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Where are the Flying Cars? (Video; Part One of Two)
Detroit recently hosted the North American Science Fiction Convention, drawing thousands of SF fans to see and hear a variety of talks on all sorts of topics. One of the biggest panels featured a discussion on perhaps the greatest technological disappointment of the past fifty years: Where are our d@%& flying cars? Panelists included author and database consultant Jonathan Stars, expert in Aeronautical Management and 20-year veteran of the Air Force Douglas Johnson, author and founder of the Artemis Project Ian Randal Strock, novelist Cindy A. Matthews, Fermilab physicist Bill Higgins, general manager of a nanotechnology company Dr. Charles Dezelah, and astrobiology expert Dr. Nicolle Zellner. This video and the one you'll see tomorrow show their lively discussion about the economic, social, and political barriers to development and adoption of affordable flying cars. (Alternate Video Link)
We don't have flying cars because they wouldn't be practical outside of long travels, and for long travels traditional airplanes are more economical and the ability to not be dependent on a third party service matters less.
Kinda like the horseless carriage. I mean, its possible, but its completely impractical since you would need to stop and chop wood for the boiler every few miles, and the uneven roads will be much harder to navigate on.
Sometimes obstacles change with times, and what looks hard now will be less hard later.
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First, there are all the regulations governing development of any new production aircraft; It currently cost approx $50 million to get a small aircraft through the cert process. If a small company thinks it will sell 1000 of its shiny new flying cars it will have to add $50K to the pricetag of each just to cover these costs.
Second, there are all the regulations governing pilots; Getting a pilot's license costs thousands of dollars and takes many people over a year but that license can be taken away from you by the FAA (grounding both you and that flying car you payed too much for) if you suffer any of a myriad of health problems that nearly every human being will eventually suffer. (there's no equivalent national revocation of drivers licenses even though many people are killed every year in car crashes and small planes do not cause much more damage when they crash than cars (somewhat faster, but less dense))
Third, The FAA has become very confused; it thinks it's primarily there to support commercial aviation and that the airlines have an a priori right to the skies. The regulatory mechanisms of the FAA allow the only airline maker left in the US to self-certify many things (it can get its employees trained and certified as Designated Engineering Representatives, wh can then sign-off on things) which is something small companies cannot afford and probably contributed to batteries with fire problems getting deigned into their newest plane and a "fix" being implemented without a root cause being understood first. This same loophole is not so readily available to small plane makers because its very expensive for non-billion-dollar coprorations. The airspace is regulated in ways that favor the airlines, and in this mindset a bunch of flying cars just adds risks to the commercial people movers.
Fourth, the FAA, which is now so concentrated on high-end aviation, has little concern for the costs of its actions. It is currently debating requiring a new bit of avionica in all planes. The new devices will probably cost about $5K per plane which is affordable to an airline or a business exec with a Gulfstream and less so to a Flying Car owner. The actual cost of the instrument should probably be about $250 BUT it can only be made and sold by FAA approved corps and the design must be certified by the FAA - so the regulatory overhead costs and semi-monopoly effects kick-in.
When the Wright Brothers invented the first successful powered heavier-than-air plane, they were a couple of bicycle builders on a shoe-string budget (they would never have been certified to manufacture, never have gotten pilot licenses, and their planes would never have been certified). When their earliest competitors, like Curtiss, got into the market there were still NO regulations and NO government overhead. Even when Boeing got started in a barn, it faced NONE of the current regulations. Every significant aerospace firm in the US (except SpaceX which was founded by a billionaire who nearly went broke doing it, is only doing rockets, and is sort-of "sponsored" by NASA which needs it) got up-and-running BEFORE the FAA arose to squelch innovation and freedom. Had the FAA existed 100 years ago there would be no commercial aviation. The only aircraft would probably be giant one-time-use planes flown across the oceans on research missions by men trained and treated like astronauts and supported by 100K ground support people (think Saturn V, but in aviation). Giant, inefficient, government designed-and-owned-and-operated with no concern for sustainability, reusability, etc and no imagination for the idea that average people should be able to be involved in it.
As long as we have an FAA you can forget about anybody who is not rich having a flying car or a jetpack... and hoverboards are probably out too given the desperation with which the FAA is currently trying to spook the public (with fears of "peeping tom" drones) into letting it regulate ANYTHING (including model planes) operating all the way down to zero feet (WELL-below the "navigable airspace" they are currently charged with overseeing).