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NYT On Flying Cars 240

Posted by michael from the flux-capacitor dept.
This week's NYT magazine has a lengthy piece on the holy grail of modern technology, the flying car. It's a very interesting history of the numerous inventors that have spent a lot of time working on their dreams - Moller, who's been mentioned on Slashdot several times, as well as several early pioneers who achieved Darwin awards. The time frame before you'll be able to buy a flying car is, as always, five years.
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NYT On Flying Cars

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  • Is the flying car worth it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by phr0stbyte ( 718187 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:22PM (#10355883) Homepage
    http://viewaskew.com/tv/leno/flyingcar.html

  • As always... (Score:3, Informative)

    by detritus` ( 32392 ) * <awitzke@wesaGIRA ... minus herbivore> on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:23PM (#10355885) Homepage Journal
    go to http://bugmenot.com/ to avoid the whole having to register deal... I'd post a google link but it doesnt want to give me one for some reason

  • My Car (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xombo ( 628858 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:25PM (#10355897)
    I've had a flying car for years, I just have to go really fast and find a sufficient ramp. It'll fly. But seriously though, why not just go buy a plane or a helicopter? It's not like you'll get some fuel, speed, or convenience advantage just because its a "car" because it's still just a plane in car skin.
    "Personal Flight Devices" on the other hand could be interesting. The Rocketeer anyone?
    • well, if you count that, I got my 740 turbo volvo stationwagon to fly on several ocassions :) as well as my ford aerostar, honda accord...et al. (yes, cars are people too.)

    • Re:My Car (Score:5, Informative)

      by tm2b ( 42473 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @02:29PM (#10356307) Journal
      But seriously though, why not just go buy a plane or a helicopter?
      Good question, and there is a good answer. Speaking as a pilot...

      In a word: Parking. An airplane, you have to find space for at a local airport. It's expensive, and good luck finding sheltered hangar space in many areas. Plus, you get to worry about whether the general aviation airport will stay open. I have to move my airplane 50 miles now because the airport I've been using, 3FD1, is being sold by the owner - to be turned into strip malls. Yay, development.

      I'd love to have an airplane that I could land and then drive home and keep in a real garage. Right now, I have to hope that my plane has weathered the hurricane here in Florida because there was no full hangar space available for shelter. I should really have flown it out of here, but I just got it back after 4 months and didn't feel safe flying in the dodgy weather.

      Any VTOL capability would be nice so that I wouldn't have to go to the local airport in order to take off and land, but that wouldn't be as much of a win as simply being able to drive on standard roads and park in a standard garage.

      Helicopters have a slightly different set of issues, but they're simply no good for long distance travel. If you want to fly a reasonable distance a helo is not an option.

      There are some other issues, like most non-turbine airplanes requiring a more expensive, different grade of gasoline (avgas: "100LL") than cars do, but those are slowly changing - we're seeing more and more engines designed to take auto gas instead of 100LL.
      • What ever happened to the program the Experimental Aircraft Association was running in the early 80's to get STCs for auto gas operation?

        They loaded a Cessna 172 and I think some others with buckets of instrumentation, tested them up one side and down the other, and I seem to remember that they discovered all the conventional wisdom about the hazards of auto gas was mythical.

  • Heh (Score:2)

    by bigberk ( 547360 )
    The industry had better find a way to make those cars fly, or dance, or perform sexual favors or something... because now that everyone has a car, the industry is starting to cool down, and auto manufacturing/sales is a major part of the US economy. Don't be surprised is Ford has major problems within the next decade.

  • Without reading the article... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chess_the_cat ( 653159 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:26PM (#10355906) Homepage
    Are flying cars really that great of an idea? Sounds to me like a bureaucrat's nightmare. There'll be licenses, tests, laws, regulations. You can't fly too low, too high, too fast, over certain areas. You have to be under a certain weight, have a good medical history, good vision. Imagine a fender bender at 150 feet. Does your car fall to the ground? They'll want parachutes, airbags, harnesses.

    And yes, there is this kind of regulation for the airlines today but they only have to regulate the few licensed carriers and a relatively small number of private pilots. Imagine 100 million "motorists" flying around in flying cars. lol. It'll never happen.

    If it's your dream to fly forget about flying cars and get your pilot's license.

    • Re:Without reading the article... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:28PM (#10355921)
      If it's your dream to fly forget about flying cars and get your pilot's license.
      And if you're a teen in Canada, join the Air Cadets program and get free pilot training/licensing. Now in my 20s I really really wish I had done this, it would be so cool.

      • And if you're a teen in Canada, join the Air Cadets program and get free pilot training/licensing. Now in my 20s I really really wish I had done this, it would be so cool.

        I was in Air Cadets and was one of the lucky few selected to get both my glider licence and my private pilot licence. It was an excellent program. I had both licences by the time I was 17 (I could fly before I could drive), and not only did it not cost me a cent to get the licences, they paid me a training bonus while I was on course.

    • You have to be under a certain weight...

      What, only skinny people can fly them? What are you, a SouthWest employee or something?

      Anyhow, with the terrorist problems, I doubt flying cars will ever happen.
    • But at least there won't be anyone washing your windscreen when you stop at the lights!
    • Yeah, I don't understand how the heck these are the Holy Grail. Maybe to a few, but I would be pretty sure most of us don't want these to happen.

      What you said is correct, and pretty much the reason they won't happen. Just cause it happens in Sci Fi doesn't mean we are trying to head that way. We could have flying cars today, but we don't because they arn't a good thing.
    • Actually ... I think what you're describing is a citizen's nightmare. Comes pretty close to qualifying as heaven for a bureaucrat, I'd say.
    • Well, a number of things can be addressed by technology.

      Researchers are already working on driverless control systems, so much like a planes autopilot, you just watch most of the time. This system will be 100% necessary in a flying car as most ppl wont be able to be pilots (more on this later), and not to mention the clear need to protect farmers' markets from inadvertent ballistic objects. This is more than 5 years away for ground cars, aircars, much more so.

      Secondly you are going to need a radically new

    • Imagine a fender bender at 150 feet. Does your car fall to the ground?
      No problem. We'll build them out of those green styrofoam peanuts you use to ship fragile things. The pieces will just flutter gracefully to the ground. It might even be pretty.

      The driver falling 150 feet might make a small crater though...
    • Answer, NO.

      Rent a car when you get there
      Some small airports have a free 'loaner car'
      It cost between $20,000 and $60,000 to overhaul a piston aircraft engine. Most are overhauled every 2,000 hours. So that's between $10 and $30 per hour to overhaul the engine. The tires last about 600 hours, Assuming an average 2 hour flight, that's 1 takeoff and 1 landing per hour. If the takeoff run, and landing rollout average 1/2 mile each, that's 600 miles per tire, plus taxi time maybe 1,000 miles per tire. Can you
      • The prices are high because the market for aircraft is so much smaller than the market for cars. If, by some miracle, flying cars ever did become mainstream the prices would be significantly lower due to the bigger market. However, I doubt we'll ever see swarms of flying cars like in 5th Element.
      • The critical technology is redundancy.

        Most airplanes cannot survive a mistake.

        Another point, Airplanes are weapons because we don't have "roads" for Airplanes. Large Airplanes create a massive threat, not only to the Passageners, but to the ground as well,

        The FAA has gone overboard - if you look at deaths by car v. death by air - we should be flying more, or spending more money making cars safe - it isn't even close.

        A tw thruster design, which is CAPABLE of running on a single thruster would be fail saf
    • I'm halfway through building a Dyke Delta.

      http://www.ernest.isa-geek.org

      John Dyke set out to build a flying car. In fact, the wings still fold, and the plans still include a steering wheel.

      It's a folding wing delta configuration, but the compromises needed to make the plan roadable would just make it useless as an airplane. Just a couple he cited to me were turn signals and windshield wipers.

      It's been stated that an airplane is a bunch of compromises flying in close formation. Making the plane roadab

    • Re:Without reading... Real Info from a Pilot (Score:5, Informative)

      by noahbagels ( 177540 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @03:25PM (#10356609)
      The parent poster basically makes one point: it will be hard to regulate, so let's just give up. OMG: there'll be licenses and regulations... just... like... a highway!.

      You can't fly too low/high - have you ever seen a speed limit, or minimum-speed on roads today?

      Airplanes today already are being shipped with BRS systems - ballistic recovery systems - rocket deployed parachutes for safe recovery after losing control / etc... see: Cirrus Aircraft.

      To counter the well-intended, but wrong info in the parent poster: they only have to regulate a few licensed carriers and a relatively small number of private pilots. This is completely false... see the AOPA [aopa.org] or Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association - of America. It has over 400,000 active, dues-paying members in the US alone, making up one of the largest active lobbies in the US. General Aviation serves america - making the first critical blood and organ transfer transports after 9/11 - see GA Serving America [gaservingamerica.com] for more info.

      As for good medical history / etc... The FAA just approved a new set of certifications called LSA / Light Sport Aircraft, allowing pilots (with certain limitations) to self-certify their health when flying particularly light (under about 1200lbs) aircraft. This is far higher than the current UltraLight limits - getting well into some of the modern composite aircraft built in Europe - that get better fuel efficiency than cars (per seat mile) and are faster than the US certified all metal birds such as Cessna 150s/152s.

      All this said, the FAA (A slow, frustrating organization at times) is making the transition to GPS (w/WAAS/LASS) in the next decade as the primary means of instrument / navigation for air transportation.

      One goal of this, already being implemented is mode-S transponders that with new FAA radio/radar systems being rolled out will do to ATC what GPS and SatComm did for the military - provide a complete 3D picture of all aircraft in the sky including position, velocity, trends, and modeled based on aircraft capability - the future potential positions of an aircraft. Not to mention the ability to transfer a flight plan / guidance revision to an aircraft over digital radio.

      This is part of the FAA's free-flight initiative - a very slow, future-envisioning research project including providing for fully automated 3D navigation for air-taxi services including collision avoidance with non-automated aircraft.

      Finally - a pet peeve of pilots, there is no such thing as a pilot's license... just a pilot certificate - certificated not unlike an aircraft... in that the certificate is only valid given certain conditions (recent flight, bi-annual flight reviews, etc...)
    • That's why they want to have the cars be largely computer controlled, so that it is difficult or impossible for an inexperienced driver/pilot to make fatal mistakes.


      Whether that is a realistic goal is open to debate... given the current state of software in general, I'm a bit skeptical.

    • No - its a Bureaucrat's dream.

      Air Vehicles would REQUIRE real time location tracking - one databse - all info. Ita actually more of a threat to privacy advocates than regulatory agencies.

      No such thing as Fender Bender.
      The Air is a medium in which computers can EASILY provide effecive guidance. Most airplanes made today use electronic steering, pilot optional.

      100 million flying pods would not be a challenge.

      I have written a scaleable ATC alg which could easily handle those numbers.

      AIK

  • Five years... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:26PM (#10355912)
    ... after I'm dead. I have enough trouble with morons on cell phones while they are driving. Dealing with them in 3D would make me join an Amish community.

    Which gives me a weird thought... flying Amish buggies. Wow. If you think pigeon droppings can be annoying, imagine a constipated horse letting loose from 500 feet!
    • Or as Tom Lehrer put it:
      So, let the raucous sleighbells jingle,

      Hail our dear old friend Kris Kringle,
      Driving his reindeer across the sky.
      Don't stand underneath when they fly by.

  • holy grail? hardly. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:28PM (#10355927) Homepage Journal
    helicopter.

    ultralights(if you're into cheap).

    kit-planes.

    one-of-those-paragliders-with-an-engine.

    balloons.

    if you want to fly there's "affordable" solutions already, none of them solve the problem of how you could use a flying device (that makes a shitload of noise) usefully in a city though, without there being some serious magic in controlling it(computers, computers..).

    • Re:holy grail? hardly. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ScrewMaster ( 602015 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @02:02PM (#10356135)
      Yes, a basic to any approach to a mass-produced flying car is that there will be some serious magic in the controllers. I imagine it would take some major smarts on both the car and a ground-based network of some kind. You can't tell Mr. Commuter that he needs to get a pilot's license just to fly to work every day. The idea is to get into your flying car, tell it where you want to go (it will probably already know: "Would you like to stop at Dunkin' Donuts on the way in, Mr. Smith?") and let the car wake you from your nap when you've arrived. Flying, as such, isn't the issue: practical commuting is. If you can get a significant percentage of people that currently commute on today's congested expressways to be able to fly to work, you've solved a lot of problems. Made a few more, no doubt, but solved a lot.

      As for me ... if this ever comes to pass you'll still find me on the ground, on the open highway, during what used to be rush hour.

    • Re:holy grail? hardly. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by CmdrGravy ( 645153 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @03:09PM (#10356536) Homepage
      I agree, cities right now simply aren't designed to accommodate millions of flying vehicles and nor is the general transport infrastructure. I think even if flying cars did become as affordable normal cars and could be maintained and driven as easily as normal cars it would still take an awfully long time to rebuild the infrastructure around them.

      I really think that at the moment they are a solution in search of a problem. If the problem is that people would like to be able to travel more quickly and easily between locations then investment in mass public transport would provide a far better solution.

      For example a system whereby you could get in the lift from your apartment to a high speed underground which could take you anywhere in the city or to intercity jump off points for more trains, planes or boats out of town and which was very quick, with hardly any waiting around between connections, comfortable and safe would be a much better idea than flying cars.

      Obviously this is more expensive in the short term than letting people spend there money on cool flying cars but in the long term once the environmental, air, noise pollution etc was factored in I suspect proper investment and planning in infrastructure would pay off in spades.

  • getting off (Score:5, Funny)

    by dankelley ( 573611 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:31PM (#10355938)
    The author has also written about a ''Secret Teenage Sex Cult'', so I guess he is qualified to write about back seats, anyhow.

  • Trains (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Schemat1c ( 464768 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:32PM (#10355943) Homepage
    Sure, flying cars would be very cool. But it would make more sense if we focused on a nationwide mag-lev train system. It would be close to the speed of planes and no worries of it falling out of the sky into neighborhoods and schoolyards. You could rent cars that go to and from the stations to get you to your specific destination.

    Besides if flying cars ever become a reality, they will just be toys of the wealthy. Just as private airplanes are now.
    • Why rent a car? I would love to take my own car on the train with me. That would be awesome.

      Unfortunatly passenger trains of any type have a bad reputation here in the US. Mag-lev trains will probably never "take off" :-(
      • Presumably the rentals would be EVs or alternative fuel vehicles and shaped to fit on the train in some specific way. At least, that is, if we're really interested in reducing pollution.
    • It isn't THAT expensive. Sure, if you want the latest and greatest plane you need to make some serious income. You phrase your reply as it is a bad thing to be wealthy. Consider it incentive!

      Flying doesn't require a full blown plane either. There are ultralights that will provide the thrill of flight with less expense.

      Finally for those who are inclined there are many kits you can use to build your first plane. This will reduce the cost as well as show you why the things cost so much in the first plac

      • The best way of handling flying cars is to (continue to) license them as a regular aircraft, AND license them as an automobile. In fact there's a car or two out there with a trailer that converts into the wings and fuselage to become an aircraft, and I'm pretty sure they have to be licensed both ways. Flying cars will have to have a lot of thrust in order to be useful, so that they can be VTOL, which basically means that they're going to be heavy and thus licensed as full aircraft.

        Thus, you can be sure

    • Re:Trains (Score:3, Interesting)

      by isorox ( 205688 )
      Maglev is fine if you want to get from point A (usually city centre), and point B (usually city centre). For long distances the transfer time is irellevent, but for your daily commute maglev is wasted. I travel 30 miles a day in to work, by foot, train and tube. It takes me 70 minutes. 10 by foot, 40 by train, and 10 by tube. 5 minute transfer at both points. If the train ran non-stop it would shave about 15 minutes off my journey. If it ran non-stop at maglev speed, it would take about 5 minutes, halving m
    • I would really like to see a national system of car transport via train for long trips. Say, New York to Atlanta.

      What I'm thinking is that I drive from Jersey to New York where I park my car on a train flatbed, and maybe even get out of my car and ride in the passenger car. The train then doesn't stop till it hits Atlanta. There I get in my car and drive to Alabama. It would be faster and safer than me driving. I could read or work on my computer the whole time. And best of all, I'd have my own car a
    • What we need is something [skywebexpress.com] a bit more flexible.

  • Flying car will always be available, tomorrow (Score:5, Insightful)

    by UncleJam ( 786330 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:32PM (#10355946)
    Flying cars will only be there because somebody just wanted to "do it". They won't be pratical. What will they accomplish that the automobile won't? Sure, they look good to somebody that looks up to the open sky, but if everyone had one, you wouldn't be flying "as the crow" everywhere. Rules of the air will be created (They're already there for the larger planes, less restrictive to smaller ones). Jumbo jets must stay on little sky highways to the destinations, and if you've ever seen those maps where the position of every plane in the US is shown, you'll know what I am talking about. Thus the benefit of them over cars will be nullfied. Sure, they'd be pretty cool, but light planes already exist ;)

    Also, what about terrorism? Not to be a fearmonger, a group could get maybe 20 of these if they are plentiful, and just crash one after another into the White House, something you can't exactly do with cars. Plus, people fall asleep in cars enough, I can't imagine trying to pilot a car/plane unconciously.
    • Flying cars will only be there because somebody just wanted to "do it". They won't be pratical. What will they accomplish that the automobile won't? Sure, they look good to somebody that looks up to the open sky, but if everyone had one, you wouldn't be flying "as the crow" everywhere. Rules of the air will be created (They're already there for the larger planes, less restrictive to smaller ones).

      You're not well acquainted with 2D vs. 3D packing problems are you? Even if you are restricted to "air highwa

  • Flying Cars - a bad idea. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lifix ( 791281 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:32PM (#10355949) Homepage
    Flying cars, while a dream for many are not as great as everyone believes they are. Imagine everything that can go wrong in a car today, then imagine it going wrong 300 feet in the air.

    Blade Runner is an excelent example of how I would build the future, flying car wise, that is: Only the Cops, and Emergency Services have flying cars. Compare this to a movie like The Fifth Element, where we see gridlock... in three dimensions.

    Rather then flying cars, I would look twords increasing the land speed, and effectiveness of current automobiles. One company (don't remember the name sorry) has designed/built a concept car that would use a form of wireless networking, to link up with others of the same make, forming essentially road traines traveling to destinations near eachother.

    Another good example would be from another movie (sorry for all the movie refrences, but I hope they explain my point) would be the cars from Minority report, and AI. Both movies by the same director, in which cars can travel at much faster velocities then they do now, and can controll themselves in one form or another, flying vehicles are left to emergency services.

    To summarize what I said: Flying cars/vehicles should be for EMS and other Emergency Services, while we should look to upgrade our current cars, roads, and driving techniques.
    • The road train --or let's call it semi-autonomous guidance for personal land vehicles-- idea obviously has to come before the flying car.
      This is the answer to all the people saying what-if there is an accident or what-if I break down. If you were part of a linked group of vehicles flying in tight formation this wouldn't be such a problem. But before we're going to see that in the air, you'd expect to see it on a road.
      However, it's not necessarily that far off. The I-15 in San Diego in the section
      • In cases like this it's foolish to make technologies that replace humans entirely. You can make the car do a lot of work for the driver, but the driver still needs to be able to take over in an emergency. At the same time the driver needs to always be ready to take over. So to keep the driver from going to sleep or whatever, you need to give them something, anything, to do.

        Even if you know that all of the other vehicles are computer guided and can be expected to be well-behaved, you can't rely on a compute
        • Bullshit.

          The Elevator man went the way of the Dodo bird, and elevators have become SAFER - not less safe.

          Transportation is a pasttime for which humans are unsuited. Concentrating on the banal is not a human skill - it is the skill of electronic systems.

          Air travel is already highly electronic - pilots are feel good actors, more than vehicle controllers these days.

          People on the ground are much safer when you create air transport with zero override featuires.

          AIK
      • The Road train is so much more expensive than the "Air Train"

        Autopilots and "Lanes" for Airplanes are feasible. While Autopilots which can account for Deer, Children, and Alians running into the street, Other Cars which are not "ON System" are all challenges removed by going airborne.

        AIK
    • Flying cars, while a dream for many are not as great as everyone believes they are. Imagine everything that can go wrong in a car today, then imagine it going wrong 300 feet in the air

      You could have said the same thing about cars. Imagine everything that can go wrong with a horse carriage today, then imagine it at 80 miles an hour.

      Blade Runner is an excelent example of how I would build the future, flying car wise, that is: Only the Cops, and Emergency Services have flying cars. Compare this to a movie l

  • Not much new (Score:3, Insightful)

    by geneing ( 756949 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:35PM (#10355965)
    I live just a few blocks away from Moller's company. There isn't much going on there nowadays.

    When they used to do testing on the car prototype the noise was pretty loud. So, I don't know if people would stand dozens of these cars flying around.

    You have to admire the tenacity though, spending 40 years on one idea.

  • Joe Pilot? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CodeBuster ( 516420 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:38PM (#10355988)
    The pilot of an aerial vehicle, be it a small single engine propeller plane, a four engine jet liner, or even a flying car must demonstrate that he is able to handle three dimensional spacial reasoning, emergency situations, and vast number of dials, meters, switches, and settings. Some of the proposed flying car concepts demonstrate helicopter like flight dynamics which mean that they would be even more difficult to fly. Most of the people driving vehicles on our roads right now are barely competent enough to handle forward, reverse, left, and right, so why should we hand them the keys to fa lying vehicle when they can barely handle the automobile that they already own? Piloting was and still is a skilled profession which should be hanlded by qualified licensed pilots. I do not forsee this changing any time soon.
    • Who's to say that that would change?

      What flying cars WOULD mean is that those who do happen to be competent and qualified would have more convenience. ...of course, that does make the market smaller and, thusly, prices higher. Rats!

  • Controls (Score:2, Insightful)

    by b0lt ( 729408 )
    The controls of a flying car would probably be difficult to use, compared to regular cars, since there is another axis of movement. Unless the car only goes up when you press the accelerator pedal, it would seem that getting accustomed to it would be fairly difficult. Not to mention the crashes you could have

  • the holy grail ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fbg111 ( 529550 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:39PM (#10355997)
    the holy grail of modern technology, the flying car.

    Funny, I thought the holy grail was efficient nuclear fusion, or an unhackable OS, or superstrong and light nano-materials or something. Where have I been all these years?
    • Anti-gravity

      OK, One hypenated word.

      • Every time I hear someone rant about anti-gravity.. my brain starts churning overtime about what we're not considering when we think anti-gravity. This would probably mean counter-acting gravitons.. or gravity waves.. if this is the case, then we will most likely have an understanding of not only how to counteract gravity.. but how to create local gravity as well. This would make space travel as open as the highways we drive on now.. fast food and gas stations included. While anti gravity is cool, and wi
        • Given sufficiently high-resolution control over gravity you can accomplish basically any engineering task. It should even allow us to control all forms of matter. The limits will then be the efficiency of the process and the amount of energy you can generate to run it. Of course, right now the limit is our understanding of gravity...
        • I agree. Instead of configuring a huge rocket motor of somekind, we could just *fall* towards the nearest solar system. Neat. When we are in the middle, we just reverse gravity. Problem solved.
  • One beneficiary of computerized navigation is national security: thanks to G.P.S. and cellphone technology, flying cars could be tracked more easily than any road vehicle.

    Somehow that doesn't seem like a good thing to me. When the Government can track you where ever you are while driving (flying?) we are back in 1984.

  • Just great (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ShatteredDream ( 636520 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:41PM (#10356007) Homepage
    The last thing we need is to give the average driver the ability to pull stupid moves in the air. If the idea of flying cars doesn't make you cringe, just imagine the average SUV drive cutting you off 50-100 ft off the ground. Yeah, that's all we need. Car accidents that happen several hundred feet in the air and cause cars to come crashing down on top of people's houses and businesses....
    • I doubt that flying cars will be piloted in the conventional sense. Modern airliners are able to take off, fly to their destinations and land with little to no human intervention.

      Flying cars will be much more like this than like current automobiles. I'd imagine there would be skyways between population centers, seperated by about 1000 feet for each direction. Harrisburg-Lancaster would be 500 feet AGL, while Lancaster-Harrisburg would be 1500 feet AGL. Longer distances would be higher than short distances

  • Tried to submit this as an article but got rejected:
    Ariel motors [arielmotor.co.uk] - here is a true geek's car: no body panels, just the bare minimum required to drive, small, light, Honda iVTEC 4cyl 220bhp engine. Looks very cool, but I find it to be a problem that there is no option to have it with body panels and the windshield for those rainy days.

    Would you drive one of those? I realize that the traffic in North America today looks like WWII traffic columns: SUVs look like tanks and behave like tanks too and there ar
    • looks like a vehicle for people who love motorcycles but who are afraid to drive on two wheels...
    • yeah, good, right.

      A true geek car would be able to be assembled in a weekend from low-cost parts to accomplish a specific task.

      For example, I like the lightweight frame of Ariel's Atom, but I need an FM radio w/ line in (for my iPod), a high-efficiency engine with cruise control for my 40 mile commute, and a roof and heater system. A full hybrid system would be great, but a punchy little diesel would probably be better.

      A true geek car company would let me put all those parts together to make the perfect

  • I dunno (Score:4, Interesting)

    by WhiteWolf666 ( 145211 ) <[sherwin] [at] [amiran.us]> on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:44PM (#10356021) Homepage Journal
    Everyone talks about the reliabiltiy issues, and the control/level of skill issues.

    Seems to me that the 'ideal' flying car would have no controls at all.

    The reason we don't have autopilots in all of our cars is because we can't retrofit every car on the road. We can't design an 'autopilot' system that interacts with human drivers.

    I'm DAMN sure we can design an 'autopilot' that functions autonmously as part of a road control system.

    Every other car would have to be part of the system, too.

    With flying cars, this infrastructure can be designed from day 1.
    • This is really the only way to put flight in the hands of joe schmoe. I would favor putting controls in all aircraft, but only letting people who have a pilot's license use them - the rest of the time they could retract out of the way to make room for a navigation interface. In order to go somewhere you find it on the map (via keyboard and tracking device, voice recognition, pupil tracking, or whatever you decide works in the car) and then the system decides if you can go there or not and behaves accordingl
    • We can't design an 'autopilot' system that interacts with human drivers.


      I'm not entirely sure that is true -- we have successfully designed robots that maneuver autonomously around hospitals, etc, interacting with human walkers... presumably interacting with human drivers is just a more difficult version of the same problem.

  • I've seen how bad most drivers are at working in 2 Dimensions, does anyone seriously think that they can handle another?

  • did not RTFA either but (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Risto ( 666860 )
    b4 you can have flying cars
    You need
    - freeflight - no flight corridors
    - autopilot for cars
    - automatic collision avoidance
    - some tanks can do this now
    - driverless vehicles that follow a map

    bottom line
    the flying car needs to be able to fly itself
    and have a parachute in case of stalls

  • Not in this lifetime :] (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Flamefly ( 816285 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:46PM (#10356037)
    For the whole flying car tech to covert the world you need some tech that can keep a tonne or two up in the air for an extended period of time (that doesn't churn out mega pollution).

    You also need totally automatic handling, no manual control at all, the user should only need to type in the post/zipcode and voila the car will take the best route. Thats a rather large challenge when we can't even contemplate doing the same (in commerical terms) of self driving cars on the ground.

    Safety, either the mechanics behind the vehicle need to be unerring, or some method to prevent the car from just splatting on the ground, wouldn't really help the marketing campaign.

    The only way any of this will pan out is if we develop a tech similar to fifth element antigrav cars. Props (even protected) / jets are just unfeasible, too complicated for your average joe to keep running. The problem is when people think of flying cars we think of these cars metres from each other floating majestically, we dont imagine cars flying along at 300mph 2 miles no fly around them, unable to fly over populated areas and generating a hellova lot of noise and spewing forth pollution comparable to a few SUV's

    Oh and it needs to be comparible cost to the current generation of cars...

    I'll stick with my bike...

    • The problem with auto-pilot is, where's the fun in that?

    • Doing a self-piloting vehicle which flies is so much easier than making a self-driving car it's not even funny. I mean, once you have the vehicle completed anyway. In some ways it's harder, like dealing with atmospheric conditions and such, but that stuff is fairly well known. Most problems can be solved by identifying the vectors of other airborne objects (or terrain objects) and using techniques commonly used in video games to determine where to go. The hard part is building the model used for the comput

  • As if ford explorers weren't bad enough on gas. Now instead of having to contend with rolling friction and air resistance, we have gravity and air resistance

    But there's plenty of oil

  • Infrastructure and the driver experience (Score:4, Informative)

    by code_rage ( 130128 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @01:54PM (#10356086)
    I would like to see flying cars a la Blade Runner or 5th Element. But until we have anti-gravity, we're still going to have to deal with takeoff and landing. There lies the biggest unavoidable problem (I consider the in-air collision problem at least theoretically avoidable, by use of some advanced TCAS-style technology).

    Let's say I live in Morgan Hill CA and want to commute to San Francisco (about 70 miles, all highway). I can drive my modular flying car in putt-putt mode to the local airport (Reed-Hillview), then attach the wing unit, fly to SF, and then what? Where do I land?

    Let's assume for a moment that SF can build a floating airfield in the Bay (somehow surmounting legal challenges from NIMBY's and enviros, ferry owners and others whose oxen would be gored by this). Even if you can land next to the Ferry building, I don't think this commute experience adds up to being worth the hassles, either for the city or for private developers or for the individual driver.

    The amount of time needed for the transition from rolling to flying, and the distance from door to airport, are the biggest problems.

    The ducted fans (Moller, Yoeli) don't have these problems, but unless developers start building heliports on buildings in the city, it's still not viable end-to-end. The heliports would have to be complex, expensive systems similar to military helicopter-carrier ships (unless they are merely a big parking lot, unfeasible in congested cities).

    Another issue is maintenance. Airplanes require a lot of expensive maintenance. Would air-cars somehow be cheaper to maintain? What would the annual total cost of operations be? Point of comparison: Here's a rundown of estimated costs to operate one of the cheapest airplanes in production: the Liberty XL2 [libertyaircraft.com].

  • This just sucks energy and resources from the One True Way: Teleportation!

  • Didn't they have a flying car..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by scupper ( 687418 ) * on Sunday September 26, 2004 @02:01PM (#10356126) Homepage
    In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? I don't recall how it's powered, but I do remember it had a swing wing similiar to an f-111 or f-14 tomcat. Any data out there on the flight characteristics of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang flying car?

  • "Darwin Awards" editorial comment (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Raindance ( 680694 ) * <johnsonmx@nospAM.gmail.com> on Sunday September 26, 2004 @02:03PM (#10356143) Homepage Journal
    I think I know what the editor was trying to say by commenting that several of these inventors have "achieved Darwin Awards" but... c'mon, it's the wrong usage of the term.

    Far from removing the bad from the gene pool, the deaths of the people who've tried this and failed (well, *really* failed) have removed physicists who were inventive enough to try something new, were financially successful enough to purchase the needed equipment, and cared enough to try it. Maybe their *idea* achieved a Darwin Award but, people like these?

    I'd suggest just using "died" next time if in doubt.

    • I think I know what the editor was trying to say by commenting that several of these inventors have "achieved Darwin Awards" but... c'mon, it's the wrong usage of the term.

      Far from removing the bad from the gene pool, the deaths of the people who've tried this and failed (well, *really* failed) have removed physicists who were inventive enough to try something new, were financially successful enough to purchase the needed equipment, and cared enough to try it. Maybe their *idea* achieved a Darwin Award but

  • Before someone comes up with a cheap way to avoid gravity pull. And I do mean cheap, no more than 20% of the overall energy stored or generated in the car should be spent on this.
  • That solves the problem of normal car gridlocks.

    [forgive the farkism]
    Still no cure for lack of downtown parking space...

  • Amazing. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by readpunk ( 683053 )
    Where are the intelligent people pointing out how ridiculous most of these arguments are.

    Flying cars will not have pilots. They will be guided by computers. Who in their right mind would make a company to build these things if the tests required to drive them are, not surprisingly going to be so difficult. Not much profit in that.

    Unlike today's cars the auto-mechanic service industry will have to be fairly non-existant. Failure in the air creates a much more desperate situation for the passengers, so inhe
  • I for one hope there will be no flying cars. If space for vehicles can be divided into three dimensions there is no need for traffic lights, to divide the 2-d space.

    I'm then out of a job and I sure everyone else is *keen* to keep traffic lights.

  • Flying cars would change the world (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BufferArea ( 794172 ) on Sunday September 26, 2004 @03:05PM (#10356514)
    Many peope are asking what's the point? You only have to think about the repercussions of flying cars to see the point.

    First, imagine what now happens to our transportation infrastructure. After the initial investment into the network for flying cars, the costs for the transportaion infrastrcuture would come down incredibly. We would either have no cost in maintaining roads or a substantially reduced cost - depending on whether it is economical to have semi's hover over the roads. The cost wouldn't go to zero, of course, since we still have to have computers and people to manage those computers to monitor the skies and traffic.

    Second, imagine your job opporunities now. I travel an hour each way for my job now. It's about 60 miles each way. With a flying car that does over 300 mph, my possible job radius increases by 5 times! That means the total area I can look for jobs increases by 25 times! Additionally, if flying can be automated, it might be possible to extend this. If I can sleep during most of the trip, I can expand my job to home radius even more.

    Third, this would just about eliminate passenger air travel within most continents. Even though air planes can travel faster that the roughly 350 mph being quoted for the flying cars, the associated over-head (checking-in, having to work on the air-lines schedule, etc...) would mostly or completely negate that advantage.

    Next, imagine the effects upon retail businesses. Since people can now go over 5x as far in the same amount of time as with convential cars (perhaps even farther since traffic may be much more manageable), retail businesses have to be much more comptetitve. Instead of just competing with places within, say your city , you're now competing with businesses that are 300 miles away. You may have to compete with businesses from several cities! If you travel at over 300 mph, now stores up to 75 miles away can be considered the "neighborhood corner store".

    Now consider the effect upon real-estate prices. Except for small islands with a dense population, it would be very hard to drive up real-estate prices based solely on proximity to areas containing many jobs. People won't mind living 100 miles away from work when it only takes them about 20 minutes for the commute. Thus the demand for property next to areas containing many jobs would severely decrease.

    Because of all these effects, we could eventually see the population spread out more evenly thoughout the contintents instead oh having much of the land empty with a few areas densely populated (we would still have still have densely populated areas -just not as many and much less dense). This would also likely have a significant impact upon the environment-whether good or bad I can't say.

    Lastly, because the population would be more spread out, it would force the communications infrastructure to expand to meet the new demands.

    If a flying car with decent range and speed is made available at an affordable price to most people-it won't be an evolutionary step of the autombile-it'll be a revolution for the world.
    • Good points, but there are still a few problems

      Congestion. We still would need a take off/land area (airport). Even a car size aircraft needs to land as current aircraft do. VTOL is hugely expensive in terms of fuel. Plus, you need the space. Vert landing in the parking lot at work just isn't happening. You'd need to be able to control to sub 6" precision, in a 20mph variable crosswind, to vert land next to other vehicles. So we're left with a hub/airport. And the resultant congestion to and from the offic

    • People thought the Segway would change the world to, and look how much THAT has accomplished :-). Seriously, good points about expanding the radius of work - I read somewhere that for 1000s of years the longest a person was willing to commute to work was about 45 minutes. So, when you had to travel by foot, people lived within a couple of miles of where they worked. Add horses, cars, cars with freeways, etc and the distance you could travel in 45 minutes keeps expanding.
  • So where is the necessary cheap energy going to come from? Keeping things in mid-air will always extract a toll in fuel consumption over just resting on the ground - and we're inefficient enough at that as it is.

    We've already reached the condition of waging proxy wars over energy supplies to support our existing ways of life, and now without addressing the practicalites of making it sustainable (let alone welcoming the other 95% of the world up to our standard of living) the ad-men are trying to sell the

  • Flying Roads (Score:2, Funny)

    by philge ( 731233 )
    Just build flying roads then we can use ordinary cars

  • Five years??? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SnappingTurtle ( 688331 )
    I'm glad Slashdot is so optimistic that I'll be able to buy a flying car in five years. The way my career is going, I won't even be able to afford a non-flying car in five years.

  • The FanWing... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Goonie ( 8651 ) * <.robert.merkel. .at. .benambra.org.> on Sunday September 26, 2004 @05:39PM (#10357326) Homepage
    Here's a new technology by a British inventor which, while not quite being a flying car, looks like it has the potential to be a considerable improvement over the helicopter in some applications. It's called the FanWing [fanwing.com], and it basically involves replacing the wing with something that looks like a paddlewheel.

    He claims VTOL performance (hasn't actually demonstrated VTOL yet, though), much better power efficiency than a helicopter, easier flight charactistics than a conventional aircraft let alone a helicopter, and importantly much lower noise than a helicopter. The models fly, but he hasn't flown a full-size prototype yet.

    Look, I'm no aeronautical engineer, but it sure does fly and it does look like a genuinely new idea.

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