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Flying Cars Ready To Take Off
Ant writes "CBS News has an article, images, and a free streaming video clip of Elwood (Woody) Norris' invention of a working flying machine, AirScooter. He asked one of his test pilots to demonstrate it for 60 Minutes on a hilltop outside San Diego, California. It can fly for 2 hours at 55 mph, and go up to 10,000 feet above sea level. This week, he will receive America's top prize for invention. It's called the Lemelson-MIT award -- a half-million dollar cash prize to honor his life's work, which includes a brand new personal flying machine.
Woody Norris' and others' inventions are for NASA's 'The Highway in the Sky.' It is a computer system designed to let millions of people fly whenever they please, and take off and land from wherever they please, in their very own vehicles."
Each person having their own flying machine....can you imagine the waste of fossil fuels and danger involved? It's bad enough with cars!!
Im fairly sure these device wont be valid road going vehicals for a while atleast. .
I am wonder (fairly sure they will)if they will need to introduce a new license scheme for them and a whole new set of transit laws
The potential problems that machines like this could cause is immense if this is not as tightly regulated as standerd aircraft not to mention the cross with auto mobiles
However if these things are avaliable for 50k from people like Mr Morris then I will definantly be rather tempted to get when if i ever have money like that laying around(Lets hope some unknown rich relative dies).
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Your basic Homosapien biped can barely handle vechicles that have 4 wheels and stay on the ground. I can't wait for these flying contraptions to hit buildings, fall out of the sky, and cause 80 flying car accidents 500 feet in the air. All because somebody spilled their coffee or were changing the radio station.
-Dipster
How many equivalent 'passenger miles per gallon' will these get versus a car? While the "as a crow flies" distance may be shorter than driving, I can't imagine that the fuel usage is less than or 2x a car.
With gas refining capacity already strained, personal flying cars would be like taking one of the worst effects of SUV usage and mulplying that effect again.
Damn...and I thought people were finally getting the idea that we have to conserve energy. Imagine how much oil/jet fuel that flying car would go through? It has four sets of rotary engines! I'd much rather see people driving an electric vehicle like this Reva NXG that can go 200km after a 6 hour charge.
He does a good job at getting the press attention every year or so yet no real advances are made. the Moller skycar is still the same point it was 5 years ago. he still has not flown it (tied to a crane is not flying it) or anything else other than his PR stunt shows.
Lots of promises are made but nothing solid or real is ever shown or demonstrated, it always feels like the snake oil or perpetual energy people. Look at what I did! no you cant see how it works or it actually work in real tests.
how about he untether it and fly it across the country? Experimental aircraft licensing is really easy to get.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Everybody assumes that everybody will start flying these things as soon as they will hit the market. That's scary.
The only way I see these things being actually safe for use is if the license can only be gotten through intensive training, akin to a private pilot certificate. Pilot training is expensive, but maybe it'll come down in price as methods of effective mass teaching are invented.
what would you do with a flying car?
kit-planes are already cheap and pretty as much usable as "flying cars" would be in the next 50+ years anyways..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Flying at low altitudes (esp. less than 400 feet) is extremely dangerous, at least in conventional aircraft. This is known in pilotspeak as nap of the earth (NOE) flying. NOE flying is dangerous for a number of reasons. A couple of big ones are hitting objects like power lines, trees, towers, etc. Poor visibility can make this even more dangerous. Another reason is you have much, much less time to react if something goes wrong if you are flying close to the ground. It may seem counterintuitive, but the higher you fly, the safer you are.
About this "car".
It's a one seater.
The driver/pilot position is open to the elements.
It has no cargo carrying capacity (as far as I could tell.)
Max speed 55mph, 2 hours of flight per tank.
Skids only (no wheels), so you can't park it in a ramp/underground garage, so can't fly it to the city...
Cool toy? H3ll yeah. If I ever win the lottery (unlikely, as I don't play it) I'll be all over one of these. Replacement for a car? Bah.
Looking at the AirScooter video, and at thinking about the motorcycle handle and the lack of foot pedals, how does the pilot correct for uncommanded roll, as might occur in turbulence, or thermals, encountering wake turbulence, ...?
I'm quite skeptical.
This is not a flying car. It's just another plane!
A small plane, but still just a plane.
There has to be another way of beating gravity than blowing air over a wing shaped objects at high speed.
------- Look mum! I have posted another Slashdot comment! --------
So, do you advocate all cars being unable to accelerate beyond 65 miles per hour? Or all guns being able to sense if they're being used in self defense? How about MP3 players that can detect copyrighted music and refuse to play it? The lack of these features sounds like a "serious issue" to me.
It's a bit different when you are driving a car and you go in excess of the speed limit. This is going into restricted airspace where you need to be licensed in order to fly above it.
Moller is the worst snake-oil salesman in the entire history of aviation. He's been "nearly ready for production" for 20+ years now, and shows some rigged demo every time he needs a bit more investor money.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Never mind Homeland Security. What about the people whose houses these things are going to fall on when people without the skills required for a current private pilots license decide that "whenever they please" means during thunderstorms or when the clouds are generating ice or when the wind is gusting to 90 knots?
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So how long before I hear about a small squadron of explosives- and fuel-laden flying cars take out the Empire State Building hmm?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Flying cars have been a Popular Science wet dream for 50 years - maybe more. Personal jet backs fall into the same category. The issues have always been more than technical.
Flying an airplane, even a small one, is not a trivial task. The general population is incapable of taking on that kind of responsibility.
Plus, who will fund and build landing pads or landing strips? Who will agree to the noise from the "airports" or backyard landing pads?
Self awareness - try it!
At the present rate of oil consumption, which is increasing by the way, the crude oil reserves will be exhausted in about 20 years.
It's a physics based fact that keeping a mass, such as an air car, airborne consumes more energy than a ground based rolling car. So unless they can figure out how to make an air car run on a renewable energy source, which has less energy than oil based fuels, it'll never happen, or at best, it'll happen as the last of oil reserves are used up, and it'll use them up faster yet on top of that.
How are they going to prevent people from flying over private property? I don't want thousands of people flying over my 2000 acres in Montana (if I ever buy it).
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
Going "point to point" and not having traffic congestion, you might get much further in two hours flying 55mph, than four hours driving.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
This is kind of like saying "I need to continue to grow my per day spending. I need to find new and more plentiful ways to make money. Having lots of money has change my life, where I live, etc... I'm not sure I can afford a yacht any time soon, but If could, wouldn't that be cool?"
It's true; spending energy is fun and has many positive benefits, but at the moment our primary energy source is oil, and it isn't renewable. One day, maybe we'll have some new, safe, and more plentiful energy "income" sources, but right now we don't. When you're out of work, spending all your cash reserves is a dumb thing to do, and that's what we're doing with oil, right now. There's no "energy Visa company" we can borrow from while we're out of oil and waiting for fusion or high-altitude wind generation, either.
It is, in fact, even worse than the cash analogy; development of new energy technologies requires energy. If we let our energy reserves drop low enough, eventually we won't have the resources required to invest in new energy technology. It's like driving down the highway, and being close to empty. It's nice that there's a gas station 40 miles up the road, but if you keep the pedal to the metal, and burn up all your gas in 20 miles, you're still fscked.
Moller's car will never go anywhere. He just loves attention. Even he has never flown his car off of a crane harness and he's had this car for many years. The bottom line is that his design isn't feasible and never will be. There are some good ideas out there but his isn't one of them.
Unfortunately, we are a long long way from flying cars or anything similar. I'm 40 and I doubt I'll see one in my lifetime given what I've seen so far.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
I was talking to someone at work about this a week or two ago. People have known how to make flying cars for a while now. If the field were viable, it would be fairly easy for an automobile/aerospace corporation to design and build one in the next couple of years.
The problem is and has always been the infrastructure and regulation required to make it anywhere near safe for average citizens to fly. This Highway in the Sky program sounds neat, but it still doesn't address many of the major problems involved. I'd hate to see a flying car stall in New York, for instance, or a drunk teenager crash one into a building.
Give most people a plane and tell them they have to keep steering it in this little box on a screen and see how long they'll stick with it before going off on a joyride. The only way these things wouldn't endanger innocents would be if police installed anti-air missiles at every street corner to blow anyone that veers from their flight path to pieces. I'm not sure that too many people would line up to buy a flying car once that went into effect, though.
[insert witty quote here]
Well, sorry to spoil the fun but you will still be promising flying cars to your children, and they to theirs. It won't happen anytime soon due to all the problems involved, just read some of the "Insightful" posts here for a few examples.
It's always amusing to read those picture books from the fifties which my parents stored in the attic, which claim that everyone is now flying around in choppers, commercial airliners are powered by nuclear reactors, and of course nobody still works nowadays because robots do all the work.
As a side note, he's down the street from me. At the same time, a few exits up there is the fuel cell initiative, which is only a few years old. They have regular show and tells and let people drive the cars. They are also trickling prototypes into circulation, letting people drive them[1]... and in the meantime Moller has an airstrip right across town and has never actually flown anything in the decades he's had "working machines only months away from production". How many years do you have to have "advance deposits" before it's clear that they aren't going to be delivered? Recently he's started touting organic almond butter as a way to extend life expectancy. He's a viagra spam away from being a blatant con.
[1] Walk off the street, drop your DL on the desk and take one for a spin. Specific days only, plus events like the recent Davis Picnic Day. They are nifty - I've seen a few different models in functional use on the freeway in the past year with the yellow "Hydrogen Vehicle" banner.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Although this is a great advancement in helicopter design it's not going to become a flying car. You still have to deal with engine outages and auto-rotation so you'll need to be a pilot to fly it. I can but a Robinson R22 2-person chopper and do everything that this unit can do, although it takes more skill. It's a great achievement but it's not a car. It's a hobbyists toy. Even if they enclose it, it will face the same issues as modern small choppers.
I wouldn't worry about the drunk ones. Even sober many people can't manage to drive decently in 2 dimensions. Add a third and you'll start seeing people falling out of the sky left and right.
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"we will run out oil eventually... this running out will happen relatively abruptly, leading to something of a crisis in our society on account of our dependance on private transportation."
This is very much NOT true. We will not suddenly wake up one day and find all the oil gone. What will happen is that price of oil will slowly continue to rise for decades. This will facilitate a smooth transition from oil to alternative energy sources.
What most people don't understand about oil is that we dig up very little of the blackstuff. When we drop a well down and start sucking up reservoirs of this oil, we are really only dragging up the easiest to reach oil that is just sitting there. Most oil is left untouched due to the fact that it would be very expensive to remove it.
Three things are going to happen to make the cost of oil slowly rise as it is depleted.
1) Speculators will make sure that it rises slowly. Speculators watch the supply of oil and basically bet on how much it is going to cost in the future. While they do drive the price of the oil up by buying out supply, they also ensure a more even distribution over time of its distribution. For instance, if suddenly the oil companies were to announce that HOLY SHIT we are out of oil in a year, speculators would quickly buy up the supply and start parceling it away. The price absolutely would go up, but we wouldn't go from oil gushing out of our ears to being bone dry.
2) As the cost of oil is driven up, oil companies will naturally start digging up more expensive to extract oil. At $30 a barrel it makes no sense to go to an old oil well and start extracting all that stuff that takes $50 a barrel to extract. However, once the price of oil hits $100 per barrel, that $50 per barrel oil will make a tidy profit. So, as the cost for oil goes up, more and more expensive oil will be introduced to the market. The oil will not suddenly run out. Instead, more expensive oil will be introduced to the market that will slowly drive the price up.
3) As the cost of oil goes up, the demand for oil will go down. This is economics 101 supply and demand. Oil is the energy source of choice simply because it is relatively clean (compared to some thing), a very dense energy source, and extremely cheap. Today oil is cheap for the amount of energy you can make from it. The stuff is plentiful enough to fuel the world, and cheap enough for almost everyone to be able to buy it. This will not always be true. As the price goes up, more people will start to spend a few extra dollars to avoid having to shell out so much at the pump. Alternative energy sources will be comparatively cheaper then oil. People will move naturally away from oil. You can see a perfect of this by looking at Europe and the US. The US, where this is almost no taxation on oil, people own big ugly fuel hungry cars. In Europe, where the taxes on oil account for a full ¾ of the costs, people use significantly more fuel efficient cars and in general burn much less oil. Up the price of oil by 500% and even Americans will find it in their hearts (or more likely wallets) to be more fuel efficient.
The net result is that as the price of oil goes up, the consumption of the stuff goes down. As consumption goes down, the price slows its upward slope. The result is that you have a gradual increase in oil prices and a gradual move away from using it.
"what would you do with a flying car?"
Park it in your garage instead of having to store it in a hangar?
Honestly, I don't understand why stories like this always suck the imagination out of some people.
"Derp de derp."
While I think your analysis is fairly insightful, I disagree with your assertion that the price of oil will slowly rise for decades.
History has shown that when the demand for a critical resource such as electricity or oil exceeds the supply, the price does not rise "slowly". When California experienced electricity shortages, the spot market price went up by a factor of 10 in a matter of months. This is not a slow increase - this is a spike. Crude oil futures were trading on the NYMEX last year at $35/barrel; this year it is $50/barrel. That is an increase of 50% in one year - not what I would call "slow". The problem that many are worried about is that the price of this essential commodity will rise much faster than our ability to replace our cheap-oil-dependent infrastructure with some alternative. This will lead to recession, depression, and possibly crash.
The only thing that can make the price of oil go down is for the demand to decrease faster than the supply is decreasing. However, unless we suddenly come up with some way to make our economy run on something other than petroleum, this means our economy will also decrease as our energy usage decreases. The problem with that scenario is that our economy is not geared to decrease - it can either grow (increase) or crash. There is no middle ground.
And what about International Borders? I can just see Mexicans crashing into houses in CA or AZ or TX (or vice versa). We already have problems with uninsured aliens and cars, adding planes would be even worse! Plus would we need SkyCops to make sure the regs were followed? If so how do you "pull them over" and give a ticket??
No that would be true for ANY mass.
Cars are subject to two major losses: (by the nature of the vehicle)
Airtcraft are subject to two major losses:
Loss no 2 is proportional to mass in BOTH CASES, so everything else being equal, varying the mass is NOT getting you anywhere.
In addition, since your coefficient of rolling friction is ALWAYS less than one, you are ALWAYS going to loose more energy from #2 when you're flying than driving.
What you're doing is taking a really light, aerodynamic airplane and compare it to a huge, unaerodynamic truck, but that's not a fair comparison. For instance, How much cargo can a 20 MPG truck move compared to a 20MPG airplane?
A fair compaison is not to compare the MPG of two arbitray vehicles of vastly different capacities, but to compare MPG per pound of cargo. Once you do this, you'll see that your point doesn't hold water at all, as evidenced by the rates of all major shipping companies (UPS, Fedex, etc).
Life is too short to proofread.