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:"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.