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Terrafugia CEO Responds To "Flying Car" Criticism
waderoush writes "The majority of the comments on last week's Slashdot post It's Not a Flying Car — It's A Drivable Airplane were critical, even dismissive, of Terrafugia's work to build a two-passenger airplane with folding wings that's also certified for highway driving. We boiled down these criticisms to the dozen most commonly expressed points, and today we've published responses from Terrafugia CEO Carl Dietrich. While hybrid airplane-automobiles are an old (some would say laughable) idea, Dietrich argues that current materials and avionics technologies finally make the concept feasible."
On fuel efficiency: their quoted estimate of 27.5mpg in the air would place it ahead of 95+% of cars on the road today in getting from point A to point B, since there's rarely an optimal, straight-line, traffic free highway between where you are and where you want to be. (Yes, you would have to have airports at each end, but general aviation airports are amazingly common.)
As for the rich part...well, nobody is claiming otherwise.
You've got it wrong. This flying car ain't nothing. THIS is a REAL energy-wasting toy for the rich. $1 million, 5.8 mpg city, and 250 mph top speed? The fact that it even exists is a sin (but you have to admit, it is beautiful).
RE the flying car, it's actually much more reasonable than most other private planes, for which the Transition's $150k price tag is really bargain-basement (for a new plane). A new Cessna 172 is around $250k. And this particular model has a number of money-saving features compared to other light-sport aircraft; specifically, it runs on ordinary super-unleaded gas, it should get ~27 mpg while in the air, and most importantly, it doesn't need to be hangared, which can cost upwards of $500/month in some airports.
If they can pull off the engineering, I could see these guys having a good, stable business selling a couple hundred planes a year (which is about what other LSA manufacturers do). If they hit their price point, there will be good demand.
Dudes: If it flies it requires FAA certification. You may return to your crack pipes now.
If you had read the fine article you'd have seen that there were two major components to the answer for "Why now when it has always before been infeasible?":
1) New materials make it technically feasible.
2) New FAA regulations, creating a new class of aircraft (Light Sport) that's drastically easier to certify, makes it bureaucratically feasible.
I believe 2) completely answers your objection.
But thank you for playing.
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The US economy grew at .6% (annualized) the last two quarters, amidst a massive spike in oil prices, and food prices, and a financial service sector meltdown, and new-home-building doldrum, and assorted other minor panic. Unemployment remains about 5%, inflation (via the CPI) just .3%. If anything, this testifies to the strength of the rest of the US economy. My local Ph.D. economist opines, "If anything, the government should stop stepping on the gas."
Invest in America. It's underpriced.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The main checks are to see if your pitot tube(tells you air speed) is working and not full of junk, check your tires for wear, check brakes for leaks, check wings for dents or other damage, check your fuel to make sure it's actually full and your gauge is correct, check that your control surfaces move freely, check propellor for damage, etc. I'm not a pilot yet but these are most of the things you visually inspect. Tell me any computer that could do all that for you. You are right that if you just landed an hour ago that not much has changed most likely and you *can* skip the checks if you want. It's your life, just don't take up any one else if you crash or don't aim for people on the ground when you run out of fuel.
I'd reinforce your point #1 with the Rutan Long EZ which does 160 Knots (184 MPH) at about 5.1 GPH, for an astonishing 36 MPG at just shy of 200 miles per hour - even my trusty, highly reliable, and economical Saturn SL2 only gets about 30 MPG on the freeway! (at 80 MPH) And, unlike the 152, which is based on technology first developed in the mid 1950s, the Long EZ owes its legacy back to the early 1970s.
(Yes, you read that right - the C152 airframe was only minimally changed in 1977 as a tweak of the previous, highly successful 150)
It strikes me as quite appropriate that 21st Century technology would provide a significant improvement in capability/price/performance, when developed by current, high-quality engineers.
BTW, Burt Rutan is a legend in the field. You might know his company Scaled Composites which won the Ansari X-Prize. He's a legend in the field. Not only did he build an experimental aircraft design that outperformed other designs by a factor of 2 or more in speed, while halving fuel burn, he did so with a design that's relatively cheap and easy to build.
Some people like Rutan and Al Mooney just seem to "get it right" when it comes to aircraft design, and they do it over, and over, and over again. The Mooney Mark 20 is a line of high performance, high reliability, cheap, complex aircraft that provide solid performance, excellent safety and great economy. The Mooney Mark-20 line (there have been lots culminating in the current "Ovation") is one of the few GA single-engine airplanes with a proper "crash cage" resulting in excellent safety numbers - you are half as likely to die (per mile of flight) while flying a Mooney in IFR conditions than the industry average.
A good indicator of airplane efficiency is its glide ratio - how far it moves forward for every foot dropped without power. The first number is the distance you move forward, the second number is is how far you drop. It's a ratio, and the higher the first number relative to the second, the better. A Mooney has a glide ratio of about 13:1, while a Cessna does about 7:1. A long EZ or a VariEZE can do anywhere from 15:1 to 20:1, a Boeing 767 did about 12:1 in the famous Gimli Glider incident. Many ultralights do as badly as 3:1.
Can they do it? I'm quite sure they can. As soon as I can afford one, I'll probably buy. (It'll take me a few years, which is fine, since they won't be ready and tested by the "early adopters" for a few years, anyway)
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