Video Where are the Flying Cars? (Video; Part One of Two) 107
Speaker 1: Communities in space -- and everything else -- is not a one-year, six-month project... unfortunately right now a lot of things even in the government are well-funded, but it’s got to be here within six months to a year. Flying cars, communities in space, it’s going to take multiple years to fund which when we did the space program, which was good, because everybody was in the mood that it would take multiple years to do. But unfortunately it’s not in the current economic environment; that’s why we don’t have a space shuttle and that’s why very soon our astronauts who are up in the space station won’t be able to get back because the Russians are not going to take us there anymore. So that’s why we're trying to find something else that’s not government funded, some commercial operator. But it’s getting down to dollars and cents and what would happen in 6 to 12 months. And can we double things? I worked on a government project which was a dual engine program for the F-35 and they killed it because the government decided, well we don’t need to fund to have two engines for an airplane, we only need one and then after they cut GE’s funding to do it, all of a sudden Pratt & Whitney came to get the engines going through the airplane and are having all kinds of problem. So I think the biggest thing stopping all this is the economics and the money that nobody can get or create a space colony in six months to a year, it’s going to take multiple years.
Speaker 2: I have an answer to the question. I don’t think the barriers are scientific or technical at all because I can show you aircraft flown in the 1930s or the 1940s or 1950s, which were functional flying cars. They were cars that turned into airplanes. You could drive around, you could take them to the airport and fly them in the air and drive from the airport at the other end to your destination. And over and over again people have built aircraft this way and any one of them would be nice to own and they may have various design drawbacks and most importantly the designs are compromised between one kind of people and another. But there are those planes, right? Sometimes building the vehicle is not really the problem. The problem is that nobody who’s ever built a vehicle has sold more than you can count on the fingers of your hands, and so there is a barrier to be broken that’s not in the engineering realm exactly but in the, gee, how do we take this to market, how do we get enough financing to build a bunch of them in our factory, how do we find customers and so forth. And once there are some customers, once you sell a few of these things, then you run into the education barriers, like are there enough people, trained pilots who want one of thesem by the way also trained motorists because you need both, and I guess I’m speaking mostly of the kind of car that turns into an aircraft and vice versa. That’s one definition of flying car, another one is just some kind of vertical takeoff aircraft that you have in your driveway and it takes off and you can go anywhere in it and never bother about driving on the roads. That’s I think the type two kind of flying car.
Cindy A. Matthews: It’s not the technology, I think we have brilliant scientists out there and we’ve got technology and if we funded it, I think we can do anything we damn well want to in the realm of science fiction, but it’s a paradigm shift we need... oh, I can’t invest money into this project when I don’t see a turnaround within three to six months. It’s just too short of a time, to get to space, to make a space colony. It maybe decades or hundreds of years or more until you “saw a profit” at least in money. Why are we thinking about money? Didn’t Star Trek say, okay in the future we won’t have money? We’re not thinking about profit as far as building up mankind, improving life for the pompous. No, we’re thinking about dollars and cents and a very, very near term profitability for a few men or people who’re going to put the money upfront. So we need the psychological paradigm shift more than we need to push technology because the technology is there if we just let it happen.
Speaker 4: I think we’re all in agreement that the economics play a big role. I think there are some scientific challenges. I don’t think the science is trivial to make a commercial product that could be broadly marketed and meet the kind of guidelines that a broadly marketed product would have to reach, but I think the biggest thing is not just the economics in terms of profitable dollars and cents but also filling a certain economic need. There has to be a niche for it and is it really improving our traditional transportation in a way that makes sense for most people to say, yeah, I’ve got to own this. And for that to exist it has to be really doing something that is a market improvement in your lifestyle and if all it does is just get you there in the same way by just flying instead of on road is it improving things. And if it is, then the economics may eventually work out, but I’d say for now it’s not really very feasible.
Jonathan Stars: One thing I think about is that it’d be nice to be able to just go out and fly, but the problem is we’re going to have to have some kind of a system, registry or flight path and so on and so forth, same thing as you do right now with airplanes. Hang on, that’s a very long drawn out process and I can’t imagine doing that, the convenience of getting in my car and going, I can make up my mind in a minute and I wouldn’t be able to do that until we move into a place where the vehicles, our regular cars are driving themselves. We’re starting to try that, and we can try an awful long time. Also, then to be able to fly themselves and know what all the other flying vehicles are doing, that’s when it becomes a logistical thing where you can’t just use it as quickly and easily as you can a car. So I think it may be a little while before even that takes shape. I’m going to move on to the next question, did you want to add anything else to that?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I’m just wondering if we’re being little too scientific for a science fiction convention because the company that creates a few flying cars, yeah they exist, but they are not in every driveway. But perhaps you are looking at the flying car in Back to the Future, which according to the movie will be around next year, in 2015 we had the conversion done and it’s the skyways that are packed with traffic because the flying circuits are safe and that’s the flying car we’re all talking about. We’re not talking about the real flying car that we the engineer scientists know is a real pain in the ass to create. We’re talking about the science fictional one. We want that one. And that one, I’m sorry, science fiction authors are not here to predict the future. We are here to give you a really cool concept of what it might
Speaker 2: I think I’m dragging this down from science fiction back into technology, so maybe we should take flight again.
Cindy A. Matthews: I had one question but I had read that if we are having private flying cars and not just military like the Marines on them and then maybe under the auspices of the FAA, they wouldn’t be able to fly above a certain altitude, right, and then we don’t have to have a flight plan when you are under a certain altitude, correct?
Multiple Speakers: _____.
Cindy A. Matthews: Under 18,000 feet in certain locations, so you know I am going to say the social aspect, yeah, the laws, the rules, you have to plan it instead of just flying to the supermarket two miles down the road or I am trying to go visit my daughter over in England, which is a completely different type of private flight I’d be taking, and we’d have to go higher but, yeah, those are issues.
Speaker 4: Yeah, actually to be a voice of dissension, I will be devil’s advocate here for the sake of conversation is when the first automobile came about, how many roads were there and did people necessarily stick to roads or did people have any sense from a social or societal point of view of how it’s all supposed to work and be organized. It kind of self-organized and kind of similar self-organizational process take place once there is an affordable family sized flying car or put cart before the horse. Is that
Speaker 2: Before that time
Speaker 4: And I think we’re right on that, is that
Speaker 6: No, the change may happen, our society has evolved to the point that when cars first came into existence, nobody thought to create all the regulations we need until after we needed those regulations. But we’ve become a much more risk averse society where now we have to regulate everything that might actually come into existence in a couple of years. There were ongoing debates on human cloning when human cloning was not yet feasible because we had to regulate and decide how we are going to treat these things and that’s one of the reasons I think that socially we don’t have flying cars. There are too many people who are scared of them, scared of what they represent without anything regulated ahead of time.
Not practical (Score:4, Informative)
We don't have flying cars because they wouldn't be practical outside of long travels, and for long travels traditional airplanes are more economical and the ability to not be dependent on a third party service matters less.
Re:Answer: Helicopters (Score:4, Informative)
Kinda like the horseless carriage. I mean, its possible, but its completely impractical since you would need to stop and chop wood for the boiler every few miles, and the uneven roads will be much harder to navigate on.
Sometimes obstacles change with times, and what looks hard now will be less hard later.
The FAA blocks them (Score:2, Informative)
First, there are all the regulations governing development of any new production aircraft; It currently cost approx $50 million to get a small aircraft through the cert process. If a small company thinks it will sell 1000 of its shiny new flying cars it will have to add $50K to the pricetag of each just to cover these costs.
Second, there are all the regulations governing pilots; Getting a pilot's license costs thousands of dollars and takes many people over a year but that license can be taken away from you by the FAA (grounding both you and that flying car you payed too much for) if you suffer any of a myriad of health problems that nearly every human being will eventually suffer. (there's no equivalent national revocation of drivers licenses even though many people are killed every year in car crashes and small planes do not cause much more damage when they crash than cars (somewhat faster, but less dense))
Third, The FAA has become very confused; it thinks it's primarily there to support commercial aviation and that the airlines have an a priori right to the skies. The regulatory mechanisms of the FAA allow the only airline maker left in the US to self-certify many things (it can get its employees trained and certified as Designated Engineering Representatives, wh can then sign-off on things) which is something small companies cannot afford and probably contributed to batteries with fire problems getting deigned into their newest plane and a "fix" being implemented without a root cause being understood first. This same loophole is not so readily available to small plane makers because its very expensive for non-billion-dollar coprorations. The airspace is regulated in ways that favor the airlines, and in this mindset a bunch of flying cars just adds risks to the commercial people movers.
Fourth, the FAA, which is now so concentrated on high-end aviation, has little concern for the costs of its actions. It is currently debating requiring a new bit of avionica in all planes. The new devices will probably cost about $5K per plane which is affordable to an airline or a business exec with a Gulfstream and less so to a Flying Car owner. The actual cost of the instrument should probably be about $250 BUT it can only be made and sold by FAA approved corps and the design must be certified by the FAA - so the regulatory overhead costs and semi-monopoly effects kick-in.
When the Wright Brothers invented the first successful powered heavier-than-air plane, they were a couple of bicycle builders on a shoe-string budget (they would never have been certified to manufacture, never have gotten pilot licenses, and their planes would never have been certified). When their earliest competitors, like Curtiss, got into the market there were still NO regulations and NO government overhead. Even when Boeing got started in a barn, it faced NONE of the current regulations. Every significant aerospace firm in the US (except SpaceX which was founded by a billionaire who nearly went broke doing it, is only doing rockets, and is sort-of "sponsored" by NASA which needs it) got up-and-running BEFORE the FAA arose to squelch innovation and freedom. Had the FAA existed 100 years ago there would be no commercial aviation. The only aircraft would probably be giant one-time-use planes flown across the oceans on research missions by men trained and treated like astronauts and supported by 100K ground support people (think Saturn V, but in aviation). Giant, inefficient, government designed-and-owned-and-operated with no concern for sustainability, reusability, etc and no imagination for the idea that average people should be able to be involved in it.
As long as we have an FAA you can forget about anybody who is not rich having a flying car or a jetpack... and hoverboards are probably out too given the desperation with which the FAA is currently trying to spook the public (with fears of "peeping tom" drones) into letting it regulate ANYTHING (including model planes) operating all the way down to zero feet (WELL-below the "navigable airspace" they are currently charged with overseeing).