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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
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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... 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!
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.
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.
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?
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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?
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...)