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One-person Air Scooters
Tempest wrote to us:"Ever wanted to soar over tall buildings with the greatest of ease? In a few years, with the help of NASA and a Silicon Valley engineer, Michael Moshier, you may be able to do so. After a lengthy training program, of course. " The specs are impressive: 80 MPH, 20 MPG. You can check out the story on CNN or the company's website.
I'm just thinking...a device like this would make the getaway from a bank robbery very easy.
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Police chasing in cars would be stuck if criminal jetted over a building out of their line of sight and helicopters would be in trouble because this thing would be able to move through areas they can't really follow.
Either the police would have to have to keep pace with the average purchasing for these things or thre would have to be some way to track them (portable radar?) so police wouldn't need helicopters for each chase.
Anyway...maybe I'm giving the criminals too much credit but I seem to remember several movies where jewel theives et. al. used jetpacks to completely ellude the police...
Just my $0.02...
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
If the flying part doesn't work out, the company is poised to take over the CPU cooling market.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Certainly every reader would love get one of these things, but I seriously doubt it will ever catch on or become affordable.
Recall those advertisements in the 80's for the Amazing Air Car (send $19.95 for plans!).
Or what about the autogyro? Short takeoff, vertical landing, cheap to operate, fits in a garage, cheap and easy to fly.... and hardly anyone has one.
NASA throws tons of money at all kinds of things that never come to pass. I sincerely hope they get it working.
I saw this article on the CNN website 5 or 6 hours ago and tried to take a look at the company's web site and it looked like that it couldn't standup to the CNN Effect! So I'd bet it can't stand up to both that and the /. effect at the same time! (Then again I can't get through to /. half the time anyway) I'd bet that CNN gets more hits than /. but I would think that alot less people follow links out of CNN than they do out of /.
In anycase this air scooter thing looks very interesting if it ever works out.
I got excited about 15 years ago when this same guy claimed to be getting ready to start trials of a personal VTOL aircraft. That company cratered (I might even have the original brochures).
Forgive me if I take a "wait and see" approach to this one. :)
Long ago, SciFi writers, such as the late Robert Heinlein, used to write about a future in which we all had helicopters in our garages. Well, helicopters are here, and should any major auto maker choose to build them in quantity, they should be roughly as cheap as a luxury SUV. So, why don't most of us have a whirlybird to go to work in? The simple answer is that the skills required to fly a helicopter are a lot more difficult to acquire than the skills required to drive an automobile. (And, we have all seen how badly some people do with *those*!) I predict that this new innovation, though perhaps it will penetrate a bit further than the helicopter, will primarily be the toy of the rich, and the tool of law enforcement. Just like the helicopter.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Unless every unit is centrally controlled or has on-board 3D radar coupled to the nav system (and would you really trust that anyway?), you can't just let people fly wherever they want at 80 MPH. I'm not a pilot, so maybe those of you who are can enlighten us on airspace regulations. Would there be a minimum altitude for "high" speed travel? Would different altitude ranges be reserved for different headings?
How about failure modes? Are emergency parachutes enough? Mars-lander-type external airbags? What about the traffic below you? Compressed helium and emergency balloons?
It seems like there are a lot of issues to be resolved apart from mechanical and economic feasibility. Does anyone know what the state-of-the-art thinking is here?
Moller International of Davis California has a full blown Skycar It uses 8 Wankel Rotary Engines(? ) (ala Mazda RX-7) the M400 gets 15 MPG (like the RX-7 too) and top speed of 390 mph (uh, not like the RX-7). The M150 gets 45 MPG and a top speed of 375 MPH. Cnet did a write-up of it a few weeks ago (that I sent into /. but was never posted), and can be found on the Rotary News site
1.3L, 3 moving parts, 280 HP, no Turbos, wanna Race? RotaryNe
I suspect that traffic would not immediately become a problem even if the vehicles were affordable for a few reasons. People wouldn't trust the things. They would be intimidated by the "rigorous training" required and the fact that you die if you screw up. (Even if this isn't true it is a misconception that solotrek will have to overcome for the device to become popular.)
.25 mile strip of flat dirt with no terminal at all.) Alaskan citizens log more flight hours on average than citizens in any other place in the world (though that is an old statistic.) Most of these small planes are VFR and can not fly when it's foggy, but that's about the only law that the bush pilots up here have to deal with (unless they are approaching an airport.)
As I don't expect that the air traffic would reach the volume it has on the ground I suspect that one easy way to avoid stupid collisions is to designate the vehicles "VFR only" or "visual flight regs only." If you can't see, say, more than a mile, (smog, clouds, fog, whatever) then you can't go up. I live in Alaska where small planes are very very common. In my home town, pop 307, there are usually at least 25 planes at the airport (a
As for safety, unless those things are heavier than they look I suspect that some of the safety tech developed for ultra-lights and small aircraft could be used. Nifty toys such as CO2 deployed parachutes have been in use in these areas for quite a while now. Make it a standard feature and hook it to the altimeter.
I sure as hell want one.
-Telemann
This is the Moller M400 Skycar he's referring to, I assume, found at http://www.moller.com. I can answer a lot of points (I've read a lot on this car):
They hope to sell them for $60,000 each.
There is no air-traffic control. They hope to develop a GPS-based autoguidance system built into each and every car, and have cars follow GPS-paved "lanes" in the sky. Cars could keep in touch with each other's GPS signals, and would fly themselves, eventually. For the first couple years, these cars would be manually operated and require a new type of FAA license.
These are designed to be flown at around 1000 feet, and have a ceiling of 30,000 feet. If you go smacking one of these into a 747 (which cruise at 25-33,000 feet), that's your own decision.
These can only be flown between licensed "vertiports" (renamed helicopter pads). The point of these is for personal city-to-city transport, not driving around in a city (though if your place of work has a helicopter pad, more power to you.)
You shouldn't fly in a rainstorm. If you *want* to, well, remember: You're not a driver, you're a pilot. This is more plane than car. It's possible to fly in a light rain... and hopefully they'll have that GPS guidance up soon.
Why would you WANT hydrogen or electric power? It'd be less efficient than these things. They use a new type of wankel engine that's far more efficient than any combustion engine mass-produced before, and the M400 gets 15 miles to the gallon. (The M150 single-seater gets 45mpg, but they won't build it, no matter how many times I E-mail them that they need to.)
They've been successfully testing a predecessor, the M200, for a while now... they're going to be doing the first tests of the M400 literally any day now. They hope to get a production run started by the end of this year, although realistically, it will probably be the first part of next year before they start pumping these sweet things out. In the meantime, a $5000 deposit gets you a position on a waiting list for one of these.
No clue what the guidance system will work on. And if you wanna get it painted purple, go for it.
I won't even come back on the fact that we've all seen the "Incredible flying car/bicycle/moto/horse/slashdot", (only one of those actually fly!:) ).
Anyway, there is something that will always keep us, the mere money impaired mortals, on the ground. And that is the running/maintenance costs.
Somebody befor mentioned that helicopters could now be manufactured in large numbers and if that happened they wouldn't cost that much. Well let's just remember that maintnance cost on those babies are incredible. For one thing the security checks are a lot more demanding on somthing that is going to fly over your head, than on cars for example. If your car breaks down, you can simply pull it on the side of the road, but if you're actually flying, well, it just hurts a tiny wee bit more when you finaly hit the side of the road.
Just remember that a chopper goes through a complete engin check every 30'000 flight hours, and on a turbine engin the *simple* check can cost you all the way up to 15k.
So to make it short, Yhea sure it could be a fine leisure/sport, like parasailing, hanglinding, etc.. but get real, it's just not for every day commute.
Murphy(c)