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

What do they know?

[migla]

Darpa schmarpa!

Whatever happened to that DARPANET they used to have? Losers.

Re:What do they know?

[GooberToo]

Many small aircraft get as good, if not better, than many SUVs and at 2-3 times the speed while carrying one to four people and a small amount of luggage.

The only hard part of the requirements is that it be a VTOL aircraft which will significantly affect the design, performance, and practicality. If they changed their requirements from VTOL to STOL of less than 1000 feet, the designs are likely to offer vastly superior capabilities.

Re:What do they know?

[sentientbeing]

Youre right. These flying cars will never take off.

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.)

"kick-starts flying car"?

[billstewart]

Can't they put a starter motor in the thing? I'd hate to have to get out, kick-start the thing, and have it fly away; that'd be almost as bad as having an old crank-start car trying to run you over.

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.

Re:To the moron(s) who tagged 'fixtheeconomyfirst'

[Trepidity]

I'm guessing it's an argument more like, "why are we allocating a bunch of money to [x], when [priority y] is more important, and we don't have unlimited money".

It's an odd sort of argument, in that it make sense to some extent, but in practice has to be ignored to some extent also, or we'll never do anything except really basic stuff. For example, if you have extra money you're thinking of donating to charity, why donate to the EFF, or to support an artist you like, when kids are dying in Africa; that's surely more important, right?

The more high-level question makes some sense though: is our current overall allocation of money to the military the proper level, or should it be reduced to free up money for other priorities?

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).

Dibs on the name...

[Tsar]

HumVTOL.

Re:no, no no

[sunderland56]

We don't need flying cars. Flying cars = Falling cars. Add in volatile fuel and you have bombs.

So, who is going to perform the security search before I leave for work in a flying car? Does the TSA come to my house every morning, or does my wife get to strip search me? And can I be checked before I put on my shoes, or do I have to put them on, then take them off, and then put them on again?

And if I bring a cup of coffee, does it have to be smaller than 3.4 ounces??

Re:Ground vs Air

[Rei]

Fly-by-wire, with a special, hard-to-get license for manual flight and restrictions on where it can be used.

Flying cars would also require a lot of safety features to ensure survivability in an accident or mechanical problem, including multiple engines with the ability to survive the failure of one or more of them, as well as vehicle parachutes launched by a spreader gun for rapid deployment, and possibly large airbags to cushion the landing of the vehicle itself.

Hmm... you know, I bet you could have the firing off of vehicle-scale airbags *be* the spreader for your chute if you did it right.