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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.
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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...
Drones have been flying a lot longer than they have been driving and they are actually pretty good at it these days. I still wouldn't get in one and let it fly in close proximity to loads of other ones though.
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...Long File Paths in WIndows File Explorer.
Which will we have first ?!
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.
It doesn't land. You fast rope out of it and hit the ground running
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Wait, you're saying that if I put a brick on my accelerator and jump out of the car it's not doing autonomous driving? :)
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
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.
You must never have lived outside a city or lived in small town USA. Growing up in northwest Illinois pretty much REQUIRES you to ride many miles on a bus just to GET TO the "closest" school.,
why are we trying to get rid of the pilot?
on long flights sure, but these sound like puddle jumpers which would be like 10 minute commuter flights and if there are dozens per city/area then finding qualified pilots start becoming harder and harder the more planes you have in the air and I would kind of trust a computer to fly me than a 18 year old named Jake who flies for both uber and lyft constantly looking down at his/her smartphone for directions. just saying :)
It's not a "flying car" if it's three lanes wide and as long as a bus.
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.
You must never have lived outside a city or lived in small town USA. Growing up in northwest Illinois pretty much REQUIRES you to ride many miles on a bus just to GET TO the "closest" school.,
You aren't kidding. Years ago I worked in Northwest Ohio. Flat as a board, and mostly rural.
Asking directions from locals, you'd get a "Drive down to Bryan, take a left and then a little ways down the road from there."
Their "little ways down the road" was something like 50 miles.
I write all this off to people not thinking that others might live in a different environment. People in SoCal can't understand that here in the soggy Northeast, we often have too much water. People in urban environments think everyone wants to live like they do. Farmers the same - although I find the typical farmer a lot more astute than the typical urbanite.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
Energy is the expensive part of flying. The tunnels aren't ready yet, though.
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Drones have been flying a lot longer than they have been driving and they are actually pretty good at it these days.
The problem with using drones as a comparison is scale. At their weight, the standard drones people think about can perform feats of maneuverability that are amazing. Scaled to the size and weight required to transport a single human the realities of physics look very different. As a simple example, think about dropping an ant. An ant is one mm thick. A fall from one foot above the ground is ~300 mm or 300 times its height. The ant will survive this fall and walk away. A person is roughly one foot thick lying down. Dropped from 300 feet above the ground the outcome for the human will be very, very different.
when an autonomous air taxi meets a delivery drone, or a large burd?
You can't in the US. You have no control of the airspace starting at 500ft above your land. That's above your land, not your house. I can come do aerobatics at 700ft above your house. (I won't. That'd be stupid. But, it would be legal.)
Unlike most of the flying car abortions of logic I've seen, this looks like it has actual wings. Once it exceeds stall speed, you're house will be very safe.
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It's not a "flying car" if it's three lanes wide and as long as a bus.
SUPERsize me! It's for those quick trips to McDonalds!
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
The woman that was killed wasn't on the bike, she was walking the bike, and she didn't "dart" out in front of anything.
She jaywalked, and should have fucking looked to see if it was clear, but the car should have seen her and stopped, and the human driver should have seen her and stopped. The video they released was doctored bullshit, and it has been proven many times over that the area is well lit and visibility is good at night.
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.
There are large drones out there. Some are developed with enough capacity to carry humans, such as the ElectraFly.
The FAA will not like your sub 1000ft AGL aerobatics. Not generally enforced is not the same as legal.
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I think your bot is broken.
Energy is the expensive part of flying.
So is the noise. Flying quietly will be a hell of a trick
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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.
I shudder to think how you get on.
You climb up a rope ladder as its flying away into the sunset like bond or some shit
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Electrafly is an idea, currently designed to carry a single person exposed to the elements in a large quadcopter with exposed blades. When a person can buy one of these approved by the FAA we can talk. I believe that most of the people discussing this particular near fantasy have little actual knowledge of flight. Safety is heavy and/or expensive. There is no way to make this affordable, safe and functional concurrently.
Funny how your argument changed from the physics won't work to regulators haven't approve it.
Safety is heavy and/or expensive. There is no way to make this affordable, safe and functional concurrently.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Aviation is expensive because of the regulatory overhead. Plenty of car engines last as long as aviation piston engines, but the ones approved by the FAA costs 5 times as much.
Safety on the other hand, is not expensive at all. The vast majority of accidents are pilot-related.
Here's the leading causes of accidents for GA:
1. Loss of Control Inflight
2. Controlled Flight Into Terrain
3. System Component Failure – Powerplant
4. Fuel Related
5. Unknown or Undetermined
6. System Component Failure – Non-Powerplant
7. Unintended Flight In IMC
8. Midair Collisions
9. Low-Altitude Operations
10. Other
Only system failures cannot be avoided by better trained and more safety-conscious pilots. So instead of spending tens of thousands on pilot training, you improve safety much more by replacing them with computers. Why? Because a computer won't accidentally stall a plane. It won't fly itself into the ground. It won't forget to check the amount of fuel it needs. It won't intentionally fly into bad weather. It can constantly scan for other aircraft. And it certainly won't be scud-running.
I was responding to a specific response about the ElectraFly. Physics is still the problem because it is inefficient to lift mass off the ground, and substantially more inefficient to lift it straight up than horizontally like an airplane. A Cessna 172 weighing 1700 lbs gets the rough mpg equivalent of 14 mpg, a Robinson R22 helicopter around 8 mpg. A Honda Civic weighing 2700 lbs gets 32 mpg.
I said nothing about the cost of regulation. Any person owning one of these is unlikely to be satisfied with traveling in the quadcopter equivalent of an ultralight and will instead expect some kind of enclosed pod in which to sit to protect them and their designer clothes from rain, cold, etc. This pod will either be aluminum and heavy, like an airplane, or carbon fiber, which is expensive and still 2/3 the weight of aluminum. Now the vehicle must carry the person plus the weight of the pod. It won't have any creature comforts like heating or air conditioning or if it does, those add weight. My point is that everything added to transporting anything more than just the person adds weight, which then requires more upward force so by extension, a more powerful engine and more fuel.
The flying car problem, imho, bears similarity to the tyranny of the rocket equation. Physics is unwavering. The problems are not insurmountable but they are way harder than most think to create a solution that anybody will actually want to use beyond its novelty value.