Slashdot Mirror
'Pocket Airports' Would Link Neighborhoods By Air
cylonlover writes "NASA's light-aircraft partner, CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency), is running a competition to design a low-cost, quiet, short take-off personal aircraft, that requires little, if any, fossil fuel. It envisions the resulting Suburban Air Vehicles taking off and landing at small neighborhood 'pocket airports.' At last week's Future of Electric Vehicles conference, CAFE president Dr. Brien Seeley outlined just how those airports would work."
Electric power might be a contender here, as you could use the 3 hours you will spend being x-rayed, swabbed, fingerprinted and cavity-searched before each flight to charge the battery.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I sometimes marvel at the size of a single road intersection: some of them are many times larger than an average person's yard!
Imagine how much land could be saved if we didn't have to dedicate so much of it to roads. I'm not sure that's what they're claiming but the thought is tantalizing.
FTA:
“The gridlock we face now is going to get worse,” Seeley stated, citing research into congestion on the world’s roads. “This is a form of insanity... We need to travel in 3D.”
Wishing more jobs offered work-at-home options! That would certainly help.
Any mechanic who works for a roadside service company can tell you that peoples cars "break down" for the oddest reasons. Not enough petrol, wrong fuel, forgot to put in oil. All sorts of stuff that simply has to be maintained and replaced and doesn't leading to failure. Running out of petrol with your car is embarrising, running out of fuel in your airplane makes you a lawn dart or worse. I don't particularly care if some soccer-mom with the IQ of a weasel (sorry weasels) gets herself killed along with her kids. But if she crashes into my house, I would get upset.
What about the weather? Snow is bringing down europe but a car caught in a snow storm just becomes stuck. An aircraft? Has to divert. How far? Small airplane, small fuel tank. Can you imagine 100 soccer mom's lining up for an icy runway when they can barely park a car in summer on an empty lot? Or for that matter the business exec who thinks his beamer is a snow mobile and plows into a lamp post? Now that lamp post will be your apartment building.
As for controlling so many aircraft, LA airport is already uncontrollable and happily parked an airliner on a small jet years ago and things haven't got much better. Can you imagine a 100 or more increase in traffic figures? And if trained pilots from other countries already cause dangerous situations because they don't speak English, what will happen if hillbillies take to the air?
Just walk the street someday and notice for fun just how many cars stall for some reason or another. Oh it is not 1 per minute, but 1 per week would already cause a number of light aircraft accidents to severly burden the coffin industry. Would you step into a one-engined airliner?
No, someday we may have the tech AND the discipline but right now, the idea of the average road user in the air would have me make my next house a bunker, a deep one. SUV's in the sky... somethings just shouldn't be.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In our current political climate, there's no way Homeland Security would allow this to work in a manner any reasonable person would consider useful - it'd get "managed" and "secured" to death. You think airport delays are ridiculous - just think about the delays seen in these pocket airports because every commuter in your area needs to be scanned/groped before being allowed to start their commute.
#DeleteChrome
"The gridlock we face now is going to get worse," Seeley stated, citing research into congestion on the world's roads. "This is a form of insanity... We need to travel in 3D."
Hmm let's see: some form of transportation to link neighborhoods, that works in 3D, to relieve gridlocks? Remove the insane flying-vehicle thing, make it cheap and practical, and you've got yourself a metro.
Instead of dreaming up shit like this, policymakers should bring back light-rail, which can work under or over streets, carries a great deal of people quickly, silently and without local air pollution, and doesn't cost a lot.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Have to agree with this. Who will be the first to afford them? Of course, the rich who already drive on the roads in their SUVs like they own the roads and generally behave like complete pricks. Imagine letting these brain dead idiots fly?
There is a fundamental difference between internal combustion engines and other technologies: they have *phenomenal* power-to-weight and energy-to-weight ratios.
There is a fundamental difference between aircraft and other vehicles: if their power-to-weight ratio is too low, they do not fly. An underpowered car is an underpowered car, but an underpowered plane is not a plane.
There is a reason why nobody invented a workable aircraft until 1905, and it's not because everybody who tried before the Wright brothers was an idiot.
==================
Example:
A set of lithium-ion batteries plus a modern electric motor of the type used in hybrid cars has a power-to-weight ratio of about 250 W/kg, and an endurance of 20-30 minutes at that power level. A small aircraft engine, including fuel tank, has a power-to-weight ratio of about 1000 W/kg, and an endurance of several hours.
For most small passenger aircraft, if you increase the weight of the power system by a factor of four, they will be too heavy to get off the ground. (Example: Cessna Skycatcher, engine weight 100 pounds, "spare" weight limit with only the pilot aboard: 150 pounds)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_162
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-weight_ratio#Electric_Motors.2FElectromotive_Generators
A vastly better investment would be a multi-gigabit FTTH infrastructure to allow for actual tele-presence and remote working from the suburbs.
Commuting is stupid, as is most business travel.
..don't panic
You do realise that ground based vehicles use quite a bit more fuel per mile than those in the air don't you?
Even if they didn't, flying at constant speed without having to worry about stopping every few minutes the fuel savings would be enormous.
You can't take the sky from me.
Because cars just aren't dangerous enough anymore.
What, like train stations?
an obscure federal program that raises billions of dollars a year through taxes on every airplane ticket sold in the United States. The taxes can add up to 15% to the cost of a flight
Private aircraft are far more useful to their owners when there's a network of handy airports. Perfectly understandable, but why do scheduled airline passengers pay for them? If all Interstate highways had tolls that were paying for private race-tracks...
Very interesting, but I wouldn't place too much confidence in their ability to actually achieve that kind of thrust any time soon. What they're currently demonstrating, under lab conditions, is less than half a newton per kilowatt, or about one ten-thousandth of the amount needed to support a car. For comparison, you can get around 120 N/kW (240 times their current max thrust) right now with a simple ducted fan, readily available online. The 30 kN/kW figure is an extrapolation based on the ridiculously high amplification (Q) levels achieved in dedicated high-energy physics labs with finely-tuned, liquid-helium-cooled superconductors—not something you're likely to ever see in a personal automobile. They seem to be marketing their design mainly toward satellite/space use, where reaction mass is a limiting factor. For terrestrial applications, of course, reaction mass isn't really a problem; you can just use the surrounding atmosphere.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Once you're done pooh-poohing the idea of electric airplanes, go and use your google and wiki-fu to look up the following:
* Yuneec e430 electric LSA
* Sonex E-Flight
* Cessna Skyhawk electric 172 POC
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Private aircraft are far more useful to their owners when there's a network of handy airports. Perfectly understandable, but why do scheduled airline passengers pay for them? If all Interstate highways had tolls that were paying for private race-tracks...
Because otherwise the little puddle jumpers would be intermingled between the big boys, clogging up scare slots. It's designed to be a win for both sides.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Perhaps the fees at under-utilised airports should be higher due to the exclusivity afforded by this arrangement? No, they're massively subsidised [see article], sometimes practically free.
No, seriously, meet him. Head on, at about 5000 feet.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Mod Parent Up!
Another point: Even if power to weight ratios were improved significantly, as a private pilot, I have personally aborted many flight plans due to weather concerns. There are certain limiting issues such as weight and balance issues, engine performance at altitude, weather, maintenance, "Temporary" Flight Restrictions (some of them aren't so temporary), Runway availability, and so on...
The fact is that even with today's technologies, helicopters and bush planes would have difficulties working in and out of these airports and meeting these requirements. Even if we all flew planes with ridiculously high power to weight ratios, such as a Piper Super Cub with an O-360 engine (and those are just two seat aircraft), you still would have difficulty getting to the sort of performance sought by these "Pocket Airports." Another thing: the noise doesn't come just from the engine: It comes from the propeller as the tips approach the speed of sound. A ducted fan might reduce some of the noise, but it isn't likely to do much for efficiency.
This is clearly something written up by yet another dreamy eyed idiot who has no idea what technologies are currently viable or what the state of the art is. What a waste of money...
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
People who want to blow shit up will find a way to blow shit up. If you can't do it with a plane you can do it just as easily with a car or truck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_bombing), problem solved.
The best we can do is take reasonable security and safety measures to minimize risk, then come to terms with the fact that we cannot eliminate risk completely, that we might die when we step out the house each day, and get on with our lives and get on with progress.
And how's that working out for ya? (Not saying the other suggestion seems all that much better..)
As a student pilot near the end of his 40-45 hours' training for a private pilot certification, it's neat that people are thinking of stuff like this, but I can't see it ever happening -- at least, not as a solution to congestion.
The nature of government control over any mass-market activity like driving is such that they become very bad at saying 'no' to the public. It's shamefully easy to get a driver's license. Not so for a pilot's license. I'm as much of an anti-government nut as you'll find on Slashdot, and while there are definitely parts of the FAA that I think are crazy, on the instruction and licensing side I've been very impressed with what I've seen. The FAA Pilot's handbook (the core 'textbook' for pilots) is well written and concise. The written tests have a few weird questions on them (like a couple on pre-1940 navigation systems) but for the most part are pretty challenging -- not the MADD-influenced DMV test with questions like 'You've just consumed nine beers. Calculate your BAC.' The 'final exam' of a pilot's license is the checkride, where you sit for up to a couple hours with an FAA examiner and demonstrate everything you have to know as a pilot, is nothing like the 'I'll be fine if I can parallel park' road test. A lot of very good flight instructors I've met admit to having failed either or both the written test or checkride on their first try. In other words, it's not designed so that a 16 year-old can pass it with a little bit of effort. It's designed to make sure you know wtf you are doing before you take off, and it includes sections on how airplane engines work, airplane instruments, airport signage, lighting, and traffic patterns, communicating with ATC, reading charts, understanding aviation weather (clouds, pressure, temperature, and density) and quite a lot about navigation.
That's not to say that you can't strip down the curriculum for a more limited set of flight rules (and we do, in fact - 'sport pilots' only need half as many hours) but even becoming a sport pilot isn't easy, to say nothing of becoming a good one. Unless you live in a handful of places around the world where the weather is consistently clear without a lot of wind, air travel will never be reliable for a commuter. Are you going to spend 20 minutes checking aviation weather or calling in for a weather briefing every day before you go to work? And if you don't, what if it's clear where you depart but you run right into a weather system halfway there and can't see the ground (that'd need another 40 hours of training for your instrument rating to even be legal).
There are definitely some things that could be done to lower the barriers of entry to aviation, and making a reliable, short-range VTOL that doesn't need AVGAS is certainly one of them. And I'm not trying to be elitist about flying, either, like it's some exclusive or impenetrable club -- it isn't. Most pilots I know encourage everybody else they know to at least take an intro flight, because there's really nothing like it. But even so, the national drop-out rate for flight school students is 80% (some recent AOPA study - don't have a link handy but Google it). It used to be that everyone thought 'oh, well, it's just expensive, people start and don't want to spend the money to finish.' That's not wrong but it's not the whole story. The study found that money wasn't the top reason for dropping out. People get intimidated and scared right around the point where they have to fly solo. They're nervous about talking to ATC. They're nervous about landing in a crosswind. They're uncomfortable in a tiny airplane. The quality of flight instructors is all over the map (another reason cited in the study); just about every CFI out there doesn't dream of being a CFI but is building up hours to try and get a job working for an airline or flying a corporate jet. That doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing, but it does mean that they're teaching because they have to and not because teaching is necessarily what they want.
As much as I love aviation, I would sooner spend the money on what other posters have suggested - either a good public transit system or multi-gigabit FTTH infrastructure for telecommuting.
It seems like commuter airships wouldn't be a bad idea--not personal airships, but airships in place of light rail or busses coming in from distant suburbs or cities. They need not achieve a high airspeed velocity--perhaps only 40 or 50 mph (~64-80 kph)--since they would not be constrained to existing roadways or infrastructure paths. To me, such mini airship busses would make a lot more sense than conventional planes designed for short-takeoff situations. Although no expert on fuel consumption between airships and planes, I'd venture a guess that airships would require less energy overall, regardless of the source (fossil fuels or renewable energy).
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
You do realise that ground based vehicles use quite a bit more fuel per mile than those in the air don't you?
Even if they didn't, flying at constant speed without having to worry about stopping every few minutes the fuel savings would be enormous.
Not true at all.
I am a private pilot and I have two different airplanes to fly. (No I'm not rich either, I only take home about $42K per year)
One plane is a mid 1960's Piper Cherokee which I own outright (market value about $25K), the other is a homebuilt Vans RV-8 of which I'm a 1/8 partner, it cost about $80K to build).
The Cherokee cruises at about 127 statute miles per hour (110 knots) and burns about 9 gallons per hour of fuel doing so. If you disregard any headwinds/tailwinds, the simple math says that's 14.1 miles per gallon.
The RV-8 cruises at about 205 statute miles per hour (178 knots) and burns 11 gallons per hour doing so. That's 18.6 miles per gallon. Better fuel economy than the old Cherokee, and much faster and more fun to fly.
My 10 year old Chevy pickup gets slightly over 20 MPG on the highway.
What the airplanes do get you, however, is to your destination a hell of a lot more quickly than driving on the ground.
In the Cherokee, I get from north Texas to Oshkosh Wisconsin in 8 hours and burn 72 gallons of fuel.
In the RV-8 I made the same trip in 5 hours, and burned 55 gallons of fuel.
To drive it on my Chevy pickup would take at least 18 hours and I'd also burn about 55 gallons of fuel.
An alternative to light rail with a reduced foot print would be Tethered Lighter Than Air (TLTA) craft. Essentially a low-weight-bearing monorail (or mono-cable) ground infrastructure would carry a tractor/tether system that would drive and direct an LTA craft. It would be an elevated sky-train that could descend (or be reeled in) to platforms for boarding/loading. The LTA craft could also sport solar cells as its upper surface in areas where that would be cost effective. This system could safely operate through wind conditions that would prohibit free flight. There would, of course, be wind gust limits for comfortable and safe operation. Rain, icing and snow don't present insurmountable problems for a ground powered system.
The foregoing is copyrighted by me (c) 2010
Invenio via vel creo
Great, now I can enjoy erotic and arousing pat-downs on my way to pick up my date a couple miles away! :D