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Uber Is Researching a New Vertical-Takeoff Ride Offering That Flies You Around (recode.net)
If Uber's recently launched self-driving cars surprised you, wait for the company's "flying" vehicles. Speaking with Recode, Uber's head of products said the company is research small planes that can vertically take off and land, so that they can be used for short-haul flights in cities. From the report:The technology is called VTOL -- which stands for vertical takeoff and landing. Simply put, VTOL is an aircraft that can hover, take off and land vertically, which would also describe a helicopter. But, unlike the typical helicopter, these planes have multiple rotors, could have fixed wings and perhaps eventually would use batteries and be more silent. In time, like cars, such aircraft would be autonomous. Jeff Holden said that he has been researching the area, "so we can someday offer our customers as many options as possible to move around." He added that "doing it in a three-dimensional way is an obvious thing to look at."
So, uber is going to be the one to bring us the flying car? I doubt it but good luck to them.
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There's a reason that both the Harrier and Osprey are called the Widowmaker. I doubt a commercial VTOL Uber plane will be a reality in my lifetime due to liability concerns. This is the kind of research that is always "5-10 years from application", like all the miracle cancer cures I've read about over the years -- which I then never heard about again. Just say "20-50 years away at best" and assume Uber won't be around any more when it happens. What a joke of a story.
Ubers cars are NOT self-driving. In fact, they all have TWO DRIVERS in them. I doubt we will see true self-driving cars (with no Google/Uber engineers behind the wheel in case something goes wrong) in 40 years.
There is so much in the way of what Uber is suggesting that it is absurd for them to be making public statements about it. First of all... Uber. You know, the ride sharing service that let's people make a few extra bucks by giving rides in their fifteen-year old Chevy. I wonder which will come first, flying Uber cars or a town on Mars named Muskville.
The biggest mistake people make, is thinking, if technology X was tested and it failed. that in 50 years with new technology and materials it will still fail.
Vertical take off technology use to depend on a skill pilot to manually account for dozens of corrections per second. Computer can handle thousands of corrections per second.
Equipping a device the person transporting was considered one of the lightest component, while now it is one of the heaviest.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The biggest mistake people make, is thinking, if technology X was tested and it failed. that in 50 years with new technology and materials it will still fail.
The problem with making a flying car isn't really the technology. We've known how to make a VTOL aircraft for a long time now. The showstopper is the economics of it. Let's assume you develop a flying car that somehow works. We'll ignore all the technical obstacles that lots of very smart people haven't solved to date and just assume they magically figure it out tomorrow. It still wouldn't work for economic reasons unless you invoke some truly magical sci-fi technology. Why?
1) Physics. The energy requirements to get something the weight of a human aloft are considerable. The fuel costs alone would make it economically prohibitive. And I'm ignoring the engineering compromises that would be necessary to make it light enough to get aloft.
2) Sticker shock. A VTOL aircraft is necessarily going to be more expensive than a standard automobile because it is more complicated and thus more expensive. Even the simplest imaginable version would be far more expensive than what anyone but the super wealthy could afford.
3) Infrastructure. None of the infrastructure for any plausible flying vehicle has been built excepting for airports. The cost to change this would be astronomical. Can you imagine trying to land in the parking lot of your local Walmart without the prop wash endangering everyone around you? There are very good reasons we don't have helicopters landing just anywhere except in cases of dire emergency. The safety concerns alone make it a terrible idea.
Like many other "tech" companies, Uber tries to show that they are innovative. However, they are not. Lets illustrate that with flying cars. The topic of flying objects which are heavier than air has been discussed lengthly in engineering. Therefore, it is relatively good understood. First, you need some force to counteract gravity (or disable gravity) and then you need additional forces to move around. In airplanes, this is done with wing which transform kinetic energy of the moving plane in lift. Therefore, either an engine is required to resupply the system with new kinetic energy or you require thermal lift. For vertical lifting, we developed rockets and helicopters which provide a counterforce + some extra to move an object up. All these technologies already exist. Yet they cannot be used to create a flying car which is cheap enough to make is an alternative to a car. Just compare the price and fuel consumption of a small helicopter and a car to see that this is not economical realizable for most people. Therefore, it is not an engineering problem, but a problem of theoretical physics to come up with a way to cancel out gravity. Unfortunately, Uber is not investing in that.
Second, average humans are not capable of flying devices. That is why pilots require a lot of training. Lets assume computer scientists and robot developers are able to create an autonomous flying machine, which is an enormous engineering task, as we are barely able to get it done with cars. Some might say, yes but we have autonomous flying drones and autopilot. The first fail often and military drones need supervision. Autopilots are able to steer a system through the air until something happens which requires human interaction. Also current flight is heavily regulated and controlled by pilots and controllers on the ground. In a "Fifth Element"-like scenario, thousands of cars are flying around. Therefore, you need additional rules, as they are closer together. Just like nowadays on the ground. An autonomous flying machine would have to mange all these rules and understand all other moving objects together which is much more complicated than 2D.
Therefore, such effort is futile, which let me conclude this is just a marketing scam used to show Uber is so great company. While the truth is, they are just a company with a lot of money form venture capitalists which provides an app and enterprise software behind it. Thus, they are just a business model not an engineering company and definitely not a company capable to come up with new physics.
It's always 5 to 10 years away from release :)
Have you seen how your average taxi driver drives around cities?
I can just see how their flying will be.
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Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
More silent? How can they be more silent? Silent means they make no noise.
That said, VTOL aircraft are far, far from quiet. Even if you made them battery powered (good luck with that, as the power densities required are really pretty serious) to eliminate most of the power plant noise, they would still be damned loud due to the massive amount of air that needs to be thrust downward in order to move the craft upward. How much air? Equivalent to the weight of the craft. All the time. More, if you want to move up. Given that air is substantially less dense that most flying crafts, this means heaploads of noise. No matter how you cut it, aircraft are loud, close up, as long as you are depending on displacing air to provide thrust.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
600+lbs of multi-rotor thrust will not even approach silent, unless they have access to "black helicopter" tech - which seems to have stayed out of the "reality domain" for a very long time.
Power to weight versus cost used to be a huge issue here...
Last I checked physics is still a thing so power to weight considerations are still very much an actively huge issue.
It might not be commonly done outside of the hobby industry, but scaling up quadcopters and adding hybrid engines to maintain a charge long term is no longer an impossibility.
Are you seriously arguing that because we've done it with an RC airplane that it is a trivial exercise to scale up to the size where it can plausibly carry humans safely? Yeah it doesn't work like. The energy costs to get aloft do not scale linearly with size. The bigger the vehicle + cargo the more fuel you need to lift PLUS you need more fuel to lift the extra fuel. This places upper limits on what can practically get aloft and how long you can stay there. Plus even if you deal with the technical problems getting it to be economically viable is a MUCH harder problem. Helicopters have been a thing for a long time but they remain hugely expensive and problematic for use by the General Public. Uber isn't going to crack this problem no matter what they claim.
There were several problems with the Harrier. Most crashes occurred during the transition from vertical to horizontal flight, as the vents pivoted. A quadcopter drone doesn't have that problem, since the thrusters don't pivot. The Harrier crashes were also way more common with newbie pilots. A quadcopter doesn't have that problem either, since there is no pilot.
The Harrier problem was fixed with more powerful engines (AV-8B replacing AV8-A), and better pilot training. Newbie pilots were assigned to F18 squadrons, and were not trained on VTOL until after they had several years of flight experience.
This is one of those things that will remain a rich people toy at best for the foreseeable future simply due to the amount of energy required. See also: Civilian supersonic flight, space tourism.
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Through a number of phases of the modern age, different airlines have attempted to offer air-taxi services from the three main airports around NYC to Manhattan. The economics would seem to make sense at first blush. The relative distances, potential market demand and locations make sense. And, yet none of the big airlines still offer these ad-ons to their mainline service, while, at the same time, they have offered significant incentives to attract big-money customers. The natural conclusion is that the devil is in the details and there must not be sufficient demand or market support for the routes to make financial sense. Not the least of which is that the fraction of the population who feels comfortable riding in a helicopter is small (consider how many people intensely dislike propeller planes, and then understand that helicopters are worse in nearly every way for ride experience when compared to jet flight).
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Uber is trying desperately to use up all that money they were given based on their (relatively simple) app. An app that they can't even make profitable. Apparently they lost around $1.2B in the first half of the year.
They have no clue what they're doing and this pie-in-the-sky stuff is just a bullshit distraction before the money runs out.
I don't know why companies aren't happy to just perfect and run an existing product profitably instead of looking for endless and everlasting growth? It's not sustainable. After all, why shouldn't they when there are investors willing to sign $1.5B cheques for a fucking app.
Look... a 5 ounce drone couldn't possibly lift a 1 pound cocoanut... it's a simple matter of weight ratios...
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