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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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...
#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.
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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?
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.