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A Flying Leap for Cars?
pillageplunder writes "Businessweek has a story about flying cars and how they could be an actual viable thing in less than 10 years. First flying taxis, then, like the Jetsons, personal flying cars. Several are already on the board, with Honda and Toyota already having prototypes of small flying devices. Even General Electric is getting in on the deal, developing a small jet engine for Honda. So...would you buy one?"
I live in Boston. Drivers here have more than enough trouble coping with travel in two dimensions. Adding a third is a recipe for disaster.
Will we have to use use "roads" in the air, or can we go as the crow flies? (going around military installqtions and so forth.
All the effort, fuel and pollution required just to get a hunk of metal off the ground and keep it there with the current technology is wasteful and unsustenable.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Normal humans can't even drive good and safe in 2D, how the hell will it work in 3D. Utopian thinking where the assumption is that everyone is equiped with a brain that grasps every aspect of know-how.
> The last thing we need is flying SUVs.
Imagine: you're sitting with your family eating a nice dinner when all of a sudden, through your fifth floor window comes crashing in, a drunk/stoned teenager who borrowed daddy's hyperSUV, and forgot to hit the autopilot button when he started rolling another joint. Dead: you. Dead: your spouse. Dead: your children. All because of some inspired auto designer who just *had* to have the 1950's dream of flying cars.
Next chapter: Airlines become extinct, no more waiting in line and subjecting your family to body cavity searches just to fly. No more terrorists hijackings. No more borders. Chaos ensues! (FUD!!)
Seriously though, it's going to be fun and scary at the same time! Wheeeee!!!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I see complaints that people are too irresponsible to drive in two dimensions, let alone three, and so forth. I don't think that this will be a problem. Considering how much space each individual car will be able to have if we extend to three dimensions, allowing them to get tens of metres into the air, there'll be even more room than usual and so less likelihood of collision. Yes, terrorists could crash the flying cars, but that can be done anyway. Besides, they could always use light aircraft instead.
This?
The thing that caught my eye in "I, Robot" was will smith's Audi. Instead of having regular wheels it had spheres for wheels. this allowed him to basically travel in any direction in any heading. Pretty dang slick.
You would be doing away with conventional steering hardware, probably for a bunch of electronics to "run" the wheel in any direction you like in conjunction with the other wheels. My question is, how would you do it? Would it be just like an AC motor wrapped in rubber, with the rest of the motor surrounding the sphere wheels?
That would make parallel parking a cinch.
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I very much doubt that it would be legal to drive such a thing on manual. Fortunately, an autopilot for a VTOL is far easier to write than an autopilot for a car (go up, head in correct direction avoiding anything with a radar signature, go down. You don't need to bother working out which bit is road, and there are not likely to be any pedestrians suddenly stepping in front of you, except when landing).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There is a track on the GameCube game F-Zero GX called Mobius Strip and its a great level to drive/levitate on. You build up hellish speeds on a quietly undulating track, that just happens to be, you guessed it, a Mobius Strip.
To date there are basically two classes of "flying cars" - light aircraft that look like cars and fold up to drive (similar to the Aquacar and other novelity cars), and scams like anything Moller puts out under his Skycar company.
Moller is actually "making" real commuter flight vehicles, 400 mph, mpg roughly equal to a car, park in a garage, take off from the driveway (or helipad if the FAA never allows driveway flight). The only problem is, his test flights have been happening for decades, commercial models for sale have always been a "year or two away", and all test flights (until a couple recent ones) have all been tethered and a dozen feet above the ground.
Unlike fusion, which is always a decade away because there needs to be a breakthough, Moller says he has it working and ready. But he's been saying that for a long, long time.
The "planes that convert to cars" (and their cousins, one of which is mentioned in the article, "helicopters that convert to cars") have been around commercially since the 1950s, and they generally work fairly well. They aren't very efficient, but they fly, drive and a new model comes out from somebody every five years or so (until the chilling effect from lawsuits slowed small aircraft production recently).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
On the other hand, I hop right into my mercedez and take off for work. If something does't feel right or sound right or if I am really low on gas, I figure "hey I'd better do something about that sometime soon", and drive off. I can always pull to the side of the road. I can't do that in my plane. If something goes wrong and I need to "pull to the side of the road" I'm in a bit of a pinch. I have a ballistic parachute installed but I'd really hate to have to use it.
I can't ever imagine what flying would be like if everyone just hopped into their flying cars and took off (after cocktails, in a hurry, low on gas, in a poorly maintained vehicle, without a license, in bad weather, etc). What a nightmare!
Don't get me wrong, I think flying is wonderfull and that everyone should be able to do it, after rigorous training and certification, in a well maintained vehicle, clearly understanding when conditions are right to fly!
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
Everyone automatically pictures cars flying WAAAAY up in the air, but how feasible is that? Traffic control would just be a nightmare to deal with. Getting stuck in bumper to bumper traffic in mid air can only lead to problems. Say you run out of fuel, do you just drop out of the sky?
I say we make the flying cars just like the Landspeeders. It's still flying, and in the worst case scenario we only fall 2 feet!
Live forever, or die trying.
Here's something I have yet seen mentioned: What about law enforcement? Unless the cops have these, I don't see how they'll let the general population drive them. It'll be pretty difficult for a cop in a standard cruiser to pull you over if you can just lift off and escape him. Even with radios and helicopters, by the time they can dispatch a chopper, you could be outta there.
- telecommute to work
- walk to the local starbucks
- fly to bahamas.
solves a lot of problems, including the oil crisis.
I believe there will be a reversal of urbanization if & when fast, efficient long distance trasportation comes to market. Many people- myself included- prefer lots of space, but live in the city or suburban areas because they like being close to things like grocery stores, friends, church, etc. The faster you can get to these places, the further away you can live from them.
May not seem that profound, until you consider things like the last election map. An exodus from the city would no doubt have interesting social consequences.
I'm scared enough when I get in some crazy cabbie's car and go for a pants wetting ride where I'm sure I'll be dead in moments.
There's NO WAY IN HELL I'm going to get in a cab that has an added dimension of travel.
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
anyone out there with the specs handy for how much helium/hydrogen(if you like to live dangerously) it would take to lift one 250 lb. person? i think it would be much cooler to have traffic floating around instead of the blast of a jet engine every morning when the neighbor takes off for work.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
The problem with flying cars isn't technology (we've had the tech for almost 100 years) nor is it controlling traffic (FAA already puts diferent kinds of traffic at fixed altitudes, often on the same path).
The problem is that people are bad enough drivers in 2 dimensions. It'll be raining death if we let joe blow drive in 3 dimensions. Drunk Dirvers. Running out of gas. And if you think that having some super-safe autopilot will solve these problems, remember that many people already modchip their car computers. Remember the DARPA grand challenge (yes, we already have autonomous aircraft, but 300,000 aren't trying to take the same way to work at the same time).
People have to work hard to obtain and keep their pilots licenses because it's a skill with a lot to know and keep track of and the stakes are really high. Flying cars sound great until an unlicensed, uninsured drunk driver crashes into your childs school from an altitude of 2,000 feet.
Now if cities would build helipads near traditional mass transit and could get the FAA to carve out the airpace for it, we could have helibusses flown by licensed pilots. But that's not flying cars for joe sixpack-while-driving. That's an airline.
I can't believe the ignorance and ludditism I'm seeing here on slashdot. You would think this website was frequented by a congregation of the Amish, rather than self-proclaimed technophiles.
... if the automatics crap out for whatever reason one should be competent enough to pilot the device safely to the ground without hand-holding.
Your post is a breath of fresh air, being at least thoughtful (if perhaps not fully informed). Your point that pilot's licenses are far more difficult and rigorous than drivers licenses is a good one.
It's still a lot harder to get a license for and rental of a small aircraft than a car.
To get a driver's license in the United States, the chief requirement seems to be a pulse. To rent a car, you need a credit card in addition to the pulse.
Pilot's licenses--for good reason--are more difficult to get.
However, while "they" may call these new aircraft "flying cars," and these aircraft may even become easier to fly than current cars are to drive, I suspect one will be required to have a pilot's license to fly these aircraft just as one must have to fly any other aircraft. And well one should
As a pilot I would love to have a flying car. Being able to get from driveway to driveway in one vehicle, rather than taking a car to the airport, flying the plane to my destination, and then renting/borrowing a car at the far end (many FBOs have courtesy cars, but many do not, and getting one is always a crapshoot), would be a tremendous boon.
Let those who want to pilot flying cars jump through the necessary hoops to become competent pilots (ideally with an instrument rating), while those who get regular drivers licenses remain restricted to the planet's surface.
All the benefits of flying vehicles, all the air safety of the current licensing system, and additional flexibility for those who do like to travel and are willing to acquire the skills to fly.
As for the post wondering what to do if one has a midair in one county and plumets to the earth in another, that one is easy. The NTSB investigates the crash irrespective of where it lands (in the US). WRT international borders, the current norms for investigative aeronautical crashes would apply.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I wondered how much longer it would be...
Time for the governements to start working on a whole new concept of traffic infrastructure. Air highway systems, signals, etc. I assume it will be low altitude not to interfere with airways, but it's finally time I guess we seriously started planning all this since it's inevitable.
This will be interesting to see how it plays out. I mean you know people that own land will be like... "you're not allowing those things to fly right over MY land!" because they probably won't fly right over the normal highway systems for safety reasons.
This doesn't say that you will disband fuel efficient tech. Rather a technology will become better efficient wise as a technology matures and mistakes are learnt from. Afterall, you wouldn't be saying China should be embargoed because of their recent spike in oil demand and expect them to be using a UN-specified percentage of fuel efficient cars within their boundary.
It's like the maglev train china decided to go and build. The only problem was who it was going to service with the price being a bit high for that middle class chinese citizen. Quoting myself from a post in an earlier article, "one trip costing roughly 1/20th of one person's income for a month." That demonstrates the sociological implications of investing in a technology, but also environmental as in this post says Price conscious people takes the bus to major transportation hubs, and convenience / time consicous people takes the taxi (which is only like 15 dollars compared to 10 dollars that the maglev costs - besides the point that the other end station is nowhere near the city and you have to take a cab anyway so it's not that much faster).
Which basically says that as long as the tech is defined to profitable areas like the airport and downtown it can remain cheap and less the cost of other tech. But what happens when you need to get somewhere else and that issue of human convenience comes up?
I think it is a matter of trade-offs. That and allowing engineers to work on interesting problems.
Yes, he's been at it for a long time. And it's always RealSoonNow(tm).
Anybody ever seen one of his things actually fly? Unmanned tethered hover doesn't count.
Propellors or turbines spin. You could consider that one way flapping.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Here's another possibility:
When the flying cars first come out, they will probably be limited to law enforcement (and important government officials and their connected friends/donors, of course). After all, if only the police should have guns, why should anyone else be trusted with potential flying bombs?
After a while, a whole generation will grow up in a world where flying cars are exclusively limited to the government, and the "right" to own one will never trickle down to us peons.
Besides, how many civilian flying cars did you see in Blade Runner ? "You know the score; if you're not a cop, you're little people."
No, but they sure as hell don't run on batteries. I hate sounding like the conspiracy theorist, but advanced battery technology and the fusion reactors to charge them must be too close on the horizon for "them" to feel comfortable... best be moving on to something that can only be oil powered!
As someone living in one of the largest cities in the world (São Paulo, Brazil), in an eight-floor apartment and with recently bought sound insulating windows, my only concern is: How much noise do these creatures produce ? I don't want anyone flying under my window at 3am in the morning and waking me up.
Now, small blimps with eletric motors, that would be OK.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Back in the late 1940's or early 1950's, a magazine, either "Popular Mechanics" or "Popular Science" had an article about flying cars. The car was powered by a central jet engine, and one concept was to have the main "car" part be a separate assembly that could be detached from the aircraft wings and fuselage. The other concept envisioned folding wings that either became part of the car body or were concealed somehow. Now, some 60 years later, we have still not solved the problems of transportation using autos as the basis for a flying vehicle or using the airplane as a basis for a car. (No, I'm not that old, but an older brother did subscribe to them for years.)
Not in (some) modern aircraft, for 20 years or so now. In the F-16, centering the (side)stick applies the appropriate inputs to the control surfaces that the aircraft quits banking - no slight reverse stick is necessary. Pilots that transitioned from older aircraft were frequently seen stairstepping to get to a desired bank angle due to their habit of applying reverse stick pressure to stop the bank. Additionally, it's seldom necessary to use intentionally apply rudder force to correct for any flight path slid or skid in such aircraft, as the flight control system applied appropriate force automagically.
This sort of computer-assisted flight control is not at all difficult with modern systems.
There are many differences between air congestion and ground congestion. You don't have to worry about accidents in the air closing off lanes or slowing down traffic. You don't have to worry about construction closing a lane. You don't have to worry about squeezing four lanes of traffic down to one lane to go over a 45 mph bridge. You don't have to get on the arterial with everybody else just to get on a different arterial. And finally, if things get too congested at 100 feet, rise to 150 feet and go over it.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Cue 500 fearful comments from the horse & buggy era. Technology enthusiasts and nerds, ready to try each tiny step of digital technology in deep fear from flying hard objects are now celebrating their backwardness. "uhhh flying cars! Think of the children!" or "Think of the terrorists!" (How many terrorist incidents involving the US mainland and airplanes have happened since the beginning of commercial flight?)
Why are you so scared? People drive around in cars every day and we don't cringe in terror from the thought they could crash in our houses.
Stop being so scared and imagine some benefits, come on - the world is NOT full of terrorists and Joe Sixpacks trying to ruin your life...
To make personal air cars a reality it comes down to improving the air traffic control system. We need to implement a computerized system that sets aside air corridors for personal and commercial traffic. These sky highways are possible if we implement technologies like Voxel based HUD's for Air traffic controllers. You can see a three dimensional image of an air craft. Anyone see a little movie called Star Wars... remember the holographic projection of the Death Star? They are testing a system that uses a laser and a spinning helix to land air craft down in San Diego so mix in a super computer or 12 and these holographic displays to give an x, y and z axis to crowded airways and mix in a really good air bag and you have yourself a super highway in the sky. Oh now you need a good skycar check out http://www.moller.com/.
John Anthony Hartman
Time to get pedantic: Your car isn't maintaining position. It's still located on the outer surface of a spheroid planet that is both rotating about its axis and revolving around its star. Hence your car is constantly changing position in the universal 3d coordinate grid. I'd be interested in seeing what kind of energy expenditure would be required to maintain TRUE position, though.
"Life in every breath... that is bushido"