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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.
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.