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Boeing's First Autonomous Air Taxi Flight Ends In Fewer Than 60 Seconds (cnn.com)
Boeing has completed the first flight of its autonomous air taxi Tuesday at a small airport outside Washington, D.C. "The flight lasted less than a minute, according to Boeing, and it didn't actually go anywhere," reports CNN. "Instead, it hovered above the runway. Boeing declined to share how high above the ground it flew." From the report: But Boeing is hailing the achievement as a milestone for its NeXt division, which develops autonomous airplanes. The flying car prototype is 30 feet long and 28 feet wide. It's designed to fly up to 50 miles at a time. Boeing and its competitors such as Airbus are betting that small, self-flying airplanes -- technically dubbed electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) -- will revolutionize transportation, especially in urban areas. Boeing believes the vehicles, more commonly referred to as air taxis or flying cars, will be a solution to traffic congestion.
1 meellion dollars
This is certainly better than the likes of the Moller. Safer and will get the rich off the road so us commoners can get to work on our self driving road cars.
Living in The Future!
I don't why Boeing is doing this but I don't believe that "Boeing believes the vehicles, more commonly referred to as air taxis or flying cars, will be a solution to traffic congestion." Imagine that half of the cars in LA lift off... Reminds me of a comedy where a party secretary takes a taxi ride in Moscow(?) and wonders why so many people crowd at bus stops. "They could all be riding taxis comfortably" says he.
autonomous vehicles can barely handle 2 dimensional space... and people think we're ready to tackle the intricacies of safely navigating 3D space? good grief, flying is not even remotely similar to driving a car. You need to worry about your airspeed, generating enough lift to safely take off, fly and land, you need to worry about wing-loading during turns, the vehicle would need to be able to interpret the way the wind 'feels' against the control surfaces when flying in order to judge what's going on, lest the aircraft fall from the sky... this is not the best way of doing this....If anything, an autonomous aero-stat would be safer. no aerodynamic forces to worry about, and it's slow... but even then...
...Long File Paths in WIndows File Explorer.
Which will we have first ?!
Thousands of flying vehicles weighing tons, flying above houses, roads and pedestrians, what could go wrong?
The problem is OVERPOPULATION. As simple as that. And allowing developers to build thousands of houses where there is already congestion on the roads.
28 feet wide cars.
Its a revolution in air travel!!!
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
- not the average Joe .1 percent in their mission to destroy everyone else
- not the energy crisis
- not climate change
- yes: the top
So much better to have the skies cluttered with self flying aircraft, drones, and such then on our highways. What could possibly go wrong??
Literally, topic. "Ends in fewer than 60 seconds" implies some kind of a failure with test flight. Most of the first test flight for rotary wing aircraft is literally take off within ground effect, see that it hovers successfully and land.
The point being that if there's unforeseen point of failure, uncontrolled crash would not be catastrophic from that height.
I live in Vancouver where the current policy is to fill in all open parking lots and put urban gardens on the tops of all the buildings (to prove that densification can be green.) Policies that I'm sure are being implemented in other cities. So, where are all, or any, of these flying cars with the foot print of a two car garage going to be able to put down, land or park in even small numbers. And, if you do manage to set aside some space for them to land, drop someone off and pick another up, that will become the new congestion point. Don't hang about there on the ground when the batteries start running out of juice.
So, this is what you would refer to as a failed experiment, or possibly just an experiment, rather than actual autonomous flight. You can't just roll up some materials and an engine and call it autonomous flight because it hovers above the ground.
They are just telling us what they think we want to hear there in the article. Not responsible reporting. Nobody wants to make it more complicated.
The real answer is to stop people travelling insane distances and lengths of time for everyday schooling, work, shopping , whatever.
Having everyone travelling 3 hours or more everyday for these destinations obviously doesn’t scale that’s why big cities are gridlocks,
The answer to solving congestion is to not require these travels. It would appear the faster the transport instead of cutting times down , the distances increase even further hence the result of grid lock and hours of traffic.
As a simple example why do so many kids need to ride a car , bus etc to school, why can’t they simply walk to school around the corner like everyone else did not that long ago. The argument that they are going to a better school can’t be true, every kid can’t be going to a better school than their closest one.
It's a clumsy first step, but a step in the right direction nonetheless. The fact that we're still moving about on the freaking wheel some several thousands of years after its "invention" makes me shake my head a little.
THIS is how a flying car should look like dammit :(
https://c1.staticflickr.com/7/...
and should sound like this
http://paulweb.org/Pweb%20back...
anything else is just an airplane
It's no different than the wildass experiments that were failed pipe dreams of the 50s and 60s. We will never have fully autonomous anything. Might as well invest the resources elsewhere, 'AI' is a fantasy.
why are we trying to get rid of the pilot?
Flying cars, as generally understood, should meet the following requirements:
1. No wings, or externally-visible propellers.
2. Able to hover, effortlessly, almost quietly, indefinitely.
3. Complete maneuverability at very low speeds.
4. Affordable - the LAPD should be able to have a fleet, and even down-on-his-luck detective like Rick Deckard, or a greasy Korben Dallas could afford one.
5. Relatively inexpensive to run.
6. Generally quiet.
With current technologies, we probably can't meet any of those requirements. With any reasonably foreseeable technologies, we can't meet most of those requirements. Flying cars will remain a pipe dream for decades to come, maybe even centuries. In fact, it may turn out to be the case that they will never make sense. In the meantime, we'll have announcements about ridiculous contraptions every so often, which will get very little to no traction at all.
Yeah, I don't know who Boeing had in charge of PR for this story, but they need to find someone new. With these sorts of 'news' stories (advertisements), no reporter goes out and writes a story. What happens is that Boeing writes the story and issues a press release. The various media outlets will then take the press release, get some automated script or the intern to mangle a few names and all the units of measure, and then stick it on their website for a couple of hours. Someone must have messed up the original press release so someone in the pipeline slapped a 'you won't believe what happens next' headline on the story. This is why good PR people charge a lot of money.
For a comparison see the press release Airbus did a few years back on the A350 wing bend test. In this test they do ultimately bend the wing until it snaps (to check their simulations of this point), but someone at Airbus media relations realised that this would not be a very good story to send out (new A350 wing snaps like twig) so they changed it to saying 'this is why you don't have to ever worry about a wing snapping'. They then showed pictures of an extremely bend (but not broken) wing with a whole media release explaining why this demonstrates how safe the aircraft is. Good move by someone.
How does one register to make damn sure none of this shit flies anywhere near my house, or have any kind of ballistics that could make it land on my house.
No thankyou boeing (or anyone else for that matter).
when an autonomous air taxi meets a delivery drone, or a large burd?
I wouldn't set foot in a 'driverless car' I have no direct control over, why the ever-loving fuck would I trust some half-assed excuse for AI to fly me somewhere? I can't think of a more terrifying experience. Why would ANYONE think this is a good idea? Human pilot ONLY, please. Or better yet just forget the whole thing.
I think your bot is broken.
Would it be feasible instead to have a 2 stage vehicle? The regular electric car and the osprey design for the flying housing that it drives into. The housing has enough capacity to fly itself around without the car, but with one it needs to draw from the cars battery.
If only to avoid a pile up of housings on one side of town and none left on the other, they can fly back on their own.