Slashdot Mirror
The End of Solotrek
bobetov writes "For those of us fed up with gravity and gridlock, the Solotrek XFV personal VTOL aircraft has been the real IT. A Segway is a nice scooter and all, but this thing can fly. But it all comes down to dollars in the end, and, with a recent test-flight accident and a missed milestone, Trek Aerospace is calling it quits."
The skycar is coming along nicely.
Congratulations Mr. Marthouse, You've Invented The Train.
OK, time to share a personal experience. This happened my last year at UVa. Every engineering student was required to do a 4th year thesis, something that was held out as a matter of pride in the rigor of the engineering program. Mine was some software that tracked the edge of the roadway using splines. The justficication for it was that one day we'd have real-time MI that could drive cars, and that the technique might be a useful component of that.
Another student was designing a "volkscopter" personal flight vehicle.
Well, we all had to give presentations (including a Q & A) during the development phase, and I made the Trent Lott-like blunder of bringing up the fact that such things were routinely advertised in Popular Mechanics when I posed a question.
We were all so busy, I never got around to settling this issue with people. I just got some hardball questions during my Q & A from students sympathetic to the other guy, which I was able to dodge. The thesis project taught me as much about politics as it did about engineering!
To the student who was designing the volkscopter, I apologize. There was no need to drag you into what I was discovering.
First, I realized that asking an entire class of engineering students to do an "original" research project is just ridiculous. Truly original ideas are like winning lotto tickets.
Second, the whole idea of self-driving cars is just ridiculous. Why not just put us all back on trains? Well, we subsidize roads way too much. We're plunking $1 billion into the Springfield Interchange near where I live, and although I must say it has added some aesthetic flair to Springfield, it won't solve gridlock. Contrast this with how much money Amtrack needs to stay afloat. I don't think Amtrack was even asking for $1 billion, wasn't it $900 million? Regardless, the point is that if we subsidized rail at the same rate per passenger and freight mile that we do highways, things would, in my opinion, be a lot better.
So, at some point it dawned on me that my thesis was really just inventing the train. I thought to myself, Congratulations Mr. Marthouse, you've invented the train. Of course I never disclosed this to my profs. I wanted to graduate. My only form of protest was to refuse to change the title of my thesis to "An application of rational uniform bezier splines for edge detection in an automated navigation system" from "Snakes: an improved method for highway line following". I swear I'm not making this up. The prof was really disappointed I wouldn't give it an important sounding title.
What does this have to do with personal flight? Well, it's only safe if you build a train-like system where the vehicle "locks on" to a program and the user doesn't actually have to pilot the vehicle.
People will not accept this in a personal flight system until they accept it in a ground transportation system. If you try to do it in a ground system, they will ask themselves the same question I asked: why not just use trains.
The answer, like many things, has more to do with politics than engineering.
--Steven Marthouse, UVa ENGR '93.
p.s., the story of my "greening" after graduation has some interesting turns, but you'll have to buy my book. :)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?