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Neiman Marcus Offers First Moller Skycar For Sale
It doesn't come easy writes "Neiman Marcus has just unveiled its 2005 Christmas Catalog of Fantasy Gifts last Tuesday, and one of the items up for purchase is the prototype M400 Skycar from Moller International (for only $3.5 million US). If you've ever dreamed of owning a Skycar, this may be your only chance." From the Skycar site: "Can any automobile give you this scenario? From your garage to your destination, the M400 Skycar can cruise comfortably at 350+ MPH and achieve up to 28 miles per gallon. No traffic, no red lights, no speeding tickets. Just quiet direct transportation from point A to point B in a fraction of the time. Three dimensional mobility in place of two dimensional immobility. No matter how you look at it the automobile is only an interim step on our evolutionary path to independence from gravity. That's all it will ever be. "
looks like the US NAVY's skycar prototypes from the 1960's
They're using their grammar skills there.
Not even a little. As far as I know, that particular model has never flown untethered.
Moller's been talking about Skycars as long as I've been alive. As far as I know, its always been "less than five years away" for the past 20 or so. He also really likes talking about his "highway in the sky", which is essentially... run of the mill avionics.
And really, given the number of accidents on the highway-on-the-ground where folks only have to worry about two dimensions, I'm glad he's been a failure thus far. At least accidents on the highway don't usually come flying into my house.
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lds
On the other hand, if people had to go through as much training to get a driver's license as they do a pilot's license the roads would probably be a better place.
I was certified to fly gliders only after many hours of instruction that included emergency situations as well as learning how to give myself large safety margins. Just the thinking process of getting my pilot's license caused me to really evaluate my driving habits as well.
As long as the license to fly a Skycar didn't end up being some sort of quickie certification you might not see as many problems as you think. Most of the truly boneheaded won't make it far enough to get the license to fly. Then again, I had some great instruction from people who loved to fly and weren't just putting in their 9 to 5 time.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Well, never in terms of our lifetimes and probably a couple more lifetimes after that.
For flying cars to ever work you'd need insane amounts of safety systems for every kind of failure. We're talking backup systems for the backup systems that backup the backup systems.
You'd also need central traffic network computers to control them, because there's no way in hell the vast majority of the population could fly something at 100MPH with any safety. You think a fender bender is bad? Wait until it also makes you fall 200 feet out of the sky.
And don't try to imagine the death and devestation the first time the traffic system fails (insert "lol crash" jokes here).
Of course, anyone can figure all this out pretty easily. I'm being over-critical.
this might sound like a stupid question ... but how slow can it go?
According to TFA it has both a fuel warning system and two ballistic parachutes.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
During forward flight the vehicle generates a significant part of its lift using airfoils. These airfoils are small, but at cruising speed they are up to the task. Remember that normal aircraft use wings sized for low-speed takeoff and landing, not for cruising speed. Low-speed hovering will naturally consume much more fuel but it's only for a short time at takeoff and landing.
Ducted fan vehicles are feasible and should theoretically be capable of doing all Dr Moller claims they can do. It's a different question whether Moller's company can achieve it. People tend to become skeptical after decades of of promises...
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Yes, but for ~$2.5M(US) you can have a Cessna Citation Mustang 6-person bizjet which is currently in shakedown testing and which will almost assuradly become certified before the skycar. Or if you are commuting by yourself or with only a few passengers there's the Dayjet Eclipse 500 which seats two pilots and 3 passengers for ~$1.3M which is also in shakedown. Basically the skycar is overpriced, underperforming, and overhyped. Basically there's a bunch of 3-6 seat bizjet's currently in testing or early production which cost less than the $3.5M pricetag of this thing, many are listed here. Since it's a page from one of the competitors in the space take all claims about estimates with the appropriate amount of salt, but even when being estimated by a competitor all of their costs come in under $3M.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
but we made a cooler commercial glorious *cough* (but streamable) quicktime or window$ media video
So that means low to no emissions there. Supposedly.
Like space flights?
.space is not a gravity free zone.
Like when you jump off the top of a skyscraper?
Space travel is not flight. The term is a misnomer born of inapplicable earth based intuitive concepts. Space is not, despite dictionary.com, a medium. The space shuttle only flies when it lands. In space it simply falls and has some inertial motion.
Going to Mars, or Pluto, is no different and unless you burn three axis thrusters the whole way the path taken is ballistic, because. .
The medium the thrusters work against are the spacecraft itself, not a medium the spacecraft is moving through.
As an aside, penguins are not flightless, they simply require a denser medium than air in which to fly.
KFG
The original diesel engine ran off of peanut oil, nothing special, although diesels in aircraft are still rare, actually they are preferable. With a standard spark detonated engine you need to ensure that the spark is there to keep the motor running, requiring such bulky stuff like a double magneto, etc. With a diesel engine, once the engine is running you just need to inject/mix the fuel properly to keep it going. In Europe due to the high prices of AvGas there has been alot of effort in the research of this for private planes. The main issue currently is buying diesel certified clean enough.
An inverted plane (with a normal non-symmetric airfoil) flies upside down (badly) due to the angle of attack. The air flowing over the 'top' (now bottom of the wing) still goes faster than the air 'underneath'. In fact, the air never goes faster 'to catch up with the air underneath' - the air flow over the wing is MUCH faster than underneath (where it tends to slow a little). A wind tunnel can demonstrate this quite ably.
But it's a fallacy to say that x% of lift is caused by Bernouilli's laws (which predict the pressures very accurately) or the Coanda effect or... and y% is provided by Newton's equal and opposite reaction - it's not cumulative. 100% of lift can be explained by pressure differential, and 100% of lift can be explained by Newton's theories. They are just different ways of looking at the same thing.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
There were eight Bernoullis. and the bernoulli 'effect' is physically real. It doesn't say anything about catching up or whatnot. It is simply that the energy in a streamline is constant at any point in that streamline. This whole catching up thing sounds a like high school physics text 'virus' to me.
You can produce lift simply from a curved wing design provided there isn't 'boundary layer separation.' So IF the streamlines meet again after the wing, you can calculate how much lift this would provide. It's not much, but it's not zero.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The Moller Skycar will NEVER be able to fly the way he claims. First of all it's a purely vectored-thrust, powered-lift machine. All flying machines of this type are inherently unstable as hell. If any component in its controls or thrust systems fails, the machine will be wildly uncontrollable. Think bottle-rocket with the stick removed... wild unpredictable flight path... firey crashing death to any occupants of the vehicle. These kind of flying machines are very difficult to keep under control and are also *extremely* fuel-hungry. Look at the size of the Skycar, how much fuel tank capacity do you think it has. Not much? You're right. How many engines will the M400 have? EIGHT 150hp dual-rotor wankels. You know how much gasoline a 150hp engine uses? About 7.5 gallons per hour if you lean the mixture to the point where it barely runs, and of course is not putting out the full 150hp at that point. At full 150hp 100% output, such an engine will burn about 11 gallons per hour. At low altitudes, you'll need full power from all eight engines to keep the thing in the air since all the thrust will be doing the duty of lift vector. That's almost 90 gallons per hour fuel burn at full power! FAA regs say that an aircraft cannot even take off for daytime VFR flight without enough fuel to complete the flight plus a 1/2 hour reserve. Moller is now saying that he expects to run the engines on alcohol instead of gas. Well, any high school kid who has just begin to learn about engines and fuels can tell you that it takes almost 2 gallons of alcohol to do the work of 1 gallon of gasoline in an internal combustion engine. I call shenanigans on this machine. Anybody who thinks this is a viable flying machine is smoking crack.
Moller should've just stuck to making SuperTrapp mufflers for motorcycles, at least that is a successful design that works quite well. Or work some more on that wankel engine to finish getting it up to snuff for small conventional airplanes. If they could get that 150hp dual-rotor wankel to have at least a 1500 hour TBO and equipped with a planetary gear reduction drive to keep the prop at about 2700-2800 max rpm at full power, they could sell a lot of these engines to the experimental airplane homebuilders, and perhaps a de-rated 100-120hp version to the Light Sport aircraft makers That's where the real money could be.
Aircars in a post 9/11 world? Even if Moller succeeds in the next decade - and even if the FAA approves his machine - can you really see the Dept. of Homeland Security letting these things within range of an office building? And would you want them to? The George Jetson dream was born in the middle of the last century, when Americans by and large thought that technology would be used for the best possible purposes and that everyone likes the good ol' USA. The car catches the imagination, yes. But it also is a dream of another era.
But thanks for contributing your ignorance to the public. We already have enough reasons for the public to be irrationally afraid of progress in private aviation, thank you.
You're also wrong about Moller. The recent progress on the skycar has been significant due to improvements in engine technology and avionics. While nobody can be sure he'll get everything together, he is definitely closer than he's ever been, and tethered flight is still flight.
Safety Cap wrote: Hey, I hear you can get some green powder that changes Water into GASOLINE ...
It is possible to create a powder that mixes with water to create gasoline. Years ago, while taking Organic Chemistry in college, I learned about the Grignard reaction. This synthesis can produce a solid that when mixed with water can hydrolyse to produce a hydrocarbon.
Just two minor problems - 1) It also produces an alkali (such as KOH or NaOH) which would be bad for the engine and the environment, and 2) the initial synthesis starts with a hydrocarbon! TANSTAAFL
[Insert pithy quote here]