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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.
In a word: Parking. An airplane, you have to find space for at a local airport. It's expensive, and good luck finding sheltered hangar space in many areas. Plus, you get to worry about whether the general aviation airport will stay open. I have to move my airplane 50 miles now because the airport I've been using, 3FD1, is being sold by the owner - to be turned into strip malls. Yay, development.
I'd love to have an airplane that I could land and then drive home and keep in a real garage. Right now, I have to hope that my plane has weathered the hurricane here in Florida because there was no full hangar space available for shelter. I should really have flown it out of here, but I just got it back after 4 months and didn't feel safe flying in the dodgy weather.
Any VTOL capability would be nice so that I wouldn't have to go to the local airport in order to take off and land, but that wouldn't be as much of a win as simply being able to drive on standard roads and park in a standard garage.
Helicopters have a slightly different set of issues, but they're simply no good for long distance travel. If you want to fly a reasonable distance a helo is not an option.
There are some other issues, like most non-turbine airplanes requiring a more expensive, different grade of gasoline (avgas: "100LL") than cars do, but those are slowly changing - we're seeing more and more engines designed to take auto gas instead of 100LL.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
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...)