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'Flying Saucers' to Go On Sale Soon
gihan_ripper writes "Perhaps the ultimate nerd acquisition, the flying car, is to go on sale in a few months. Speaking to the BBC, the inventor Dr Paul Moller described his creation, dubbed the Flying Saucer, as a VTOL aircraft designed to hover at 10 ft. above the ground. The flying saucer has eight engines and is expected to sell for $90,000. Dr Moller expects to produce a successor within six years, a 'Skycar' capable of a climb rate of 6000 ft./min. and an airspeed of 400 mph."
from holding my breath
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I had a flying saucer once, but when it landed it broke into a thousand shards.
Be relentless!
Strange thing is, the other day I was thinking about Back to the Future 2, how all those years ago the writers thought we might all have flying cars in 2015, and how off the mark they were. Looks like they were right after all!
I lost me sig.
I saw this and previous veriations on this way back in 1987 on a tech show called Beyond 2000. 20 years later and still a prototype.
I'll believe it when I can actually buy one. Much as I'd like a flying car, his always seem to be "Real Soon Now(TM)" AFAIK, Moller has never actually had anything for sale. Downside(R) lists his company as a scam because it has been a few years from production for 30 years. There have also been SEC complaints for "fraudulent, unregistered offering and the filing of a fraudulent Form 10-SB by Moller International, Inc. ("MI" or "the company"), a California company engaged in the development of a personal aircraft known as "the Skycar.""
I'd like to be wrong, but I sure won't be putting down any money just yet.
The Skycar has been in the works for decades with barely anything to show for it. There are too many stories that just talk about the positive future that it supposedly represents when it's been a boondoggle so far. There was even action against Moller by the SEC.
Moller's been pushing this nonsense since his first snowmobile engine modifications in the 70's. He has been collecting investment money for decades promising VTOL vehicles to the masses. There's a whole sky full of problems with this. First, getting into the sky is a series of tests and checks and licenses here in the US because, essentially, many people don't really want every Tom Dick and Harry flying over our heads. The skies are a-crowded already, from a management point of view.
Second, while the technology may be sound and there were doubters to the helicopter and "aeroplane" alike, this design seems a bit more like rocketry than either of the prior two. Ducted or directed fan technology is hugely inefficient compared to wing technology. Coolness aside, there's something of an "experimental" quality of these machines that they cannot seem to shake. If I'm watching YouTube videos of the Moller employees coming and going in these contraptions, then perhaps my doubts will be alleviated, but until then, I keep picturing a screwball in an oversized frisbee darting over the park and eventually plowing into the trees.
The only way I could see this working is if they work out a few infrastructure challenges. For starters, the article mentions that you won't be able to fly one over 10 feet without a pilot's license. 10 Feet won't get you over some pickups, much less off the highways. Next, how do you work out right of way, parking and so on. These are challenges that will be difficult to overcome even IF flying cars were readily available.
Next is safety. While cars have been pretty focused on protecting their occupants, this takes that to a whole new dimension. A stall is no longer just an inconvenience, but a high probability that you are going to die. What about the people on the ground that you crash into? How many car wrecks are there in an average size city. Now imaging that for each of these wrecks, you have a heavy, flammable piece of metal, glass and plastic falling to the ground! It would seem to me that the only way to make these things remotely safe would be to equip them not only with a parachute, but with airbags on the outside to protect those that are going to be in their homes beneath these things!
Economy. With all the current focus on global warming, dwindling oil supplies, wars in the middle east etc, I don't see how flying cars will help alleviate any of these problems. As a matter of fact, I see the exact opposite happening! Could you imagine what would happen to the demand for energy if half the auto's on the road were not flying over it!
Of course, these issues are just a few issues that my ignorant-ass can come up with in a few minutes. I'm sure that there are problems that real life engineers haven't even dreamed of yet! So I'm afraid that building a flying car will be the easy part.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The last time he was in the headlines was a few years ago. The SkyCar was going to go on sale soon. What the press release and news articles didn't say was that it was *the* one and only prototype SkyCar that was going to go on sale, in the Nieman Marcaus catalog. This guy comes out with a press release every few years to raise cash for toys. Last time I looked at his web page he was also selling some kind of diet supplement pills, right on the same page with the SkyCar info! Scam scam scam scam scammity-scam scammity-scam! Can I have his scam? I like scam!
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
What good is hovering 10ft above the ground, except for fun. How do you get from home to work in this thing?
Surely you can't fly over people's backyards so you'll have to follow the roads. 10ft is too low to get you over trucks so you won't be able to fly over the traffic easily, so you'll just have to follow the traffic like in a car except for the temptation to skip over low cars and cut across corners etc. while avoiding the power lines, overpasses etc.
No way will this thing ever be legal unless the whole infrastructure and traffic laws are changed to accommodate which ain't gonna happen either. So, what good is it?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
While I agree with all the skeptics, having read about this same damn car years ago, some of the skepticism is unfounded.
Moller may never produce a 'flying car', but someone will eventually.
When that flying car hits the market, it will likely be little different than when the first automobiles we're being sold. There were no parking spots in front of the general store, only places to tie up your horse. As more of these are sold, more spots to park them will become available. More gasoline/diesel stations will accommodate them as well. It will be slow. There won't be any real regulation of them for a while, but that won't stop people from using them. And these will likely be flying deathtraps for a while. So was the car for the first two decades of it's life. Same for the train when we started laying tracks everywhere we could find a place for them but couldn't design brakes worth a shit. As dangerous as these flying cars may be, people will fly them.
If I could afford one, I would buy it to fly it to work everyday. It would be easy for me; I'd just follow the river. The first automobiles were not utilities, they were novelties, just like the flying car will be when someone eventually manages to start selling them.
Aero
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
I really like the look of the Entecho Flying Saucer looks nice and apparently is going to retail for only 30,000 AUD I heard an interview with one of the designers who claims it will be on sale to the public with in 3 years. Unfortunately it will be limited to climb to 1.8 meters off the ground for safety reasons and only seats one person how ever the plus side to this is there is a good chance it will become a registered road worthy vehicle in Australia. Perfect for cruising over the tough corrugated roads we have here in Australia.
Well, joking. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/01/014821 0 had an article about the first skycar being for sale, but the rebuttals for their technology are to be found in the comments, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163945&cid=136 93215 and http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163945&cid=136 92203 for example (but the others make a good read as well).
my other sig is a 500 page novel
Not because of any engineering difficulties, although I'm sure there's no shortage of those. Engineering difficulties can and will always be overcome. Someone will develop a better fuel, a lighter/stronger material, a more elegant design. The real reason these will never happen is because there is no way any government will ever let their citizens have the freedom of the 3rd dimension. The Solotrek looked very promising until an accident with a safety tether caused a crash (note, not a failure on the part of the machine!). Paranoiacs wishing to generate conspiracy theories about this incident are of course welcome to do so.
Go read Bob Shaw's 'Vertigo' for some idea of what happens to a society where personal human flight is commonplace. Borders become meaningless, passports doubly so. Criminals are going to love these things - how do you set up a roadblock in the sky? And also, no matter how carefully you build the vehicle to be safe, and easy to pilot, the human element will always be a factor.
"People who were in a hurry tended to switch off their lights to avoid detection and fly straight to where they were going, regardless of the air corridors. The chances of colliding with another illegal traveller were vanishingly small, they told themselves, but it was not only occasional salesmen late for appointments who flew wild. There were the drunks and the druggies, the antisocial, the careless, the suicidal, the thrill-seekers, the criminal - a whole spectrum of types who were unready for the responsibilities of personal flight, in whose hands a counter-gravity harness could become an instrument of death."
That's a bit like saying the Star Trek Enterprise's warp engines look a lot more feasible than other types of faster-than-light travel like those totally unbelievable Hyperdrives from Star Wars.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Do it as an experimental. Sell kits that have 45% of the work finished, and detailed instructions, and let the new owner finish it, register it as an experimental, and go. The FAA still has to issue an airworthiness certificate, but the threshold for getting an AC is far, far lower than for getting FAA type approval. Plus people feel like they're getting a deal, so they're more likely to buy.
I think the problem is: where do you go to get instruction? You're not legally allowed to fly these things without a pilot certificate coz they weigh too much to fit into ultralight categories, and more critically, they're a different type of certificate. To fly a Moeller or the like, you need instruction in 'powered lift' not 'fixed wing' or 'helicopter' or even 'autogyro' -- and there are precisely two 'powered lift' vehicles in existence, the Moeller and the Osprey V-22. Nobody has flown a Moeller, and the only Ospreys are being flown by US military and Boeing/Vertol research/design people. There are no instructors and as such there is no way to get instruction, so the market for an aircraft you're not legally allowed to fly is pretty slim. Moeller has to get a dozen of these things built and four dozen certified flight instructors trained up -- when nobody has any idea of what constitutes a certified flight instructor for powered lift -- before there will be a market for his machines. IF they ever actually work.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I swear this guy puts P.T. Barnum to shame.
"Dr." Paul Moller has been promising to sell his skycar "in a few years" since the 70's. When I first saw something about his concept (in a late-70's Pop Sci, as I recall) it looked pretty interesting. At the time (almost 30 years ago) Moller was promising these "soon." But as time has gone by it's become clearer and clearer that the only thing that Moller is selling is old-fashioned snake-oil and the only folks he's selling to are the gullible.
If you look at what he's offering for sale "soon" you'll see that it's not the long-promised skycar, it's a flying saucer type craft that looks like something out of a Mario Party minigame. Seriously, it looks like four weed-whacker engines in a fiberglass shell molded from an old Texaco sign.
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