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Fanwing Planes?
waimate writes "Up until now, there's been fixed wing, or there's been rotating wing, and that's it. But now thanks to Patrick Peebles, there's an entirely new principle of flight called the Fanwing. Initially developed in secrecy and flown only at night, as reported in this Bulletin article this machine combines the many of the attributes of helicopters and conventional aircraft, but not by combining the worst aspects of both like the V-22 Osprey. The FanWing is a whole new way of getting off the ground, particularly suited to inner city applications. It's only downfall (he he) is that it lacks any ability to glide in the event of an engine outage. Includes videos of the prototype in action."
I do not want to see flying cars until people learn to drive the ones that don't fly. As dangerous as these "I am the only person on the road" mentality drivers are, imagine them with an "I am the only person in the sky" additiude. Goody, another whole dimension to cut people off in.
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I say make 'em get pilots' licences, or some modified form thereof. That'll cut down on the soccer moms and grandparents and who(m?)ever else causes all the problems on the roads today.
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gliding an airplane seems "boring".
Just gotta say that in anything that flies, boring is considered a good thing. Excitement can mean something is going very wrong.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
OK so they're not as bad as giving nukes to everyone. But a flying car typically can take out far more people and stuff than a normal car - just the potential energy of being much higher up is bad enough. Add in the fact that there's no equivalent of road barriers and emergency lanes for flying vehicles - say you have problems midair in the city you can't really pull-over can you?
Also, humans don't appear to have any innate flocking instinct. You can get a million flamingos to fly in various flock patterns and paths without colliding with each other, but try get humans to do that.
So I personally think consumer level flying cars are a bad idea. Even masses of above average humans won't be able to fly and maintain them safely amongst other masses. I doubt you can get masses of people to do it safely.
It's not like slowly getting people used to flying- e.g. performance envelope of flying chickens - that won't sell. It's like a jump to eagle speeds and altitudes with 1 ton inertias - no stopping on a dime. Eagles and other birds have had a long time to slowly get things right.
I don't trust computers to get it right either - especially since computers and sensors still have to be maintained.
Also if you look at the passenger airplane safety - despite all the training, equipment and controls, they're often worse than cars on a _per_trip_ basis. They win in safety just because of distance travelled.
In the typical "rose tinted view" of free flight in cities, when you have consumer grade flying cars and pilots you get the worse safety of both worlds - many short-medium trips, low level flight, no open air space - lots of cables wires and obstacles around, and lots of other unpredictable flying vehicles around.
So I argue that they'll remove too much more than just the plain idiots.