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Larry Page's Flying Taxis, Now Exiting Stealth Mode (nytimes.com)
Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page's autonomous flying taxi company Kitty Hawk on Tuesday unveiled its "fully electric, self-piloting flying taxi" called Cora. Since October, Cora has been seen moving through the skies over the South Island of New Zealand. It looks like a cross between a small plane and a drone, with a series of small rotor blades along each wing that allow it to take off like a helicopter and then fly like a plane. The New York Times reports: Now that project is about to go public: On Tuesday, Mr. Page's company and the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, will announce they have reached an agreement to test Kitty Hawk's autonomous planes as part of an official certification process. The hope is that it will lead to a commercial network of flying taxis in New Zealand in as soon as three years. The move is a big step forward in the commercialization of this technology, which even the most optimistic prognosticators had recently bet would take another decade to achieve. The decision to embrace the commercial use of flying taxis offers New Zealand an opportunity to leapfrog many developed countries in this area, and perhaps give it a head start over Silicon Valley, where much of the most innovative work has been taking place.
New Zealand's not a realistic testbed, they only have two destinations, hobbitown and mt doom.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Those are expensive to operate, as the energy requirement to keep something afloat without it being as or less dense than the surrounding environment is quite big, they are incredibly noisy, need really good maintenance, as any incident can cause death of passengers and people around, which is expensive, and they cannot carry much, and this machine specifically has some limbs chopping propellers, which are just asking to be a major safety hazard with children and drunk people.
We already have "flying cars" called helicopters, and they absurdly expensive and complicated machines, that only work for very wealthy people or business like offshore oil exploration, because the alternative is either very inconvenient, takes a lot more time, or can is even more expensive.
Isn't it a bit too bold? I for one see great opportunity for things going wrong very fast.
I think that's a feature, not a bug: the main impediment to implementing flying cars in the 20th century was that you can't debug the idiots who would be flying them.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Awesome. I can't wait to fly to work so I can snooze and occasionally push my one huge button.
sifting through flying car jokes in the comments section is whimsical, but as a millennial I wasnt promised flying cars in my future, i was promised a dystopian cyberpunk pesudo-utopia run by evil megacorps.
i wont be happy until an army of these things are deployed to relocate cybernetic self-aware corgis to robo-france as part of an effort by UN-Bot-3000 to quell unrest surrounding the birth of a telepathic, 6-legged mario plumber from a haunted cyber-womb.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Technology was never the issue with flying cars but safety always was
While I agree that safety was/is a huge issue with them, the technology is a show stopper issue too. Since we lack Tony Stark's arc reactor we really don't have a power source with a power to weight ratio adequate to make a flying car a practical reality. There is no technology that is not science fiction that is going to make flying cars a reality nor is there any reasonable prospect of such a technology any time soon. This issue alone makes flying cars literally an impossibility.
There also is the fact that our infrastructure is utterly unprepared for a flying car. Our parking lots and roads were not designed with 3 dimensions in mind. Even full autonomous control doesn't solve this problem. We'd have to completely rebuild our infrastructure to make flying cars practical even if it were technologically possible to make them. I think Elon Musk is correct that it's a LOT more practical to dig than to try to fly if we want to add a third dimension to our routine travel. We still have the technology to fly but trying to make a flying car is like putting a rocket motor on a cement block - even if you get it in the air it's still a dumb idea.
The significance of that depends on how quiet they've gotten it. If you can have a helipad in your neighborhood, there's no need to "drive down the road". Generally, however, noise, pollution and safety constraints render that prohibitive.
There's been some good research in reducing prop noise, however. One of my favourites is the use of props with an even number of blades, with the number of pairs at least two (aka, at least 4 blades), where the pairs are balanced within themselves but not evenly spaced around the axis. Normally, a prop with perfectly spaced blades sets up a wave where pressure rises as a blade approaches and declines as the blade leaves, with each subsequent blade passing at the exact same rate and amplifying the signal in a resonant fashion. But when pairs of blades are unevenly spaced, you're adding power at two or more different frequencies, so you don't get that buildup, and to the contrary, the waveforms disrupt each other.
That's just an example (this craft doesn't appear to be using that specific one, as all of the props are just twin bladed - although they might achieve a similar net effect by offsetting the various props from each other). But there are a lot of different ways to reduce noise. It sure sounds quiet in the video. Obviously, since it lacks an ICE, that noise source is missing.
Pollution obviously doesn't apply to it, as it's electric.
As for the safety side, this craft looks to already be hitting all the right buttons. It could lose several motors / several props and keep flying just fine. It's battery powered (probably from multiple independent packs), too, so maintenance needs should be low and failure modes tame.
I'm not saying that it's ready for prime time as a vehicle that can take off and land in a neighborhood. But at least some of the checkboxes appear to have been ticked. If it really is as quiet as that video makes it sound (which could just be how they edited it), and they've tackled safety correctly, it might well have all the boxes checked.
(That said, I don't expect that, at least initially, to be their main market)
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
Implicit in the distinction of 'flying cars' is the idea that they have the ease of use, maintenance, and safety of cars with the added ability of not needing roads
None of which are realistic. People can barely handle cars safely and we're going to allow them to fly? No thanks. Plus an aircraft has to be MUCH safer than a car, otherwise it is a huge danger not just to the occupants but to whatever they hit when the inevitable crash happens. More safety = more maintenance and/or more expense.
And if you don't need roads then it isn't a car now is it? Then it's just an aircraft.
If it has all the qualities you mentioned: expensive, dangerous, high maintenance, loud, etc, then it's not a 'flying car.'
Well, cars are expensive, dangerous, high maintenance, and loud so it's puzzling to me why anyone would thing a flying car would somehow be less so.
I actually thought the rather large vertical stabilizer was probably there so it could pitch up and auto-rotate down in the case of total failure (the inertia of the out runner motors might even allow a landing flair). I also wonder if it uses those rotors to provide some auto-rotation lift during normal operation (essentially reducing the wing loading). That would be quite smart, as otherwise they are just massive amounts of appendage drag.
There are a lot of redundancy paths in this project. For rural transport where you don't have to be so smart about where you land in an emergency, and if weather patterns are stable, then I actually think it could work quite well. But yeah, I don't think we will be flying these to work anytime soon.
More of the usual nonsense: a ridiculous, tiny airplane with folding wings. That's not a flying car. Flying cars, as they are generally envisioned (think Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, etc.) obviously rely on technologies that we do not currently have, and that we are not likely to have this century. By insisting in calling these silly things "flying cars", the manufacturers are bound to Segway themselves - those of us who have been around for a while remember the Segway, a device that was bound to revolutionize transportation. We also remember thinking, "This piece of junk is going to revolutionize transportation?" as it was unveiled.
If you want to know just how ridiculous a flying car for the masses is, just go take an introductory flying lesson.
Quite so. Even fully automating a vehicle's navigation and controls doesn't solve the problem. For aircraft to safely fly they have to have a rather rigorous level of inspection and maintenance, well beyond what most people are capable of (including myself).
Then there is the ridiculous energy cost to flying. Trying to lift something the size of a car into the air will suck energy at a enormous rate.
I get that the idea of a flying car is appealing but if you give it a few moment's thought it's a really dumb concept. It doesn't solve any burning problems, it's hugely expensive, the technology doesn't exist and likely never will, it's terrible for the environment, our infrastructure isn't designed for it, and it's dangerous.
Unfortunately, you can neither debug the morons who write the code that control these things... nor, in most cases, the code they write.
Southern California actually has all of those forms of weather, just not in the big cities. Plenty of mountains and deserts to test on if they wish. Regardless, though, it would make far more sense to handle easier conditions first. A flying car doesn't have to deliver emergency supplies to a siberian research team in a blizzard to be useful... and it doesn't have to be useful for you to be useful.
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Until they build several hundred copies that rack up at least a few million miles and a few hundreds of thousands of hours.
Don't be the dude shaking out all the bugs.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The FAA requires flights in the US to be planned to have a minimum of 30 minutes of fuel remaining at the end of the flight for Day VFR operations. 45 minutes for night or IFR flights. The requirement is there for a reason, as running out of fuel is a consistently high ranking cause of accidents. In my Zenith Zodiac 601XL, which has approximately the same performance as this vehicle, it is generally around 15 minutes between arriving at an airport and getting it on the ground. Setting up in the pattern for a coordinated landing with the other traffic actually takes time.
This thing cruises at 93mph, and has a 62mile range....somewhere around 40 minutes of flight time.
To fly across the city, say 20 miles, there is going to be several minutes of climb out, and something on the order of 15 minutes of en route time. Every landing would have to be an emergency declaration disrupting any traffic pattern.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Gyroplanes. Near-VTOL* with 100+ kph performance with snowblower engines. Impossible to stall. Bunting over nearly impossible with contemporary designs. Several companies have one and two seat models in production. Available today. Typically at a fraction of the cost of a 10 year old single seat monowing.
*Some models need less than a 5 meter roll and can clear a 10 m obstacle in less than 15 m. All the dozen+ models I have looked at qualify as (Very) Short Take-Off and Landing aircraft.
Google "gyroplane". Many of these meet your objections and are already in production.