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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.
bugmenot was a huge waste of time. None of the logins worked.
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.
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
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
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 halfway through building a Dyke Delta.
http://www.ernest.isa-geek.org
John Dyke set out to build a flying car. In fact, the wings still fold, and the plans still include a steering wheel.
It's a folding wing delta configuration, but the compromises needed to make the plan roadable would just make it useless as an airplane. Just a couple he cited to me were turn signals and windshield wipers.
It's been stated that an airplane is a bunch of compromises flying in close formation. Making the plane roadable under its own power adds another list of compromises, and as every engineer knows complexity grows exponentially with the number of requirements.
John's eloquent compromise was to make the plane towable on it's own gear.
Moller is a charlatan that has been foisting an unworkable idea on uncritical investors for 30years. His machine requires the unfaltering opeation of 4 engines, one at each corner. Most general aviation accidents result from running out of fuel, at which point the pilot is often able to save the soft, pink contents of the plane by gliding to the ground. What recovery option does this craft have? Most light planes will still fly at around 60-65mph, but there is no way the Moller car will stay aloft under 120mph without power.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Maglev is fine if you want to get from point A (usually city centre), and point B (usually city centre). For long distances the transfer time is irellevent, but for your daily commute maglev is wasted. I travel 30 miles a day in to work, by foot, train and tube. It takes me 70 minutes. 10 by foot, 40 by train, and 10 by tube. 5 minute transfer at both points. If the train ran non-stop it would shave about 15 minutes off my journey. If it ran non-stop at maglev speed, it would take about 5 minutes, halving my commute. I'm not aware of anyone else doing Twyford to Ealing at 7:40 each morning, so a direct train wouldn't be much good. In realiity it would call, as it does now, at Reading-Twyford-Maidenhead-Burnham-Slough-Hayes-Ea ling-Paddington. Given the allowed acceleration of vehicles with standing passangers, a maglev might shave 10 minutes off the journey.
While maglev might help on middle distance trains (London - Manchester, Birmingham-Glasgow), that's a different market from the flying car ideal.
Doing a self-piloting vehicle which flies is so much easier than making a self-driving car it's not even funny. I mean, once you have the vehicle completed anyway. In some ways it's harder, like dealing with atmospheric conditions and such, but that stuff is fairly well known. Most problems can be solved by identifying the vectors of other airborne objects (or terrain objects) and using techniques commonly used in video games to determine where to go. The hard part is building the model used for the computations. You can accomplish a lot of it with GPS and GIS, though, by keeping a map of the terrain. If all flying vehicles carried an appropriate transponder then the system would be simple; otherwise you need a radar system to point out other aircraft. All you need to know about them is their position over several sweeps and you can decide where they're likely to be and give them a wide berth.
That all sounds pretty complicated right? Well, the only hard thing is takeoff and landing, even with VTOL, because at all other times you just avoid everything by such a wide margin that it never becomes an issue. Unless someone is deliberately trying to crash into you, it's just not going to be that difficult. You won't be flying them in crowded urban areas until a serious revolution in materials technology occurs, because you need to be able to build essentially indestructible structures for that to be at all feasible. Personally, I'd never implement it. Once you're in a city there's no reason not to use public transportation.
Of course, we'd be better off just running trains everywhere and ditching all the cars. If gas prices continue to climb, we may actually get there sooner than we'd like. Actually, we'll get there a lot later than we'd like, because it will take us ages.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?)