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NYT On Flying Cars
This week's NYT magazine has a lengthy piece on the holy grail of modern technology, the flying car. It's a very interesting history of the numerous inventors that have spent a lot of time working on their dreams - Moller, who's been mentioned on Slashdot several times, as well as several early pioneers who achieved Darwin awards. The time frame before you'll be able to buy a flying car is, as always, five years.
http://viewaskew.com/tv/leno/flyingcar.html
go to http://bugmenot.com/ to avoid the whole having to register deal... I'd post a google link but it doesnt want to give me one for some reason
drunk chemists
Sounds good except in 5 years the timeline will have increased to 10 years.
I've had a flying car for years, I just have to go really fast and find a sufficient ramp. It'll fly. But seriously though, why not just go buy a plane or a helicopter? It's not like you'll get some fuel, speed, or convenience advantage just because its a "car" because it's still just a plane in car skin.
"Personal Flight Devices" on the other hand could be interesting. The Rocketeer anyone?
The industry had better find a way to make those cars fly, or dance, or perform sexual favors or something... because now that everyone has a car, the industry is starting to cool down, and auto manufacturing/sales is a major part of the US economy. Don't be surprised is Ford has major problems within the next decade.
And yes, there is this kind of regulation for the airlines today but they only have to regulate the few licensed carriers and a relatively small number of private pilots. Imagine 100 million "motorists" flying around in flying cars. lol. It'll never happen.
If it's your dream to fly forget about flying cars and get your pilot's license.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
... after I'm dead. I have enough trouble with morons on cell phones while they are driving. Dealing with them in 3D would make me join an Amish community.
Which gives me a weird thought... flying Amish buggies. Wow. If you think pigeon droppings can be annoying, imagine a constipated horse letting loose from 500 feet!
helicopter.
ultralights(if you're into cheap).
kit-planes.
one-of-those-paragliders-with-an-engine.
balloons.
if you want to fly there's "affordable" solutions already, none of them solve the problem of how you could use a flying device (that makes a shitload of noise) usefully in a city though, without there being some serious magic in controlling it(computers, computers..).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The author has also written about a ''Secret Teenage Sex Cult'', so I guess he is qualified to write about back seats, anyhow.
Sure, flying cars would be very cool. But it would make more sense if we focused on a nationwide mag-lev train system. It would be close to the speed of planes and no worries of it falling out of the sky into neighborhoods and schoolyards. You could rent cars that go to and from the stations to get you to your specific destination.
Besides if flying cars ever become a reality, they will just be toys of the wealthy. Just as private airplanes are now.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Flying cars will only be there because somebody just wanted to "do it". They won't be pratical. What will they accomplish that the automobile won't? Sure, they look good to somebody that looks up to the open sky, but if everyone had one, you wouldn't be flying "as the crow" everywhere. Rules of the air will be created (They're already there for the larger planes, less restrictive to smaller ones). Jumbo jets must stay on little sky highways to the destinations, and if you've ever seen those maps where the position of every plane in the US is shown, you'll know what I am talking about. Thus the benefit of them over cars will be nullfied. Sure, they'd be pretty cool, but light planes already exist ;)
Also, what about terrorism? Not to be a fearmonger, a group could get maybe 20 of these if they are plentiful, and just crash one after another into the White House, something you can't exactly do with cars. Plus, people fall asleep in cars enough, I can't imagine trying to pilot a car/plane unconciously.
Flying cars, while a dream for many are not as great as everyone believes they are. Imagine everything that can go wrong in a car today, then imagine it going wrong 300 feet in the air.
Blade Runner is an excelent example of how I would build the future, flying car wise, that is: Only the Cops, and Emergency Services have flying cars. Compare this to a movie like The Fifth Element, where we see gridlock... in three dimensions.
Rather then flying cars, I would look twords increasing the land speed, and effectiveness of current automobiles. One company (don't remember the name sorry) has designed/built a concept car that would use a form of wireless networking, to link up with others of the same make, forming essentially road traines traveling to destinations near eachother.
Another good example would be from another movie (sorry for all the movie refrences, but I hope they explain my point) would be the cars from Minority report, and AI. Both movies by the same director, in which cars can travel at much faster velocities then they do now, and can controll themselves in one form or another, flying vehicles are left to emergency services.
To summarize what I said: Flying cars/vehicles should be for EMS and other Emergency Services, while we should look to upgrade our current cars, roads, and driving techniques.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
Flying cars would entail new technology...new technology would likely lead to alternative fuel sources. Something Bush and his oil buddies at Halliburton definitely do not want.... Our dependence on oil is to be keep.. forever if possible...
When they used to do testing on the car prototype the noise was pretty loud. So, I don't know if people would stand dozens of these cars flying around.
You have to admire the tenacity though, spending 40 years on one idea.
The pilot of an aerial vehicle, be it a small single engine propeller plane, a four engine jet liner, or even a flying car must demonstrate that he is able to handle three dimensional spacial reasoning, emergency situations, and vast number of dials, meters, switches, and settings. Some of the proposed flying car concepts demonstrate helicopter like flight dynamics which mean that they would be even more difficult to fly. Most of the people driving vehicles on our roads right now are barely competent enough to handle forward, reverse, left, and right, so why should we hand them the keys to fa lying vehicle when they can barely handle the automobile that they already own? Piloting was and still is a skilled profession which should be hanlded by qualified licensed pilots. I do not forsee this changing any time soon.
The controls of a flying car would probably be difficult to use, compared to regular cars, since there is another axis of movement. Unless the car only goes up when you press the accelerator pedal, it would seem that getting accustomed to it would be fairly difficult. Not to mention the crashes you could have
got sig?
the holy grail of modern technology, the flying car.
Funny, I thought the holy grail was efficient nuclear fusion, or an unhackable OS, or superstrong and light nano-materials or something. Where have I been all these years?
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Somehow that doesn't seem like a good thing to me. When the Government can track you where ever you are while driving (flying?) we are back in 1984.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
When the internet is allowing more cardiologists, engineers, architects, accountant, and wall street analysts to work remotely, either from home or across the world, the target market of people who can spend huge amounts on commuting is vastly diminishing.
Not to say, that if you want to vacation where you can't get from here to there in first class, you "might" need but you can't afford this, because like virtually all vehicles, if they are not used frequently, capital costs exceed operating costs by a huge margin--you are better off chartering!
The last thing we need is to give the average driver the ability to pull stupid moves in the air. If the idea of flying cars doesn't make you cringe, just imagine the average SUV drive cutting you off 50-100 ft off the ground. Yeah, that's all we need. Car accidents that happen several hundred feet in the air and cause cars to come crashing down on top of people's houses and businesses....
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I think they are going about it the wrong way.
I think that taking a car, a thing, that was not designed to fly, and making it fly may be admirable, but a mistake.
After all we had the car several decades before we had the airplane, so obviously making things fly is much more difficult then making things drive.
So OBVIOUSLY instead of making a car that flies, we make a airplane that drives.
That's SIMPLE!!! Simply take a Lear jet, put a Bus suspension on the front and chop off the wings.
All those silly engineers, and they couldn't think of that, HA!
wait... I better patent it.
Tried to submit this as an article but got rejected:
Ariel motors - here is a true geek's car: no body panels, just the bare minimum required to drive, small, light, Honda iVTEC 4cyl 220bhp engine. Looks very cool, but I find it to be a problem that there is no option to have it with body panels and the windshield for those rainy days.
Would you drive one of those? I realize that the traffic in North America today looks like WWII traffic columns: SUVs look like tanks and behave like tanks too and there are way too many of trucks on the road. (Isn't it time to revitalize the rail road in North America and get rid of the Tractor Trailers?)
In any case, at around 15-19K British pounds this is a very nice little car but I guess it's for summers only.
You can't handle the truth.
Everyone talks about the reliabiltiy issues, and the control/level of skill issues.
Seems to me that the 'ideal' flying car would have no controls at all.
The reason we don't have autopilots in all of our cars is because we can't retrofit every car on the road. We can't design an 'autopilot' system that interacts with human drivers.
I'm DAMN sure we can design an 'autopilot' that functions autonmously as part of a road control system.
Every other car would have to be part of the system, too.
With flying cars, this infrastructure can be designed from day 1.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I have a co-worker who keeps going on about flying cars being the future.
Who would want these things flying over their heads at a few hundred feet? They'd be noisy as hell, and they'd be dangerous to boot! As it is, we have small planes occasionally crashing in neighborhoods. Imagine if the number of small vehicles in the air went up by a couple of order of magnitudes! One small mistake or breakdown in an urban area and boom...
And will these vehicles ( especially the vertical take-off and landing versions ) use less fuel than a regular car? I suspect not. Just what we need, a way to accelerate our energy crunch.
What a bunch of nonsense.
I've seen how bad most drivers are at working in 2 Dimensions, does anyone seriously think that they can handle another?
I stole this Sig
b4 you can have flying cars
You need
- freeflight - no flight corridors
- autopilot for cars
- automatic collision avoidance
- some tanks can do this now
- driverless vehicles that follow a map
bottom line
the flying car needs to be able to fly itself
and have a parachute in case of stalls
You also need totally automatic handling, no manual control at all, the user should only need to type in the post/zipcode and voila the car will take the best route. Thats a rather large challenge when we can't even contemplate doing the same (in commerical terms) of self driving cars on the ground.
Safety, either the mechanics behind the vehicle need to be unerring, or some method to prevent the car from just splatting on the ground, wouldn't really help the marketing campaign.
The only way any of this will pan out is if we develop a tech similar to fifth element antigrav cars. Props (even protected) / jets are just unfeasible, too complicated for your average joe to keep running. The problem is when people think of flying cars we think of these cars metres from each other floating majestically, we dont imagine cars flying along at 300mph 2 miles no fly around them, unable to fly over populated areas and generating a hellova lot of noise and spewing forth pollution comparable to a few SUV's
Oh and it needs to be comparible cost to the current generation of cars...
I'll stick with my bike...
So that's like dog years right. Or is it Duke Nukem Foever years?
Okay, I didn't RTFA but maybe someone who has can tell me if the flying car is actually a BMW hydrogen prototype testdrive gone horribly wrong?
- 4r0g
As if ford explorers weren't bad enough on gas. Now instead of having to contend with rolling friction and air resistance, we have gravity and air resistance
But there's plenty of oil
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
#1 and #3 tickle the fanciful mind, but only #2 is practical.
Even if we could build a flying car economically, how would we regulate it? Imagine everyone replacing their regular car with a flying car. How could we draw the "lanes" in air? Who has the right of way? What is the speed limit?
The flying car would likely be a hazard as all sorts of nuts zip zag across the atmosphere, crashing into each other and killing each other in head-on collisions.
It's one thing to turn a grade school teacher to hamburger, live, before the expectant eyes of millions of children, with "the most complex machine ever built by man". It's another to have those children themselves turned to hamburger.
Seastead this.
Anti-gravity
OK, One hypenated word.
From the article:
The world has never been kind to flying-car dreamers like Henry Smolinski, who died in 1973 when his Ford Pinto with the welded-on Cessna wings crashed
Darwin Award, anyone?
Trying to fly a Pinto? Of all the hundreds cars in the world, he used a friggin' PINTO?
I had to see this for myself.. image.
They probably told him he was nuts too.. But I mean this guy was really NUTS!!!
I would like to see flying cars a la Blade Runner or 5th Element. But until we have anti-gravity, we're still going to have to deal with takeoff and landing. There lies the biggest unavoidable problem (I consider the in-air collision problem at least theoretically avoidable, by use of some advanced TCAS-style technology).
Let's say I live in Morgan Hill CA and want to commute to San Francisco (about 70 miles, all highway). I can drive my modular flying car in putt-putt mode to the local airport (Reed-Hillview), then attach the wing unit, fly to SF, and then what? Where do I land?
Let's assume for a moment that SF can build a floating airfield in the Bay (somehow surmounting legal challenges from NIMBY's and enviros, ferry owners and others whose oxen would be gored by this). Even if you can land next to the Ferry building, I don't think this commute experience adds up to being worth the hassles, either for the city or for private developers or for the individual driver.
The amount of time needed for the transition from rolling to flying, and the distance from door to airport, are the biggest problems.
The ducted fans (Moller, Yoeli) don't have these problems, but unless developers start building heliports on buildings in the city, it's still not viable end-to-end. The heliports would have to be complex, expensive systems similar to military helicopter-carrier ships (unless they are merely a big parking lot, unfeasible in congested cities).
Another issue is maintenance. Airplanes require a lot of expensive maintenance. Would air-cars somehow be cheaper to maintain? What would the annual total cost of operations be? Point of comparison: Here's a rundown of estimated costs to operate one of the cheapest airplanes in production: the Liberty XL2.
Not to sound like a gov't official, but just think of how infinitely more difficult resource-wise it is to constrain a car that has 3 dimensions of movement. We've already got enough trouble with simple roadblocks if someone really wants to cause trouble, blockading flying cars? good luck.
Would a horseshit attack be a reasonable basis for an aerial war?
I think we need the winged steeds before we can even contemplate this.
This just sucks energy and resources from the One True Way: Teleportation!
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
I'd like to commute, Boba Fett style!!
Hell yeah!!
In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? I don't recall how it's powered, but I do remember it had a swing wing similiar to an f-111 or f-14 tomcat. Any data out there on the flight characteristics of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang flying car?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think I know what the editor was trying to say by commenting that several of these inventors have "achieved Darwin Awards" but... c'mon, it's the wrong usage of the term.
Far from removing the bad from the gene pool, the deaths of the people who've tried this and failed (well, *really* failed) have removed physicists who were inventive enough to try something new, were financially successful enough to purchase the needed equipment, and cared enough to try it. Maybe their *idea* achieved a Darwin Award but, people like these?
I'd suggest just using "died" next time if in doubt.
I don't think the personal flying car will ever be practical or affordable, but I think there are some applications for merging flight with city traffic. First, flying police cars as mentioned in the article. Second, how about flying transit? How much more popular would mass transit be if you could zip over the heads of car-driving motorists stuck in traffic at 450km/hr, making it to the depot at the grocery store or near your work in record time?
I'm really glad some people are exploring it. Hydrogen-powered flying transit, anyone?
What Future?
Before someone comes up with a cheap way to avoid gravity pull. And I do mean cheap, no more than 20% of the overall energy stored or generated in the car should be spent on this.
What do you think people were saying 100 years ago about cars? Same things we are saying today about flying cars.
That solves the problem of normal car gridlocks.
[forgive the farkism]
Still no cure for lack of downtown parking space...
Give me a break... my girlfriend can't even figure out how to check the air in her tires, has been known to go a *LONG* time without changing her oil and in one occasion ran out of gas.
I can't imagine this with airplanes or flying cars...
We'll have flying cars when monkey's start flying outta my...
Every time I hear someone rant about anti-gravity.. my brain starts churning overtime about what we're not considering when we think anti-gravity. This would probably mean counter-acting gravitons.. or gravity waves.. if this is the case, then we will most likely have an understanding of not only how to counteract gravity.. but how to create local gravity as well. This would make space travel as open as the highways we drive on now.. fast food and gas stations included. While anti gravity is cool, and will do wonders on planets.. there is MUCH more space in.. space.. and so, controlling GRAVITY is the real holy grail. Anti-gravity is just like the mastering of electrical current. Gravity control is like setting those currents into small chips, and building devices not considered in the first place. anywho..
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
It'll be 20-30 years from the point where there is a real fully working prototype to the point where the ordinary person can make use of it.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Trains are fantastic for very high capacity point to point, A-B transport during rush hour, but otherwise they suck. PRT is the way to go in the future, much cheaper than trains and far faster and more convenient.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
It isn't THAT expensive. Sure, if you want the latest and greatest plane you need to make some serious income. You phrase your reply as it is a bad thing to be wealthy. Consider it incentive!
Flying doesn't require a full blown plane either. There are ultralights that will provide the thrill of flight with less expense.
Finally for those who are inclined there are many kits you can use to build your first plane. This will reduce the cost as well as show you why the things cost so much in the first place. All that time and effort you put into making sure its safe is reflected by all the other planes we see daily.
As to your reply about trains. Not in America. Population center to pop center is probably workable, but your referene to trains seems to imply mass transit and that does not fit well with the current American lifestyle. Worse, this country still has an immense amout of unoccupied land.
I like the idea of flying cars, but as others have mentioned it. In the hands of the Police and EMS. (and NOT POLITICIANS - you know if they restrict the use of flying cars they will except themselves - just like they do from most laws designed to protect others)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Would it be innovative? Dunno. To me it seems not. Unless you want to consider power to weight ratios innovative, which I really don't. Yes I realize there is a little more to it than that but that is the bulk of it.
Maybe it's the term innovative that trips me up. It's such a miss used term anymore it has little meaning for me.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
C'mon, flying cars? What real improvement to human civilisation does that give?
SUSTAINABLE FUCKING FUSION is the holy grail of modern technology, and damn right I'll drink to that dream.
Where are the intelligent people pointing out how ridiculous most of these arguments are.
Flying cars will not have pilots. They will be guided by computers. Who in their right mind would make a company to build these things if the tests required to drive them are, not surprisingly going to be so difficult. Not much profit in that.
Unlike today's cars the auto-mechanic service industry will have to be fairly non-existant. Failure in the air creates a much more desperate situation for the passengers, so inherently very sophisticated self diagnostic system will have to be created.
These two hurdles are large, but certainly not impossible. If all the money that is being wasted on the continual effort to squeeze out a few extra kilometers per gallon on normal car engines was put into researching ways we could get over these two hurdles there might be a chance of a serious prototype in ten years... or maybe we could just have a sustainable car! Surprising the auto-gas industry isn't hard at work on that!
./revolution
I'm then out of a job and I sure everyone else is *keen* to keep traffic lights.
Of course, Moller Skycar website has some cool stuff as well, but I'm sure most have checked it out already...
Die Menschen verhoehnen was sie nicht verstehen. -- Goethe.
Flying cars also would not be possible in areas densely packed with skyscrapers.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"Not only is NASA developing its own flying cars, but it's also working on a collision-deterring navigation system that could make skyways safer than highways. 'You can say our goal is to make the second car in every driveway a personal air vehicle,' says Andrew Hahn, an analyst at NASA's Langley Research Center"
This part's not so great, though...
"One beneficiary of computerized navigation is national security: thanks to G.P.S. and cellphone technology, flying cars could be tracked more easily than any road vehicle.... ground monitors and every other aircraft in the sky will know exactly who and where you are."
I can understand the "where," but I'm not so keen on the "who"...
Many peope are asking what's the point? You only have to think about the repercussions of flying cars to see the point.
First, imagine what now happens to our transportation infrastructure. After the initial investment into the network for flying cars, the costs for the transportaion infrastrcuture would come down incredibly. We would either have no cost in maintaining roads or a substantially reduced cost - depending on whether it is economical to have semi's hover over the roads. The cost wouldn't go to zero, of course, since we still have to have computers and people to manage those computers to monitor the skies and traffic.
Second, imagine your job opporunities now. I travel an hour each way for my job now. It's about 60 miles each way. With a flying car that does over 300 mph, my possible job radius increases by 5 times! That means the total area I can look for jobs increases by 25 times! Additionally, if flying can be automated, it might be possible to extend this. If I can sleep during most of the trip, I can expand my job to home radius even more.
Third, this would just about eliminate passenger air travel within most continents. Even though air planes can travel faster that the roughly 350 mph being quoted for the flying cars, the associated over-head (checking-in, having to work on the air-lines schedule, etc...) would mostly or completely negate that advantage.
Next, imagine the effects upon retail businesses. Since people can now go over 5x as far in the same amount of time as with convential cars (perhaps even farther since traffic may be much more manageable), retail businesses have to be much more comptetitve. Instead of just competing with places within, say your city , you're now competing with businesses that are 300 miles away. You may have to compete with businesses from several cities! If you travel at over 300 mph, now stores up to 75 miles away can be considered the "neighborhood corner store".
Now consider the effect upon real-estate prices. Except for small islands with a dense population, it would be very hard to drive up real-estate prices based solely on proximity to areas containing many jobs. People won't mind living 100 miles away from work when it only takes them about 20 minutes for the commute. Thus the demand for property next to areas containing many jobs would severely decrease.
Because of all these effects, we could eventually see the population spread out more evenly thoughout the contintents instead oh having much of the land empty with a few areas densely populated (we would still have still have densely populated areas -just not as many and much less dense). This would also likely have a significant impact upon the environment-whether good or bad I can't say.
Lastly, because the population would be more spread out, it would force the communications infrastructure to expand to meet the new demands.
If a flying car with decent range and speed is made available at an affordable price to most people-it won't be an evolutionary step of the autombile-it'll be a revolution for the world.
Given sufficiently high-resolution control over gravity you can accomplish basically any engineering task. It should even allow us to control all forms of matter. The limits will then be the efficiency of the process and the amount of energy you can generate to run it. Of course, right now the limit is our understanding of gravity...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Since no one seems to have posted this yet:
Going Way Off-Road
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
The parent poster basically makes one point: it will be hard to regulate, so let's just give up. OMG: there'll be licenses and regulations... just... like... a highway!.
You can't fly too low/high - have you ever seen a speed limit, or minimum-speed on roads today?
Airplanes today already are being shipped with BRS systems - ballistic recovery systems - rocket deployed parachutes for safe recovery after losing control / etc... see: Cirrus Aircraft.
To counter the well-intended, but wrong info in the parent poster: they only have to regulate a few licensed carriers and a relatively small number of private pilots. This is completely false... see the AOPA or Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association - of America. It has over 400,000 active, dues-paying members in the US alone, making up one of the largest active lobbies in the US. General Aviation serves america - making the first critical blood and organ transfer transports after 9/11 - see GA Serving America for more info.
As for good medical history / etc... The FAA just approved a new set of certifications called LSA / Light Sport Aircraft, allowing pilots (with certain limitations) to self-certify their health when flying particularly light (under about 1200lbs) aircraft. This is far higher than the current UltraLight limits - getting well into some of the modern composite aircraft built in Europe - that get better fuel efficiency than cars (per seat mile) and are faster than the US certified all metal birds such as Cessna 150s/152s.
All this said, the FAA (A slow, frustrating organization at times) is making the transition to GPS (w/WAAS/LASS) in the next decade as the primary means of instrument / navigation for air transportation.
One goal of this, already being implemented is mode-S transponders that with new FAA radio/radar systems being rolled out will do to ATC what GPS and SatComm did for the military - provide a complete 3D picture of all aircraft in the sky including position, velocity, trends, and modeled based on aircraft capability - the future potential positions of an aircraft. Not to mention the ability to transfer a flight plan / guidance revision to an aircraft over digital radio.
This is part of the FAA's free-flight initiative - a very slow, future-envisioning research project including providing for fully automated 3D navigation for air-taxi services including collision avoidance with non-automated aircraft.
Finally - a pet peeve of pilots, there is no such thing as a pilot's license... just a pilot certificate - certificated not unlike an aircraft... in that the certificate is only valid given certain conditions (recent flight, bi-annual flight reviews, etc...)
Could you -Please- give this "flying car" bullshit a rest.
You guys are starting to read like the National Enquirer when it comes to "flying car" stories.
Everytime someone with a flying car idea gets some press time, somebody's panties get moist and they submit a story.
It doesn't mean that you have to post it each and every time.
We've already reached the condition of waging proxy wars over energy supplies to support our existing ways of life, and now without addressing the practicalites of making it sustainable (let alone welcoming the other 95% of the world up to our standard of living) the ad-men are trying to sell the idea of a bigger, better, faster tomorrow.
The little boy in me would really, really like my own flying machine; but as an adult all I see is down sides. Christ, flying soccer-moms should be enough to put any one off....
I see an important difference...... Right now I feel safe sleeping in my second floor bedroom on a saturday night.... If flying cars were around though... I'd have to worry about a drunk driver flying into my bedroom window..... No thank you..... Lets keep us naked apes with all four wheels on the ground......We are far dangerous enough that way....
Business is Business and Business must grow, Regardless of crummies in tummies you know... -Onceler
Joe Pilot wouldn't exist.
We simply can't afford to give people the ability to change course mid-flight. Too many variables, as you cite. Flying cars driven that way would be a waste of lives and money. That being said, there are still a lot of gains that flying vehicles could provide (so long as we're willing to toss energy concerns out the window)
So we may have flying cars, but they won't be equivalent to the cars you have now where you can get in and go for a drive with no real destination in mind. Instead, your controls to the individual flying car become a simple data entry system. You type in where you want to go, strap in, and let the vehicle do the rest.
Obviously such a vehicle would need multiple redundant systems and the ability to handle emergency landings. It would probably also be centrally controlled, in order to make sure that they didn't hit each other and for emergency cases. (You don't want any idiot getting into his flying car as the hurricane comes through) A flying car isn't a step toward more freedom, as many people think, it's a step toward more control.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
The Problem with Cars is the operate so very close to each other - with unreal accuracy requirements.
2 feet in any direction could cost your life.
In the Air, GPS precision is enough to seperate traffic, and for landing, ground based positioning systems can provide landing.
The Traffic control problem is not complicated (simple Ant Colony Optimization can do it)
The Issue is reliabiity.
I would suggest a 4 upthrust system.
The 4 thrusters designed such that any two can support the craft's weight at least suffecient to create a survivable descent. And the third (Assuming one fails) is capable of providing axis control.
Assuming the thrusters are articulated, any 4 thruster vehicle can be repositioned in the air for flight on three thrusters - it requires that the balance of weight is higher than the thruster plane. In this case the plane can lean over and thereby shift the weight away from the failed corner and evenly onto the other three corners, forming a weightbalanced tripod.
AIK
The most versatile system would be a 360 radar which detected moving (or solid objects), and used a repelling force so that both sky cars would 'push' away from each other at a specified distance (depending on the relative speed). This means you can get the freedom to fly wherever you want, and I bet it's much easier to implement too.
This way, we can scrap the entire concept of sky lanes altogether.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Just build flying roads then we can use ordinary cars
As a pedestrian and cyclist, the idea of a flying car horrifies me! It is hard enough avoiding these poison gas spewing terrorist death machines on wheels as it is. Will I have to worry about them landing on my head as well?
I agree. Instead of configuring a huge rocket motor of somekind, we could just *fall* towards the nearest solar system. Neat. When we are in the middle, we just reverse gravity. Problem solved.
And by 2015 we can turn your car into a skyway flyer... ...for only $39,999.95.
flying while intoxicated?
the horror....
I'm glad Slashdot is so optimistic that I'll be able to buy a flying car in five years. The way my career is going, I won't even be able to afford a non-flying car in five years.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
Except that we usually don't need to worry about cars falling through the roof.
Then there's the Flying Yahoo Tossing Beer Bottle From Window issue...
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
He claims VTOL performance (hasn't actually demonstrated VTOL yet, though), much better power efficiency than a helicopter, easier flight charactistics than a conventional aircraft let alone a helicopter, and importantly much lower noise than a helicopter. The models fly, but he hasn't flown a full-size prototype yet.
Look, I'm no aeronautical engineer, but it sure does fly and it does look like a genuinely new idea.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
fyi: don't crash on my property. Trespassers will be eaten alive by my cat.
Hmm, mass transit that goes above traffic? How if it could carry a lot more people than even a bus? You know, like a train that goes above traffic... hey, don't we have those already? And we can also get them to go below traffic! The problem with mass transit is people that are too stupid (particularly in the USA), but hey, if you like traffic jams, go have fun. Here I just walk (takes 30 minutes to get to downtown) when I travel to Buenos Aires (12 million people) I use the subway or bus. Mass transit usually has a fixed path, the only advantage with planes is speed over water (over land I'll take a fast train, thank you). Ok, enough ranting.
The standard argument [seen above several times] about flying cars being unsafe because you are in 3D space is misguided. An aircraft at altitude is much easier to guide than an automobile! First off, the odds of collision with other vehicles is vastly reduced because the space for vehicles and escape routes has more dimesions; in a car on the road, if the car in front of you suddenly stops, you have exactly one option, to stop. In the air, the the car in front of you suddenly went into hover or popped a chute, you wouldnt even have to change course typicall because you are on a different route in 3d, and if even if you did have to take evasive action, you have 3 dimensions to reroute too.
Traffic jams would never happen because there are no physical bottlenecks; course would be plotted on a virtual 3D highway where you are the only one in your lane. Remember, its not just one dimension more, but 2; up down right and left in addition to the typical forward only.
Typically in an aircraft, when something goes wrong, you have several minutes to compensate befoer you collide with anything. In a car, you typically have about one second to compensate, or you go off the road.
The reasons aircraft today are just as safe as cars, but not safer, is mainly down to the fact that they are not VTOL and dont have parachutes for engine out; in emergency you have to land on rough terrain at high speed. If you remove the need for a runway and the need for high speeds near the ground, and compensate for engine out properly, aircraft could actually be safer than cars.
Thanks, but those Hindenburgs give me the creeps.
Does everything include nothing?
moller and theskycar thing have been around for nearly 30 years and its all hype and no results. The whole concept is foolish. The moller bunch relies on naive new investors to keep showing up because it seems like a neat idea. It was hyped in popular mechanics/science and the amateur aviation magazines in the 80's until it died away. Then the web brought in a new group of suckers to feed off the hype.
From an engineering point of view, planes and helicopters leverage aerodynamics to get lift from relatively small power plants. The skycar needs a 1/1 thrust to weight ratio. it flies (or in this case, fails to fly) on brute force, like a rocket. not an efficient way to go.
From a pilot point of view, planes and helicopters glide when the engine(s) go out. You have a chance of surviving. The skycar will fall like a rock. that won't be too popular. yes yes they claim they use a lot of engines to get redundancy, but more engines makes reliability worse, not better.
I am going to puke the next time I see people in slashdot talking about the skycar like it is real.
Not ALL of us in the USA are too stupid - you do have plenty of people like me who prefer to live on several acres of land and enjoy the peacefulness of knowing your nearest neighbor is 2+ acres away. I enjoy the value of privacy and being able to turn my stereo as loud as I damn well want without worrying about my neighbors in the apartment upstairs getting pissed off... And yet, driving, I can still get most anywhere I want within about 15-30 minutes... It would take me a helluva lot longer to walk there, and there is no public transportation out where I live because it's not an inner-city area.
Those of you in foreign countries (especailly Europeans) get very pissy about us Americans sitting in our traffic, etc etc - but you don't seem to realize - the majority of traffic (in Georgia at least) - is from people who do not live in the city and instead commute to the inner city to work.
"The Samurai who does not fear death becomes invincible."
would it be easier or harder to get caught dwi?
enough trouble driving on a two dimesional road , any idea what a mess we will make flying in the three dimensional airspace?
Wanted : A Signature.
Next we will have the Dept. of Homeland Sec. warning of terrorists planning on flying cars into skyscrapers....
As a child in the late sixties and early seventies, I was sure that I'd have a flying car just like George Jetson by the 1980's, The futuristic 1980's when we'll be taking trips to the moon and flying around in our cars. And robots will do all the really difficult chores.
The future's not what it used to be.
Chitty Bang Specifications
(http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/ )
NATO Designation: GEN11
Classification: Automobile, VTOL 3 rotor aircraft, hovercraft
Primary Function: Joymobile, sentient magic being
Builder:
Ken Adam, Rowland Emmett - Production Designers, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Movie
Alan Mann - Ford Racing Team
Fiirst Flight/Road Test: June 1967, UK
Power Plant: Ford 3000 V6 and automatic transmission
Fuel: Love
Thrust: Unknown
Length: 17 feet
Height: 5 feet
Wingspan: 10 feet
Rotor Diameter Vertical Lift Rotors(2)- 6 feet; Rear Propulsion Prop Diameter(1)- 6 feet
Speed: 100 Mph
Ceiling: 5000 Feet, est.
Maximum Takeoff Weight: 3500 lbs.
Range: Unknown; Recorded trip to Vulgaria from UK
Armament: Truly Scrumptious
(Source: http://chittygen11.com/index.html)
Holy Grail? Give me an African sparrow anyday. I mean European sparrow. Waaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
At first glance, I thought you were saying that General Aviation serves America by generating the blood and organs used for transfer to other humans.
Then I realized that was ridiculous, as most aviation accidents don't leave many organs to mop up.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Everybody knows you'll be able to buy a hovercar conversion in Hill Valley for $39,999.99 from the grandson of mayor Goldie Wilson.
car-driving motorists stuck in traffic at 450km/hr Now, now, have wee been playing too much Need for Speed? Calling 450km/h stuck just won't do you know!
A flying car would need to be almost completely autonomous.
It is absoultely impractical to expect joe shmo to be a certified helicopter pilot to drive to work. Already we have modern airplanes that can go from takeoff to landing without one imput from the pilot.
Basically, the way the flying car could work would be that the only input that the driver could have is the destination.
I think cost is the real problem. Try making a flying car for 10k!
Take a gasoline powered leaf blower. Scale it up so that it makes a lot of wind. Now build about five of these and attach them to a car-sized vehicle.
If you bring one of those home, I don't want to be your next-door neighbor.
To be fair, Moller is proposing an engine that would be more efficient (and thus quieter) than the cheap two-stroke engine in a leaf blower. But he still needs a boat-load of thrust per engine to lift the car, its fuel, and its passengers and their luggage, plus extra power to handle engine failure.
The last time I looked at Moller's web site (years ago) it said something hand-wavy about active noise cancellation. It sounded good at the time but now I'm dubious; moving as much air as this thing will move, how can you ever get it really quiet? (And how much will the noise cancellation gear weigh?) Noise cancellation works great if you are sitting in a predictable spot, but how can you cancel the noise of the flying car for all listeners in all directions?
I'd love flying cars, with safe autopilots please, but I think that unless someone invents antigravity they won't be practical.
On Earth, anyway... A Miracle of Science showed flying cars inside the domed cities of Luna. With one-sixth the gravity of Earth, flying cars might be more reasonable.
P.S. I'd like to plug A Miracle of Science. It's a nifty hard-science SF story that nonetheless has a sense of wonder. It's one of my favorite web comics.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
We put airports outside of cities for a reason- well, actually several reasons. One is noise. It's bad enough with cars, but can you imagine the racket from several thousand small aircraft zipping around a major urban area? Another huge issue is safety- aircraft obviously try to avoid inhabited areas. Think of how dangerous an air car crash will be to the street traffic below: like, imagine a Volkswagen catapulted forward at 150mph... from atop the Empire State Building.
You just need the right software.
That's what an IBM commercial a few years ago said, and I loved it. We are obviating more and more of the need for cars with high speed networks. There will always be a need for transport, of course, but perhaps not so much of it.
The problem with predictions of the future are that they are made with the stuff of the present. Flying cars were an early fantasy when traffic jams started. The vision of being able to just fly straight around the traffic is a lovely one, but if they were really a commercial reality, then many other people would have them and you would all be trying to fly around the traffic at the same time and just create another mess just like the people who try to "fly" around a traffic jam by zooming ahead on the outside down to the merge point and jump in there, and this activity is then much of the cause of the delay in the first place.
The flying car attraction is similar in principle to the electric car: it will cost much less to operate because you don't buy gasoline which is what has the road tax in it. This is about what the diesel car idea was, but they became popular, and the tax on diesel was increased. Once electric cars become popular enough, some road tax will move to electricity. Don't think that hybrid cars are immune - the less gas used means less road tax revenue, so the tax per gallon will go up since the cost to maintain roads won't change. The flying cars will be taxed for the increase on air traffic control costs.
Umm, Zoche is nothing more than a way to scam R&D money from the german government. The specs of the engine look fantastic and all, but zoche has been saying "FAA/JAA certification next year" for the past, oh, 15 years or so. So far he has shown nothing but empty promises.
As far as aviation diesels go, Thielert and SMA produce certified engines, flying today in certified installations (some new planes, some STC:s for Cessnas IIRC). There are other serious players too, Deltahawk is nearing certification, and perhaps Wilksch too.
I would prefer the Doctor's TARDIS, though it has some navigation problems at times.
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
Perhaps a little token of control such as flight controls to let us request access (or creation of?) and navigation of "virtual tunnels" that take the place of today's highways. But the air-traffic systems that will actually be controlling traffic patterns and having conversations with your jet-car will not let you change lanes (tunnels?) into someone else, nor will they let you enter restricted airspace, leave the boundaries of a virtual tunnel or any other stupid thing that we will all try to do the moment we get into one of these things...
There will be no "fully manual mode" other than in the case of communication failure with traffic systems or system failure in the air-car...
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
... not to post links that require a subscription?!? I wonder how all those people can be so resistant to learn something so simple as not using links not everyone has access to. Unfortunately this time even no one came up with a reg-free link. :-(
Kosi
Those of you in foreign countries (especailly Europeans) get very pissy about us Americans sitting in our traffic, etc etc - but you don't seem to realize - the majority of traffic (in Georgia at least) - is from people who do not live in the city and instead commute to the inner city to work.
Ah, you mean that you are causing all the major traffic jams and using most of the resources (compared to people in the living in the city). Anyway, I don't see how your 2 acres life style justifies all the traffic jams and poor public transport. If you think it does I can see why the Euro-trash gets pissy......
M0571y H@rml355.
> Next we will have the Dept. of Homeland Sec. warning of terrorists planning on flying cars into skyscrapers....
Actually, once we have flying cars, no one would expect the terrorists to drive real cars into buildings! It's just crazy enough to... Uh -- do... something.
Actually, the idea of these flying cars is that they'll have sophisticated, idio-proof avionics. The FAA has been actively working in that direction. Now, that said, I think we'll see "flying taxis" before we see most of these as personal cars. With a taxi, you can assume a modestly trained operator-which makes a big difference.