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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
>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.
Ah, but now you've seen a classic /. poster archetype, the grumpy old man/Luddite. See any article on phones with more functions than making phone calls ("I just want something simple that makes a phone call"), game consoles with HD graphics ("no one wants these fancy graphics, no thanks"), HD TVs/BluRay/etc ("No one owns an HD tv, no one wants this, DVD is just fine for me thank-ya-very-much"), or websites that resemble anything past 1996 ("Whats with all these flash ads and graphics, give me 3 fonts on a repeating background!") This poster enjoys racing other posters of the same type to the bottom of the heap to show how old-school/not-affording that latest crap they are. Frequently spotted in threads about the iPhone, Wii/PS3/Xb360, and programming languages that were invented after 1981.
That's all for now. Tune in later for "I know about topic X, topic X rhymes with article topic Y, let me tell you how smart I am" and everyone's favorite "This scientific breakthrough is no big deal unless I can buy some practical application of it tomorrow at Wal-Mart"
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.