Larry Page Is Secretly Working On a Flying Car (bloomberg.com)

Google co-founder Larry Page is personally investing in flying cars. Page has been secretly bankrolling Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk, two California-based startups working on developing a flying car, reports Bloomberg, citing 10 people familiar with the matter. From the report: Better materials, autonomous navigation systems, and other technical advances have convinced a growing body of smart, wealthy, and apparently serious people that within the next few years we'll have a self-flying car that takes off and lands vertically -- or at least a small, electric, mostly autonomous commuter plane. About a dozen companies around the world, including startups and giant aerospace manufacturers, are working on prototypes. Furthest along, it appears, are the companies Page is quietly funding. "Over the past five years, there have been these tremendous advances in the underlying technology," says Mark Moore, an aeronautical engineer who's spent his career designing advanced aircraft at NASA. "What appears in the next 5 to 10 years will be incredible."

Comments

Re:Larry Page wants a vanity project...

[Overzeetop]

The same can be said of traditional aircraft. There are, indeed, limits - some of which have been overcome and some of which still aren't quite practical (stored energy density for electrically driven aircraft, for example). Most of the things which make small flight vehicles "impossible" revolve around efficiency. There are limits to that, as well, but I'm not convinced that we are anywhere close to our limits.

Velocopter

[Scottingham]

The article briefly mentioned a few of the competitors.

My favorite of this whole new 'class' of flying machines is the Velocopter.

It has 16 outrunner brushless DC electric motors on fixed prop blades. All flying is done essentially through the software and a single joystick (no rudder pedals or separate throttle).

The fact that it has no actuated flight surfaces, and the blades are in a fixed position, the build complexity of this machine is waaay simpler and to lower tolerances than just about any other flying machine out there.

Of course, right now on battery alone the range is pretty poor (prob like 15-20 min of flying time, tops), but with a gas turbine generator it should be extended quite significantly.

While it isn't exactly the most efficient at flying compared to even helicopters, I think its simplicity, safety (very redundant), and relative quietness makes up for that.

Re:It's about time

[dgatwood]

You might want to read up on what happens at Oshkosh every year. That's what commuting by air would look like when everyone wants to go to/from the same place. Couple that with electric aircraft with extremely limited flight durations and the tendency of people to not refuel their cars / aircraft with the idea of a contingency situation...

As long as you limit its altitude, lack of refueling isn't necessarily a big problem. Just design it to refuse to fly more than thirty feet above the current road grade, and ensure that it is designed to automatically find a spot to land when it gets below two minutes of charge. The issue of getting a tow is, of course, still a problem, but at least you won't have it falling out of the sky on top of someone.

This sort of design would allow for two (and in some cases, three) layers of traffic instead of one, and would allow detours around wrecks without having to necessarily be precisely above the road surface, which would basically fix everything that's wrong with freeways, but without turning it into a free-for-all and interfering with normal air traffic. There would, of course, be no-fly zones, such as the stretches of 101 and 880 at the ends of the SJC airport runway, but this would also open up the use of 87 as a cutacross, so in a pinch, a lot of folks could avoid problems on the ground layer, reducing the impact of the problem.