Flying Car Passes First Flight Test 273
waderoush writes "Terrafugia — the Massachusetts company building a 'roadable aircraft' (that's flying car to you and me) — revealed at a press conference Wednesday that the Transition vehicle has been taken aloft for its maiden flight. The craft, which can fly up to 460 miles at 115 mph and then fold up its wings for 65-mph highway driving, was the subject of two hotly debated Slashdot posts on May 8 and May 13 of last year. The company said the first flight took place in Plattsburgh, NY; retired Air Force Colonel Phil Meteer was at the controls."
Nifty idea, but marginally too heavy (Score:4, Interesting)
The video voice-over says that the Terrafugia's empty weight is 890 pounds. With a maximum gross weight of 1320 pounds set by the Light Sport AIrcraft rules, this leaves a useful load of just 430 pounds. Gasoline weighs 6 pounds per gallon. With two real people aboard, it won't have much range...
Re:I've been patiently waiting for 35 years. (Score:4, Interesting)
Every time I turn around I see another "flying car" that just can't get off the ground financially or technically.
This one could possibly be different, but I'm just not holding my breath.
I think it's a waste of time. The logistics involved with actually having a non-trivial number of these things up in the air over urban areas without mass casualties are just too difficult.
I reckon for flying personal vehicles to be actually feasible you need anti-gravity, a portal powersource capable of powering said anti-gravity-device, and some sort of master control network capable of automating and coordinating all such vehicles in the air to ensure they don't collide (among other things). So I would say the likelihood of personal air vehicles becoming feasible is rather slim at the moment.
Re:I've been patiently waiting for 35 years. (Score:3, Interesting)
You have something like a car-pool lane, with very, very steep penalties. (you could even had RFID readers like toll-booths to make sure every mile or so) Couple that with the lower insurance costs for drivers, and it would pick up pretty quick.
Re:Nifty idea, but marginally too heavy (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah... unfortunately, the kind of thing I'd really want something like this for is visiting my family in Florida (from Georgia). At 550 miles, it's way over the maximum range of this thing, and I have two kids. And two dogs. And, of course, luggage.
Otherwise I'd buy one of these in a heartbeat. If they took a slightly postdated check, that is.
Folding Plane, not Flying Car (Score:3, Interesting)
Autonomous flight is an easier problem to solve (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone worries that the skies will become a deathtrap when flying cars, driven by people without pilots' licenses, hit the market. But the collision-avoidance solution is simple if they're all flying autonomously. In 2009, it's trivial for inexpensive consumer devices to communicate with each other wirelessly. Similarly, flying cars need to broadcast their positions and velocities to all other aircraft within a few km radius (via WiMAX or similar technology).
Then, all it takes are some simple "right of way" rules and a small amount of computing power to compute the slight course adjustments needed to avoid collisions, or even to avoid intersecting another aircraft's wake vortices. This will also eliminate "air lanes," and the fear of them becoming saturated with traffic. All aircraft will simply fly the shortest point-to-point great circle route, except when the computer tells it to deviate to avoid another aircraft, another aircraft's wake vortices, a region of bad weather, or an ADIZ.
Because three-dimensional airspace is so vast, it will be able to accommodate exponentially more traffic than the current "air lanes" concept.
Autonomous flight is a much easier problem to solve than autonomous ground vehicles. A large but simple database will allow the aircraft to avoid obstacles like mountains and tall structures. An autonomous ground vehicle, on the other hand, would need to tackle machine vision problems like discriminating between an actual pedestrian and a picture of human on a bus-stop advertisement.
Re:Still barking up the wrong tree (Score:3, Interesting)
If you don't care about the sports license limits, I don't think it would be a problem to upgrade the engine, but then you would need the better pilot license to fly them.
Honestly, raising your top legal speed from 65 mph (most areas in the US), along the curving, traffic ridden roads to 100 mph as the bird flies, should alone be worth it for typical 'road trips' of less than 200 miles. It would more than cut your time in half, assuming typical driving conditions.
The real problem with going the Powered Parachute route is weather. A powered Parachute car works great as a daylight only, sunny weather vehicle. But I would not want to fly one in anything mroe than a light drizzle. The Fixed wing/foldable wing would almost certainly do a lot better in the rain.
Re:I've been patiently waiting for 35 years. (Score:5, Interesting)
In my case, I have a place to store an aircraft in a local home, and on my vacation property. I have a house in upstate NY which I would like to go to, but it is a 6-7 hour drive from my current location.
The ability to store this thing in my home garage, drive it to a local airport, fuel, and then fly to NY would be wonderful. I could land in a podunk airport, and drive the last 3 miles to my vacation home and store it in my garage there. I'm not too keen on arranging to park an aircraft at a field and pay a fee to do so when I could have the option of storing it in my own climate controlled garage (would it be a hangar then?)
If they can get it down to the sport craft limitations, this thing would be awesome and I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
Damn you, Moller (Score:3, Interesting)
See, this would be far cooler if Moller hadn't set the bar so high with his vaporware. 4 seater, 350mph cruise, and 16MPG, and near VTOL - even when it turns out to be technically impossible - is still the standard flying car of my dreams.
Re:I've been patiently waiting for 35 years. (Score:2, Interesting)
realistically, the biggest problem isn't really computing power, or an all-inclusive system.
I've thought about this a lot over the years, and the single-most serious concern I have is security of the system. The beauty of humanly-operated vehicles is the decentralized nature of it. We don't have real-life versions of Matt Parkman, so it's kinda hard to hijack all the cars at once and cause mass casualties. Second to that, I think there is a certain euphoria surrounding the notion of a car that drives exactly like a human. We really just need improvements on the grunt work of transportation.
- Cars should be able to report position/origination/destination information regardless of the automated driving feature.
.. I put on my blinker ... cars in my immediate vicinity see that I'm trying to get over 2 lanes ... I don't have to get eye-contact from the guy to my right to make sure he's going to let me over .. likewise this information cascades to the cars around his car, etc etc. Pretty soon it's easy to see how a network of decentralized mini-functions react very similarly to that of a collective of human drivers, except faster and (in most cases) better!
- Another key ingredient to a successful system like this is what I'll call locally dynamic coordination & cooperation. Essentially a subset of actions & functions that people take for granted (and, incidentally, are the primary cause for traffic, IMHO). Signaling turns/lane changes, merging, switching lanes to allow better merging/traffic flow, proactive braking, etc. These types of things can be implemented in stages as helpers to the human driver. I need to exit up there
We're not going to see railed roadways with automated cars anytime soon. What's the process for converting existing infrastructure? Vehicles? I'm not even sure a railed system is really what we'd want, anyway.
Whatever the pipe dream is (think Minority Report), we're a long way from completely automated travel. This causes a slight issue, because independently, the pipe dream may actually be relatively easy to pull off. The problem lies in the gray transitional period. Inevitably, converting from human to automated must result in a more complicated solution. Unfortunately, this combined with the desire we all have to go out and drive at our own leisure will slow adoption of any new automated system to a near stop.
Re:Folding Plane, not Flying Car (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I've been patiently waiting for 35 years. (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually think railable cars is a much better solution than *flyable* cars. There's multiple concepts for regular cars that have a "slit" under the middle that make it possible for them to drive on a monorail.
The advantages are many, compared to normal car:
For longer commutes, you can spend the time on the rail sensibly (catching up on news or email, for example)
Higher capacity, on the rail the cars can form a "train" with zero inter-vehicle distance, which means a single rail can have the capacity of 4-5 lanes. Also, doing this reduces wind-drag a "train" of 10 cars does *not* use the same energy as 10 individual cars.
Potentially higher speeds.
Electric vehicles can get power from the rail, solving one of electric cars achilles-heels, namely the short battery-range and long recharge-times.
Making the car capable of self-driving when on the rail should be MUCH easier than self-driving on a road. A self-driving car can get you somewhere while you relax.
At the same time, the fact that these vehicles are *also* normal cars mean you can get one even if there isn't a rail going to *everywhere*. When a rail is available, you use that, when not, you drive the normal way.
Have a look at http://www.ruf.dk/ [www.ruf.dk] for one such example.
Yes, there's engineering-challenges in this too, but they're MUCH simpler than those assosiated with flying cars. And the advantages are many.