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It's Not a Flying Car - It's a Drivable Airplane
waderoush writes "Aviation enthusiasts have been dreaming of flying cars since the 1940s. But in an old machine shop in Woburn, MA, a team of MIT aero/astro grads is building what could be the first practical airplane that's also certified for highway driving. Angel-funded startup Terrafugia, headed by 2006 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winner Carl Dietrich, hopes to have its first full-scale proof-of-concept vehicle ready to show off at July's AirVenture aviation festival in Oshkosh, Wisconsin."
Look at the accident and fatality rates with the masses and regular cars. I can't imagine how many deaths this would cause worldwide. A flying car is great in cheesy novels and movies, but horrible in reality.
How is this different from any other crazy flying car? It's still vaporware as long as there isn't a working prototype, and as far as the difference between a flying car and a 'roadable aircraft'--it seems like a marketing gimmick to me.
steampunk web design
...it is painted bright orange and has a confederate flag on the roof, I'm down.
Not a lot of shared attributes between these two subclasses of class "vehicle."
Car: heavy suspension built to handle potholes and such; real-world roads still apply various nasty twisting moments throughout the body, which must be stiff enough to cope. Can ignore the occasional shopping cart dimpling the sides as irrelevant to operational safety.
Plane: built very VERY lightly. Undercarriage takes one good "whomp" on landing but time spent taxiing is a very small part of the overall life of the vehicle. Even a minor ding may result in it being flagged non-airworthy.
Executive summary: Cars make lousy planes. Planes make lousy cars.
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
Wow, listen to you guys. A crowd that usually embraces and welcomes new technology is cutting this to ribbons. Whether or not the concept is actually practical or not remains to be seen - there is certainly more than enough interest out there to continue to fund and develop and research the idea, regardless if the masses don't like it. It'll happen anyway - just give it time.
>The skills needed to fly are a lot higher than those to drive.
As a regular driver and a semi-regular pilot, I'm not sure I agree with that. Driving takes continuous alertness and work because you're surrounded by dangerous stuff, much of it being driven in the opposite direction only a meter or so away by crazy idiots talking on cellphones. In a plane, somewhere between 70 and 95% of the time, you have nothing more than air molecules in all directions for better than 2 km. I know pilots who have set alarm clocks, gotten the plane in stable flight with their 3 axis autopilot, and then gone to sleep for an hour while the plane tooled through the sky: a damned bad idea, but perfectly viable in a plane.
Aircraft demand some skill in handling the plane in takeoff, and rather a lot in landing, and *enormous* amounts when there's an emergency and you have to do a bunch of intelligent things in the right order to survive. But overall, as regards routine flying, I don't think they require anywhere near as much consistent skill as driving.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Because the creators were idiots. And they died. Spectacularly. And idiots dying spectacularly is funny. And comedy overshadows tragedy in the spectrum of the spectacular.
There are hundreds of small/medium airports and airfields that are miles from the nearest car rental agency. There might be a few rental agencies that might be willing to ferry a car out, at great added cost, but that's a decidedly non-trivial exercise, and not always available.
-- Alastair