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A Production-Ready Flying Car Is Coming This Month
cartechboy writes It's 2014. Where the heck are our flying cars? We were promised flying cars. We should be living like The Jetsons, right? Well, we aren't, but we are about to take one step closer: a production-ready flying car is debuting this month. Slovakia's Aeromobil is planning to unveil its "Flying Roadster" at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna, Austria on October 29. The latest iteration is called the Aeromobil 3.0, and work on it dates back to 1990. The Aeromobil 2.5 prototype made its first flight about a year ago. The Aeromobil transforms from plane to car by folding its wings behind the cockpit. Supposedly, the Aerobmoil will fit in a standard parking spot and run on pump gas. In less than a month, our dreams could become a reality.
Bet you'll not see this in the US any time soon. I wonder what its crash test ratings would look like.
You can drive with a bent fender, but if you bend an aircraft it is instantly grounded until repaired, this may entail x-raying the superstructure etc. So a small bingle in a flying car means it instantly becomes just a car until repaired and approved for flight. Personally I cant see flying cars becoming a reality any time soon.
In case you don't drive much, its already too scary with cars on the ground. Can you imagine some of these idiots flying around? The horrendous crashes? Care to think about what it would be like when someone careens into the top floor of an office building and explodes into a fireball? Thankfully flying tech has not progressed to reality.
Obviously manual controls would only work outside of restricted airspace; within restricted airspace, you'd be under the guidance of the airspace control computer.
Somehow it sounds cool to have a flying car, but kinda stupid to have a driving plane. This was an observation made by Tyler Cowen on his blog. It's a good point. It reminds me of a survey of priests that emphatically showed priests are ok with praying while smoking, but not with smoking while praying.
Good that you mention Karl Benz. The restrictions imposed on him, led to the first long distance driver being a woman. As the story goes, Karl Benz was only allowed to drive the car with prior police permission and only on closed off roads. He never drove the car himself, because of fear it would explode on him. So on 5 August 1888, when Karl was out, his wife Berta decided to visit her sister in Pfortsheim. As there where no other means of transportation she and her two sons took the car on the 106 km trip. This was without the permission of her husband and the police. They had to refuel on the way and bought the ethanol in a pharmacy. This story was a PR wonder that got many restrictions lifted.