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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."
These numbers are meaningless without corresponding numbers on how much flying was done. With the soaring price of avgas I wouldn't be surprised if accidents were down slightly simply because people are flying less.
And to the grandparent poster: judging safety by reading the news is almost precisely backwards. The reason you hear about small planes crashing into things on the news is because it's rare enough to be newsworthy. A hundred people die on the roads in this country every day, and they almost never show up on the news because it's simply too commonplace.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
>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.
It's aimed at allowing PILOTS to take to the roads.
In other words, people who fly now don't have to pay a hangar fee, they can keep their plane in their driveway. If going somewhere, they don't have to pay a hangar fee and then rent a car to get to their final destination, they can drive their plane there.
Totally different focus, totally different market. Flying cars were stupid, but this is a damned good idea.
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