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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)
Forget flying cars - this group can't even get a decent microphone.
Couldn't someone have recorded this on a broken cellphone to improve the audio quality?
Obviously, the sleek, compact flying cars we're waiting for are sitting right alongside the compact gravity repulsion units and the ununpentium powercells...
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.
I want my hoverboard!
They're a long, long, looong way off. Let's focus on more realistic and practical things, like self making beds and toilets that put the seat down for women automatically. Now that would be progress.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
You clearly live in a flat place near an airport hub. Flying cars would be tremendously practical for most of the US, which are not near hubs. It's 40 miles to my parent's house, 100 if you drive. They happen to live two mountain ranges over and across a lake from me so the path to get there is rather circuitous. I'm 3-4 hours drive from 4 different large airports, but the only one within an hour has a horrible flight cancellation record, costs $100-200 more per trip than a hub, and to catch a flight that takes me to a hub I have to leave the house earlier than if I just drove straight to the hub.
Sure, travel more than 200 miles or so is probably more economical on a commercial jet, and more than about 400-500 miles is probably the break point for convenience/cost combined. But outside the big cities, which comprise less than 2% of the land area of the US, there are lots of use cases for a flying car.
Besides, a real flying car (not a roadable aircraft) should be able to reasonably navigate local traffic as well as airborne travel.
It's arguable whether having five million flyers is a safe thing, but as for the utility - it's definitely there.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Self flying cars should be easier than self driving cars - heck, we already have them in commercial use. The user space is far larger and the location tolerance is much looser than driving on a road.
And if it's a flying CAR you can land outside of densely traveled/populated areas and drive to your final destination (say, Manhattan or LA).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
We have flying cars, they are called helicopters. They are dangerous and appear (to the public) to be notoriously hard to fly...partly because people keep using them as flying cars/platforms.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I think this is tied somewhat to the issue of the issue of self-driving cars. Part of the problem with flying cars is the question of, who do we trust to fly them? What's the process of licensing people to drive/pilot these things? Do we trust people not to fly over protected airspace? Do we trust people not to fly into buildings? Along with everything else, driving/piloting a vehicle designed both for driving and flying might very well be more complicated than learning to drive and learning to fly combined.
However, if you can have self-driving cars, and you can make a self-flying driving car (including take-off and landing), then you could have the whole thing controlled by a computer guided system, adhering to restrictions to traffic and air traffic. Along with everything else, you could have restrictions that say, "When you're in NYC, the car knows that it needs to drive because airspace is restricted. Once you drive X miles outside the city, you can take to the air along certain restricted routes, following certain procedures." All of that could be controlled with computers, disallowing various kinds of abuses.
Of course, that assumes that we have sufficient systems for safe autonomous driving/flight. It also assumes that everything is coded well enough to prevent people from hacking the car to allow them to break the rules. It also assumed that people will be ok with being restricted and tracked. Finally, it assumes that, when you've put all these restrictions in place, you haven't made the idea so un-fun that people don't want a flying car anymore.
The reason I'd want a flying car is so I could avoid all the idiots by flying over them. It wouldn't be so much fun when the idiots have them and are flying around while talking on their phones! Yikes!!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Six reasons we do not have flying cars:
1. Unforgivingness: Run out of gas, stall, fail to perform scheduled maintenance? You plummet and die. Road vehicles are more forgiving of errors and faults.
2. Regulation: There is an overwhelming regulatory burden imposed by the FAA. This restricts R&D, commercialization and ownership.
3. Expertise: Piloting requires specialized skills and extensive training.
4. Expense: Flying vehicles are expensive.
5. Infrastructure: The air traffic control system can not handle ubiquitous flying vehicles. Take-off and landing zones are not ubiquitous. For short distances, it is inefficient to to the airport to fly to the next airport to drive to where you are going, Why not just drive to where you are going to start with? For longer distances, drive to the airport and take a plane. The flying car only makes sense if we put airports everywhere. Yes, VTOL would mitigate this.
6. Inherent inefficiency: Hauling your car around with you everywhere you fly? Carrying your airplane with you everywhere you drive? A combination car/plane of the future makes about as much sense as traveling with your car on a commercial passenger flight today.
You are stuck with #6; Flying cars might just be an inherently stupid idea. Other barriers can be overcome with technology and mass commercialization except for the FAA regulatory burden and restrictions.
Ubiquitous personal air transport makes more sense for short to medium distances if you do not try to make combination, flyable/roadable vehicle. As-the-crow-flies routes are way more efficient than road networks and with automated navigation and automated air-traffic control there would be no traffic jams in 3 dimensions. Automated VTOL would largely obviate road travel.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
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).
Flying cards are energetically stupid, safety-wise stupid and traffic-capacity-wise stupid. That means they may not ever happen except for meaningless stunts. Those that want them are like little children crying "I want! I want! I want!" all over without realizing that this physical reality has limits. Really pathetic.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Flying vehicles are expensive: to build, to operate, and to maintain. Probably close to an order of magnitude for each, though the last may be close to two magnitudes.
Cost per pound of cargo in an airborne vehicle is huge. Here's an example: the HondaJet runs around $5m. A comparable Honda Odyssy is $35k.
Flying is a significantly more energy-intensive operation than rolling along the surface. A cheap prop plane like a Cessna has an airspeed around 100mph, and gets 20mpg. The equivalent super-cheap subcompact doesn't have to worry about winds, and gets 40+ mpg. Turbofans (like the HondaJet) which you'd want on a "flying car" get 4x or worse gas mileage than a Cessna. VTOLs (whether helicopter or directed thrust) are getting 6x or worse gas mileage.
The vast majority of aircraft require HOURS of maintenance per hour of flight time. Even the small, simple stuff like Cessna are more than a 1:1 maintenance:use ratio. There's not really any way to avoid this, since flying is significantly more hard on the vehicle than driving. So, for each flight you take, you're going to have to pay several hundred dollars in maintenance fees.
Overall, even with some reasonable improvements and economies of scale, you're looking at a vehicle that costs 10x or more than an equivalent wheeled vehicle to start with, and has an annual operating cost around 100x.
Besides, we already have flying cars. They're called helicopters. Notice how the pricing on those has kept them from be adopted. There's no real way to make a flying car significantly cheaper. And you're still stuck with the 1-6 reasons above.
Asking where flying cars are is only slightly more inane than asking why we don't have personal teleporters, and about the same as asking why personal jetpacks aren't sitting in everyone's closet.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.