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BiPod Flying Car Makes (Short) Test Flights
Zothecula writes "The team at Scaled Composites pulled out all the stops to realize the final design of the company's founder and former CTO, Burt Rutan, ahead of his retirement in April earlier this year. In just four months, the Scaled Composites team went from beginning the preliminary design to the first flight of the 'BiPod,' a hybrid gasoline-electric flying car that grew out of a program to develop a rapid, low-cost electric test bed using as many off-the-shelf components as possible."
Needs a runway to take off...
apple lawsuit over name in 3...2...?
* Your invention requires pilots to attach the wings themselves every time they want to fly, which must require the help of a friend or two,
* Your plane shuts the pilot in a separate compartment from the only passenger seat,
* They have to trade seats when the pilot wants to switch from flying to driving (or vice versa),
* The passenger has no ability to take the controls in an emergency,
* It looks odd in the air and downright silly on the road,
* And you picked a gimmicky pop-culture-based name that will piss off a major corporation!
You must be an engineer! Welcome to Slashdot!
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
You could leave, and then us idiots wouldn't have to continue defending morons such as yourself.
Our problem, is that we attempt to allow people to have their own opinion, even when thats clearly a bad idea. We could easily solve our problem by terminating anyone who makes idiotic statements. Unfortunately for you, that means you'd be shot fairly early on.
Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Company Motto: "FEEL the stability of a BiPod!"
Funny, I was more thinking: First DNF, then GNU Hurd, ... of course we'd get a flying car today!
Why does everyone jump on that thing to diss it? It's not a commercial project, it's a technology test bed. It can't be overpriced, because it won't be sold. It won't go on the roads. It's a cool project from a guy who had the means to kick it off before retiring. What the hell is wrong with you all, thought this was a geek site. Building a convertible road/flying machine in whatever form is as geeky a project as you can get...
The Human CentBiPod!!
I actually read one of the links (I know, I know...) and saw some (to my non-professional engineer eyes) great or at least interesting ideas.
Like having the "left seat" have flying controls and the "right seat" have the driving controls. Sure, as other posters pointed out, you can't take over in an emergency but I would imagine (since I don't fly a plane) it must make the controls a lot easier to design and use. I wonder why they didn't put the driving controls on the left side since I presume they would use it in the USA not say Britain? Of course you don't need separate enclosed cabins to use this idea.
I'm impressed that hybrid technology is advanced enough that you could carry the additional equipment without a crippling weight penalty. That of course allowed them to do all sorts of interesting things like decoupling the gas engines from the electric motors allowing them to be placed wherever it is best and splitting the gas engines up for redundancy. Having presumably small lightweight electric motors in the wheels takes care of a lot of power train issues I guess. Also having lithium battery assisted takeoff is good for keeping the engines smaller because they don't have to provide brief spikes in power. I wonder if the plane can generate power as it descends (like an aerial version of regenerative breaking)? Can it charge the batteries on a windy day on the ground?
From what I saw in my cursory skimming of the article, the wings are detached before the "car" goes on the road. I guess they didn't really try to optimize the design because this is just a test vehicle (and they designed and built it in a very short amount of time! 4 months!) but I imagine that as long as you're going to leave part of the gear at the airport, why not leave the rear airfoils and electric propeller? That's another benefit from the hybrid design, no mechanical coupling to the propeller, just a power cable.
Anyway even if the overall project doesn't really "take off" (bada bish!) some of these ideas seem very interesting! I wonder if high temperature super conductors could really make this idea "go"!
It's as much a car as a motorbike is a car. It just isn't.
especially at 70mph. It its typical light aircraft construction it'll come off worse in a collision with a rickshaw, never mind a 2 ton 4x4.
The announcement that DNF was going to be released caused mass panic. The Debian Hurd team assembled on an emergency meeting, the devil begin to order truckloads of dry ice, suddenly wings began to appear on cars and pigs. Only Apple got lucky and the panic didn't get to them. Thankfully, they started using Intel CPUs a long long time ago.
I think the big problem is that in the USA, you will need to build flying Humvees to get this idea accepted. Anything smaller will be seen as an insult to American integrity, and not safe on the roads (because everybody else believes you need a 4x4 offroad capable 8 litre vehicle to buy a pint of milk from the local shops).
Apart from the fact that the two concepts (car, plane) just don't work together that well really. A bit of a laugh for folk with more money than sense to try to develop, but until we get some sort of Bladerunner anti-grav lifting and propulsion devices, just not practicable. Next up, the submarine that turns into a plane!
Did you actually read the rest of the article? It said, in the sentence *immediately following the one you quote*:
"Originally conceived as a rapid, low-cost electric testbed, the effort evolved into a flying car."
Whether it IS a flying car or not (personally, I don't think so), the article at least does make the claim.
I wish journalists would learn the difference between a flying car and a street-legal airplane.
Technoli
This sounds like a similar concept to the Terrafugia Transition, which is also advertised as a "roadable aircraft." The Transition has made a few appearances on Slashdot in the past. Apparently the Transition uses a CVT to transmit internal combustion engine power to the wheels, so it's not a hybrid like Rutan's one in TFA.
Terrafugia's homepage at www.terrafugia.com
sustainable living
The only color option is copper orange.