DARPA Kick-Starts Flying Car Program

coondoggie writes to share that DARPA is finally trying to make good on the promise of flying cars for our future with the new "Transformer" (TX) project. "DARPA said the vehicle will need to be able to drive on prepared surface and light off-road conditions, as well as support Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) features. The TX will also support range and speed efficiencies that will allow for missions to be performed on a single tank of fuel. DARPA said the TX will 'provide the flexibility to adapt to traditional and asymmetric threats by providing the operator unimpeded movement over difficult terrain. In addition, transportation is no longer restricted to trafficable terrain that tends to makes movement predictable.'"

Comments

Re:Ground vs Air

[Trepidity]

In most countries you already do need some sort of permission, don't you? An exception is if you're flying at relatively low altitudes over your own property, since in some countries airspace below a certain level is considered to be part of the ownership of the property. But if you're flying at even sort-of-high altitudes, you have to be a licensed pilot. And if you're flying at low altitudes over another person's property without permission, you're violating their property rights.

Another exception in the U.S. seems to be very light aircraft (I believe under 155 lbs), under the theory that in any crash you're not very likely to harm anyone but yourself. If a flying car weighed anything like a normal car, though, it wouldn't come close to meeting that threshhold (a Honda Civic is over 2500 lbs).

Re:What do they know?

[smellsofbikes]

No kidding. The KR2 can do 180 mph at 50 miles per gallon. Of course, it does this by having the internal volume of a refrigerator rather than a bathroom, like most SUV's.

The ADI Stallion homebuilt is more efficient than a 747, as regards fuel spent per person carried, and if you're willing to only carry 2 people rather than 6, you can take along a motorcycle as well, at 230mph, while still using less gas than many larger SUV's.

However, for the VTOL demands, maybe they should consider an autogyro with a prerotator like the Carter Copter or several others, that can manage vertical takeoff and landing (and has the happy side-effect that it flies the same after an engine failure as before, except its climbing capability is severely limited.)

Re:"kick-starts flying car"?

[smellsofbikes]

You kid, but Barnaby Wainfan's unique Facetmobile aircraft originally had a pull-start motor that could only be started from the outside of the aircraft, which made life complicated. For that matter, most older aircraft, pre-1950, didn't have starters at all, and were started by hand-pulling the propeller hard enough to get the engine to fire. As you can imagine, this injured and killed a lot of people -- a lot more people killed than crank-starting cars -- and ended up with a fairly large number of aircraft flying off with no pilot. Some of them managed to fly hundreds of miles this way, in fact.