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Flying Car More Economical Than SUV
fusion812 writes "The M400 needs 35 clear feet to take off but thanks to its 770 hp engine can whiz to 365 mph - cruise control kicks in at 326 mph - and climb at 6,400 feet per minute. You may hear it before you see it: it emits a rather noisy 65 dba at 500 feet. Interestingly, with a fuel consumption of 20 miles to the gallon on the road, it's rather more economical than a Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) and looks positively eco-friendly compared to a Hummer."
Gyrocopters would make good civilian flying cars.. They're easy to learn (about 30 odd lessons) and if they run out of fuel they autorotate automatically.. they fall gently and safely.
You can take off and land vertically. Though you need a jumping mechanism to take off vertically as they can't hover. Typical take off distance is less than 50 meters without jumping mechanism.
They're less fuel efficient and slower than their fixed wing counterparts. You can expect a top speed of 116mph on most commericial models.
If they became more prevalent i'd expect the low flight speed and fuel efficiency would become diminish.
The main problem with the gyrocopter is that the angle of the blades to the horizon has to be great enough to provide lift at low speeds for landing and take off. If this angle could be changed in flight then you can fly faster and more economically.
I'd like to see a lot gyrocopters in the sky.. They're great!
Simon.
Can't you stall? What about extreme high angle of attack situations? I've never been on these and I don't know the physics of it (I'm quite familiar with classic aircraft design and calculations).
If you can stall them it's very difficult to do and easily recoverable due to the autorotation.
If they are so great, why no medium scale implementation exists? The only ones I saw were the small, lightweight implementations.
Fixed wing aircraft are most cost effective for moving loads (be it people or cargo). Simon.Well, if you were out of control and were going to land in a residential area, you could smash up houses, plow kids away in the street. Downtown you could slam into office buildings. Some would do it on purpose. I'd love for the to become common, but I think someone should invent forcefields for buildings first... :)
I'm sorry, but you've been sadly misinformed. I did, however, make one mistake. I stated that the leaded edge could stall in a head wind, which is incorrect. It's the trailing edge which stalls in a high speed head wind.
MOD THIS POST DOWN BECAUSE HE IS COMPLETELY CLUELESS!
That's exactly right! The statistics exactly reflect dangers that I outlined. Anyone that thinks that gyrocopters are safer than GA planes are either idiots or fools.
The are death traps for ALL of the reasons I outlinned.
Please mod the ignorant grandparent post back down as it's completely wrong and not support by physics nor accident statistics.