'Pocket Airports' Would Link Neighborhoods By Air 257
cylonlover writes "NASA's light-aircraft partner, CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency), is running a competition to design a low-cost, quiet, short take-off personal aircraft, that requires little, if any, fossil fuel. It envisions the resulting Suburban Air Vehicles taking off and landing at small neighborhood 'pocket airports.' At last week's Future of Electric Vehicles conference, CAFE president Dr. Brien Seeley outlined just how those airports would work."
Ask the AA/ANWB or whatever fixes car on the road (Score:5, Insightful)
Any mechanic who works for a roadside service company can tell you that peoples cars "break down" for the oddest reasons. Not enough petrol, wrong fuel, forgot to put in oil. All sorts of stuff that simply has to be maintained and replaced and doesn't leading to failure. Running out of petrol with your car is embarrising, running out of fuel in your airplane makes you a lawn dart or worse. I don't particularly care if some soccer-mom with the IQ of a weasel (sorry weasels) gets herself killed along with her kids. But if she crashes into my house, I would get upset.
What about the weather? Snow is bringing down europe but a car caught in a snow storm just becomes stuck. An aircraft? Has to divert. How far? Small airplane, small fuel tank. Can you imagine 100 soccer mom's lining up for an icy runway when they can barely park a car in summer on an empty lot? Or for that matter the business exec who thinks his beamer is a snow mobile and plows into a lamp post? Now that lamp post will be your apartment building.
As for controlling so many aircraft, LA airport is already uncontrollable and happily parked an airliner on a small jet years ago and things haven't got much better. Can you imagine a 100 or more increase in traffic figures? And if trained pilots from other countries already cause dangerous situations because they don't speak English, what will happen if hillbillies take to the air?
Just walk the street someday and notice for fun just how many cars stall for some reason or another. Oh it is not 1 per minute, but 1 per week would already cause a number of light aircraft accidents to severly burden the coffin industry. Would you step into a one-engined airliner?
No, someday we may have the tech AND the discipline but right now, the idea of the average road user in the air would have me make my next house a bunker, a deep one. SUV's in the sky... somethings just shouldn't be.
3D travel today! (Score:5, Insightful)
"The gridlock we face now is going to get worse," Seeley stated, citing research into congestion on the world's roads. "This is a form of insanity... We need to travel in 3D."
Hmm let's see: some form of transportation to link neighborhoods, that works in 3D, to relieve gridlocks? Remove the insane flying-vehicle thing, make it cheap and practical, and you've got yourself a metro.
Instead of dreaming up shit like this, policymakers should bring back light-rail, which can work under or over streets, carries a great deal of people quickly, silently and without local air pollution, and doesn't cost a lot.
Cool idea, but environmently friendly? (Score:5, Insightful)
A vastly better investment would be a multi-gigabit FTTH infrastructure to allow for actual tele-presence and remote working from the suburbs.
Commuting is stupid, as is most business travel.
Re:200 mpg?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
You do realise that ground based vehicles use quite a bit more fuel per mile than those in the air don't you?
Even if they didn't, flying at constant speed without having to worry about stopping every few minutes the fuel savings would be enormous.
Re:Less roads could save land (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly what cars did. They lead to the birth of the suburbs, allowing people to live in places of moderate population density while having the advantages of a major city within easy traveling distance. The problem now is that this model is a victim of it's own success: The car-enabled suburb model has reached the limit of scaling without a radical redesign.
Re:The age-old known problem with flying cars... (Score:5, Insightful)
People who want to blow shit up will find a way to blow shit up. If you can't do it with a plane you can do it just as easily with a car or truck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_bombing), problem solved.
The best we can do is take reasonable security and safety measures to minimize risk, then come to terms with the fact that we cannot eliminate risk completely, that we might die when we step out the house each day, and get on with our lives and get on with progress.
If wishes were airplanes... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a student pilot near the end of his 40-45 hours' training for a private pilot certification, it's neat that people are thinking of stuff like this, but I can't see it ever happening -- at least, not as a solution to congestion.
The nature of government control over any mass-market activity like driving is such that they become very bad at saying 'no' to the public. It's shamefully easy to get a driver's license. Not so for a pilot's license. I'm as much of an anti-government nut as you'll find on Slashdot, and while there are definitely parts of the FAA that I think are crazy, on the instruction and licensing side I've been very impressed with what I've seen. The FAA Pilot's handbook (the core 'textbook' for pilots) is well written and concise. The written tests have a few weird questions on them (like a couple on pre-1940 navigation systems) but for the most part are pretty challenging -- not the MADD-influenced DMV test with questions like 'You've just consumed nine beers. Calculate your BAC.' The 'final exam' of a pilot's license is the checkride, where you sit for up to a couple hours with an FAA examiner and demonstrate everything you have to know as a pilot, is nothing like the 'I'll be fine if I can parallel park' road test. A lot of very good flight instructors I've met admit to having failed either or both the written test or checkride on their first try. In other words, it's not designed so that a 16 year-old can pass it with a little bit of effort. It's designed to make sure you know wtf you are doing before you take off, and it includes sections on how airplane engines work, airplane instruments, airport signage, lighting, and traffic patterns, communicating with ATC, reading charts, understanding aviation weather (clouds, pressure, temperature, and density) and quite a lot about navigation.
That's not to say that you can't strip down the curriculum for a more limited set of flight rules (and we do, in fact - 'sport pilots' only need half as many hours) but even becoming a sport pilot isn't easy, to say nothing of becoming a good one. Unless you live in a handful of places around the world where the weather is consistently clear without a lot of wind, air travel will never be reliable for a commuter. Are you going to spend 20 minutes checking aviation weather or calling in for a weather briefing every day before you go to work? And if you don't, what if it's clear where you depart but you run right into a weather system halfway there and can't see the ground (that'd need another 40 hours of training for your instrument rating to even be legal).
There are definitely some things that could be done to lower the barriers of entry to aviation, and making a reliable, short-range VTOL that doesn't need AVGAS is certainly one of them. And I'm not trying to be elitist about flying, either, like it's some exclusive or impenetrable club -- it isn't. Most pilots I know encourage everybody else they know to at least take an intro flight, because there's really nothing like it. But even so, the national drop-out rate for flight school students is 80% (some recent AOPA study - don't have a link handy but Google it). It used to be that everyone thought 'oh, well, it's just expensive, people start and don't want to spend the money to finish.' That's not wrong but it's not the whole story. The study found that money wasn't the top reason for dropping out. People get intimidated and scared right around the point where they have to fly solo. They're nervous about talking to ATC. They're nervous about landing in a crosswind. They're uncomfortable in a tiny airplane. The quality of flight instructors is all over the map (another reason cited in the study); just about every CFI out there doesn't dream of being a CFI but is building up hours to try and get a job working for an airline or flying a corporate jet. That doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing, but it does mean that they're teaching because they have to and not because teaching is necessarily what they want.
As much as I love aviation, I would sooner spend the money on what other posters have suggested - either a good public transit system or multi-gigabit FTTH infrastructure for telecommuting.