely minds a few days travel, I dare say.
Only a madman would allow himself to be transported in a flying machine. The risks are outrageous. Even if one was to survive such a flight the damage to one's reputation (being thought of as a reckless anarchist) would certainly not be worth the time saved or the risk.
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