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Uber Hires a Nasa Veteran Who Thinks We'll Start Seeing Flying Cars In Next Three Years (bloomberg.com)
Uber is getting serious about its intentions of building a flying car. Uber's plan involves airborne taxis that will travel 50 to 100 miles between "vertiports" that connect passengers between their homes and offices, according to a report on Bloomberg. Now it is hiring the right leader for this project. From the report: In 2010, an advanced aircraft engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center named Mark Moore published a white paper outlining the feasibility of electric aircrafts that could take off and land like helicopters but were smaller and quieter. The vehicles would be capable of providing a speedy alternative to the dreary morning commute. Moore's research into so-called VTOL -- short for vertical takeoff and landing, or more colloquially, flying cars -- inspired at least one billionaire technologist. After reading the white paper, Google co-founder Larry Page secretly started and financed two Silicon Valley startups, Zee Aero and Kitty Hawk, to develop the technology. Now Moore is leaving the confines of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, where he has spent the last 30 years, to join one of Google's rivals: Uber Technologies Inc. Moore is taking on a new role as director of engineering for aviation at the ride-hailing company, working on a flying car initiative known as Uber Elevate. "I can't think of another company in a stronger position to be the leader for this new ecosystem and make the urban electric VTOL market real," he says.
so that's not so bold.
There are a lot of metro areas I've lived in that have great roads or transit to get from one area of a city to another - but make travel from different zones across the city a nightmare. If you could put in a number of aerial transit lines like this you could open up jobs and housing in much different areas of the city than is currently practical.
Depending on where you placed these zones you could make who new areas job centers that could never have been before.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As in hallucinations? This guy is senile.
They can build something that can fly itself and take you from point A to point B.
What they can't do and what will take years and years is the infrastructure. Remember the Jetsons? Ya...they were following "roads".
The rules and regulations to manage millions of aircraft flying pilotlessly from point A to point B hasn't even been dreamed of yet, never mind rationally though out.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
and told you it was chocolate milk, would you believe them? 10 out of 10 tech reporters answered a resounding yes.
It's spelled NASA, not "Nasa."
Rolling on a surface is pretty energy efficient - the power requirements for flying are much, much higher.
Safety & FAA regulatory issues aside, this is always going to cost a LOT more than ground transportation- for fuel costs alone.
This may end up being the rich man's tool when a limo is too slow, but a charter aircraft overkill.
Most stupid ape on the roads can barely even drive on land, forget the flying in the air.
It will need to be 100% autonomous. Considering we don,t have commercially available self driving cars yet, the flying ones ain't gonna come anytime soon. Not to mention, every "flying cars" we've seen so far are NOISY as hell. Now multiply that times a couple thousands flying above you. It will be deafening.
Not the flying car shit again.
I dont think this happening within 3 years. For example, take a look at how long Terrafugia has been at it. It has taken them *years* to get to the point where they've been allowed by the FAA to self-certify their "flying cars" for weight and stall speed limits. They're finally allowed to self-certify as a Light Sport Aircraft (LSA). So, now they expect to have a new prototype by 2018, and customer delivery by 2024! As for flying it, I'm guessing Uber is planning on self-flying craft (there's already a ton of automation for flying that has been in place for a long time). I'd love to see it happen, but I'm not counting on it within 3 years.
What are Uber and Google rivals at?
Insane valuations? Winner Uber...
Data mining users? Winner Google...
I don't really get it. Taxi company vs. Ad agency. Not rivals, almost certainly use each other's services.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
“I can’t think of another company in a stronger position to be the leader for this new ecosystem and make the urban electric VTOL market real,” he says.
That's because of Uber's strong engineering track record, civic integration, and long history of co-operation with governmental agencies.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Yes, NASA is know for being staffed by idiots. Landing on the moon, launching thousands of satellites, the space shuttle, flybys of all the planets, landers on Mars, the space station, the Hubble telescope... all flukes.
...we'll be lucky if there's milk and eggs on the store shelves (if there's even stores left) in 3 years!
I'm still dreading the day that we see the first major drone terrorist attack... but affordable, practical flying cars for the masses (not just licensed pilots using airports) are out of the goddamn question for obvious goddamn reasons even if all of the other technical and safety and cost issues can be sorted out.
Cheap, electric-only, driverless cars with next generation batteries and sporting drive trains that might be able to manage a million miles without an expensive breakdown is already a huge revolution to ponder and (assuming someone finally mass produces one of these magical nanotech batteries we keep hearing about) is an entirely realistic one.
Flying cars is just fantasizing about retro-futuristic aesthetics instead of real, practical revolutionary stuff, stuff that could dramatically lower the costs and dangers and inconveniences of driving cars.
Seriously look at the technology showcased in the last many years. They could have had flying cars years ago. I personally think they are just waiting for technology/restrictions available to keep them under control.. Free flying across borders or into restricted airspace, terrorism is the real issue.
Heck, look at the JetPack Aviation JB-9; If they can do that(and they do), flying "cars" are a piece of cake.
No need for millions of them. This is clearly aimed at the 1% being taxied from the penthouse of one shining building to another while the plebs sit in traffic-snarled, crumbling infrastructure. Think Metropolis, not Jetsons.
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I mean, flying cars are just bullshit. There is nothing that makes them useful compared to the alternatives. They cannot be real cars and they cannot be real planes or helicopters. In addition, they cannot be flown by anybody not quite experienced. In all circumstances it is preferable to have car and "flying" done by separate, specialized machines. Why this extremely obviously extremely stupid ideas does not die out is beyond me.
And "3 years"? That is just plain demented. You cannot get a new car design for a normal car out the door in that time.
Sure, we may see useless stunts in 3 years, but nothing beyond that for a very, very long time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Safety issues for these flying cars, roads below them, and then consider the already overloaded ATC systems in the US. The idea may be interesting, but three years won't happen. Should it happen? Well, as the AC says above me, can we prevent drunk/bad drivers? Can we ensure that when one of these has an engine failure, it does not take out half a city block or a few dozen cars on the freeway making traffic much worse?
I hope he realizes also, that Helicopters are very dangerous and require a huge clear space for takeoff and landing. You are not going to have a bunch of loose propped cars buzzing around without people losing limbs.
We are not quite to the Jetson's level of technology, and won't be for way more than 3 years.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
#NotMySpaceShuttle
These people (Uber) have never done anything with the FAA or certifying an air vehicle for flight. You'd be lucky to get new commercial air vehicle certified in ten years for flight and sale.
Richard Branson says "The fastest way to become a Millionaire is start as a billionaire and buy an airline".
Anyone with or working towards a pilots license knows everything used in an airplane has to be FAA certified making even simple things cost 5-10x more.
Just like Google Fiber closed up and shut down it's municipal fiber projects - real cost is much higher and revenues lower then some arrogant millennial MBA guessed - "ride share flight" idea will flame out quickly.
Unlike squeezing wages out of drivers, like Uber did for taxis, the FAA is going to be all over this. There's already lots of rules on the books regulating flight and defining the difference between commercial and professional.
We already have "flying cars". They are called helicopters and have the problems and dangers you would expect.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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Everyone knows me.
People cannot handle flying cars.
Yes, I totally agree... that's why you have instead what is described IN THE SUMMARY THAT YOU SHOULD HAVE READ - essentially a small bus (they say taxi) that flies itself through the air between hubs and from there you take an uber (or drive home in your own car).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Safety issues for these flying cars, roads below them, and then consider the already overloaded ATC systems in the US
Why would they need to do anything except relay location to existing ATC? They can't talk as there are no pilots. They fly along a narrowly defined corridor at an altitude that would not conflict with existing airports and all local aircraft would know about.
Can we ensure that when one of these has an engine failure, it does not take out half a city block
There are literally a billion ways the answer to that question is yes (whole craft parachute, limited glide capability with designated crash zone along flight path, etc).. Theses are small vehicles holding a handful of passengers. All your luddite fears are vaporized by the simple fact that today, a FOR REAL HELICOPTER can fly nearly anywhere it likes overhead, presenting far greater danger.
You are not going to have a bunch of loose propped cars buzzing around without people losing limbs.
I wonder how you don't hear about that all the time given helicopters exist? Oh that's right, they take off and land on designated zones you do not let people just flail arms around on.
You seem to be thinking some military grade helicopter when the reality would be more like a glorified drone that could hold four people and a bit of cargo, pretty much all plastic and lighter than your car doors.
This is such a simple concept it really boggles my mind how people can misunderstand it so badly, just from what is written in the summary alone I could start a whole company to do this if I had the funding.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is foolish. The energy requirements needed to fly are far higher than it is for wheels. This would be a plaything of the rich, and wasteful, at best. This is a back of a napkin calculation for goodness sakes. I remember when NASA had a reputation for having basically the cream of the crop engineers, and that was basically ALL that staffed it. Now it's staffed with idiots.
The FAA banned internet ride sharing in 2014. That decision was upheld by a court ruling in 2015. Uber tried to argue pilots in ride share didn't need a commercial license, and that argument was swatted twice. Commercial pilots are under a great deal more scrutiny than recreational, and rightly so.
This to me sounds more like Uber is going to try to create their own sky terminals to compete with public transit. Unless Uber is going to pull some magic pill out of their arse, to use a pun - this isn't going to fly. Just look at the history, both public transit and air lines for that matter, are huge money sinks. Unless they think "my man Trump" is going to remove all this needless regulation (like public safety) that only get's in the way of job creation...
I hate gravity as much as the next guy, but we're stuck with it. Flying cars are impossible unless we have a mechanism of propulsion that doesn't involve shoving air downwards at a high velocity. Forget flying cars, let's focus on getting the following technologies within the next 20 years (in order of difficulty):
1. Batteries with 3x the capacity of today's best. -- We are clueless how to do this.
2. Fusion Energy -- should be possible, theoretically
3. Developing in-vivo gene editing technology. -- difficult, especially to do it safely
4. Improving cellular drug delivery systems -- hard but not impossible
5. Curing Type 1 diabetes -- we are close
6. Level 5 autonomous vehicles. -- feasible
7. VR with 5K per eye -- plausible
8. Passive WiFi -- tech has already been demonstrated.
NASA is an acronym (National Aeronautical and Space Administration) and according to grammar usage,
all of the letter should be capitalized (that means use the BIG letters).
I don't know about other countries, but where I live you could not expect any kind of private air-traffic allowed/tolerated that is as loud as all flying vehicles are today. Heck, even the relatively few airports around are under constant pressure to limit their noise emissions. And I think that is a good thing.
Here's the thing, quick and simple: Uber is not known for it's warm feelings toward its employees/contractors (depending on which side of the law you sit on). Driving a four-wheeled vehicle on the ground is simple enough that you can do it while seriously impaired without too much risk. Not so with something flying through the air. Pilots are not the same as the semi-employable edge of society that Uber is famous for employing/contracting (yes, I'm being intentionally inflammatory here).
Anyone, but anyone, can drive a car. Not everyone has the situational awareness to fly you through the air, and the vast majority of Uber drivers I've had would not pass even a low-bar flight test. How are they going to surmount the barrier that getting a pilot's license requires? Are they going to attempt to establish a new class of licence in the eyes of the FAA? Good luck with that. Engineering is one thing. Fighting government in 50 states plus the feds, now that's something entirely different. Finding talented people to pilot these things for bottom-of-the-bucket wages, well, that's crazy impossible.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
You will see Amzon delivering packages before you see electric flying taxis carrying fare paying passengers. FAA regulations for passenger carrying aircraft is very stringent.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
With money, you fucking idiot.
Bitch. Tell me again how a helicopter isn't a flying car? You get in it, put your seatbelts on, drive it directly from point A to point B and can park it basically anywhere.
Oh? it's expensive and noisy as hell? Well, since when does something have to be cheap and practical to be an existence proof? More to the point, does anyone ever expect "flying cars (that aren't helicopters due to arbitrary nonsensical exclusion rules)" to be cheap and quiet, or not require FAA certification and licensing?
I charter helicopters at least once a month. It's probably the cheapest way to travel short-to-medium rural when accounting for time. I don't need to own one, and the heliport is less than two miles from the office. If I need to go long, I can get a charter to the airport or spend an hour in a taxi...
How are they going to solve the problems of :
1. High fuel consumption. Fun fact : the type of batteries you need for this kind of range burn themselves up very quickly as providing this level of current is very stressful on them. It costs more to replace the aircraft's battery pack than the equivalent amount of jetfuel would cost for the same energy delivered.
2. High liability, thus very high aircraft manufacturing costs. You can't make a helicopter with any real cargo capacity for less than 10s of millions of dollars, why do you think you can make a flying bus any cheaper?
3. Highly skilled workers to operate them. Even if they fly themselves, you need highly paid mechanics to maintain them, well paid ATC operators to monitor them, an expensive place free of debris to launch them from, etc etc etc.
4. Low demand. These things only make sense for moderate distance trips. They save you about 90 minutes of driving time but now you gotta wait to board, wait to leave, and go through security. Nope.
Maybe we will see flying cars but what is the point without the airports? It is quite popular to close airports in urban areas and never open them again. We would not have flying cars any time soon.
:)
Helicopters can fly anywhere because they cost millions of dollars
I would respond to the rest of your post but I don't see why I need to bother when at the outset you have displayed that you are an idiot and we can all assume the rest of your ideas are equally uninformed/absurd.
The cheapest HC there are on the order of $20k but I'll even be reasonable and just take the $190k model as an example of something that is vastly far from "millions of dollars", and is way more advanced than an air taxi drone would be (read the description). Remember that helicopters as YOU know them were designed to be highly maneuverable, but an air taxi just has to lift off, fly 30-40 miles, and land. With no user controls.
I'll let you have the last word since people who are caught being stupid usually try as hard as they can to reenforce the impression once it is pointed out. I'll just be over here rolling my eyes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The way I imagine a flying car is as a vehicle that can hover almost silently, effortlessly, for long periods of time. I do not think that we have the technology for that, much less in an affordable way. Those silly planes with folding wings and the ridiculous little helicopters with an individual strapped to them are not flying cars, but preposterous contraptions.
I can't think of another company in a stronger position to be the leader for this new ecosystem and make the urban electric VTOL market real
If a strong position includes making profit from your current business, then there are many companies are in a stronger position than Uber.
Just what I need, someone with a CPL flying solo for Uber to gain hours for his ATPL.
NO THANKS. I'd rather walk.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
getting them past the crash testing in so short a period of time....
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
It truly is a Brave New World
So I assume he's perfected an anti-gravity system that doesn't require power? Because as long as the failure mode of a flying vehicle is "drop out of the sky like a fucking rock onto people below"... might have a little problem there.
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Just what I need for the family holiday to the moon I've been planning since 1969. I have the pod an' evry thing all ready to go.
Hey don't underestimate NASA, they are actually pretty clever. They keep the whole global warming thing going, cover up the flat earth, run a fake space station (including fake live feeds) AND launch all those fake rockets. If it wasn't for a few dedicated Youtubers we'd all still be in the dark, so I think they deserve full respect.
alternative headline is "Uber Hires a Nasa Veteran With Severe Dementia?" We've had this flying car scenario before, it's a repeating theme, much like virtual reality. Then again, I'm not the one speaking out against some Boom-Leelo-Dallas-Multipass action, so go right ahead.
They're looking for anything to sell the next batch of overpriced stock to support their $3 billion a year loss.
It is a Ponzi scheme at this point, the C levels are just trying to keep the party rolling as long as possible.
Isn't NASA that place where liberals think there's global warming? How are clueless people like that going to get a car to fly?
#FakeNews #BoycottNASA #MAGA
On slashdot nowadays you pretty much have to put a big "THIS IS SARCASM" heading on a post if you don't want it taken literally.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So much quieter than those nasty choppers? Not hardly, not unless they are virtually silent - and I'm not aware of that technological development. In order to lift useful numbers of people all those little multi-rotors are going to make a helluva racket. Higher pitched maybe, and not as loud vehicle per vehicle as a conventional helicopter - but if they are successful and much cheaper than choppers as proponents are claiming, then there will be a whole lot more of them. Imagine hundreds or thousands of leaf blowers flying over head at all hours. No thanks! I can maybe see a limited number of them on vertiports atop tall buildings, but even then, those top floor offices will have to have a whole lot of sound insulation.
I think we're really going to have to stick with surface transport, folks, or have our ears amputated. Monorails, hyperloopps, good old trains, self driving cars.
Requiem for the American Dream
Is soon parted. There's a reason it hasn't been done yet. You can't do it. I'm a pilot and I've flown around the country. The weather can be a bitch. Especially thunderstorms. People in even automated vehicles are no match for mother nature. So it'll be very unreliable. It'll be very expensive. It'll never get approved.
Use a car, it's way better.