Boeing's First Autonomous Air Taxi Flight Ends In Fewer Than 60 Seconds (cnn.com) 108
Boeing has completed the first flight of its autonomous air taxi Tuesday at a small airport outside Washington, D.C. "The flight lasted less than a minute, according to Boeing, and it didn't actually go anywhere," reports CNN. "Instead, it hovered above the runway. Boeing declined to share how high above the ground it flew." From the report: But Boeing is hailing the achievement as a milestone for its NeXt division, which develops autonomous airplanes. The flying car prototype is 30 feet long and 28 feet wide. It's designed to fly up to 50 miles at a time. Boeing and its competitors such as Airbus are betting that small, self-flying airplanes -- technically dubbed electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) -- will revolutionize transportation, especially in urban areas. Boeing believes the vehicles, more commonly referred to as air taxis or flying cars, will be a solution to traffic congestion.
Re: A realistic take on "flying cars" (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's not a "flying car" if it's three lanes wide and as long as a bus.
SUPERsize me! It's for those quick trips to McDonalds!
Finally (Score:4, Funny)
WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Interesting)
It is a solution to traffic congestion for the people who can afford to fly
Exactly, and it is a solution for them only if there are only very few of them. There is plenty of space in the air, but there will never be plenty of landing places in cities (or anywhere else that the "congestion" is headed for) and those will be the bottlenecks. These things will be queueing up for ages waiting for their turn on the landing pad.
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"There is plenty of space in the air, but there will never be plenty of landing places in cities (or anywhere else that the "congestion" is headed for) and those will be the bottlenecks."
You didn't read the post closely enough. They're designing them to be VTOL vehicles, Vertical Take Off and Land. Any parking spot will do if the autopilot they are creating for these things is reliable enough
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So a section on the top of every parking garage and most large buildings to provide last-mile transport to work.
My company has shuttles that bring people in from a couple of different park and rides outside of the city. Probably because they don't want to pay to expand the parking facility and also because people sitting on their way to work instead of driving might start working before they sit at their desks and clock in.
If these were cheap enough I could see compenies like mine providing a shuttle air-t
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So a section on the top of every parking garage and most large buildings to provide last-mile transport to work.
Indeed. Helipads are already common on many buildings, and many more could be built. There will be no shortage of landing spots.
I don't think these will be only for "the rich". During rush hour, it can take me 90 minutes to go from San Jose to Palo Alto, and 2 hours to SFO. If I could take an air taxi for $100, I would.
These aircraft are electric and non-polluting, and getting even a few percent of traffic off the roads can reduce congestion and benefit everyone.
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I don't think these will be only for "the rich". During rush hour, it can take me 90 minutes to go from San Jose to Palo Alto, and 2 hours to SFO. If I could take an air taxi for $100, I would.
If you can afford to pay $500 a week ($24,000 a year) just to speed up your commute- many people on here would consider you rich.
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If you can afford to pay $500 a week ($24,000 a year) just to speed up your commute- many people on here would consider you rich.
My regular commute is from my bedroom to my office downstairs. About 50 feet.
But I do have to travel to Palo Alto a few times a month, and to SF and SFO occasionally. $100 to save two hours would be worth it, especially since gas and parking for a conventional car is going to cost me anyway.
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Do you ever go to the Palo Alto Creamery or YAYOI?
Yes, I have been to both. My wife used to work in Palo Alto, near Stanford, so I have eaten lunch in most restaurants along University Ave.
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Modern Helipads are rarely on the building top. Winds are typically too high.
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Have you ever been near a helicopter?
Yup. Ridden in them hundreds of times. Marine infantry.
The downdraft is considerable, but the many small rotors on these aircraft produce less than a single big rotor on a conventional helicopter. They are also much lighter, and need less lift.
But a conventional parking lot shared with cars is not going to work. They will need dedicated pads.
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Have you ever been near a helicopter?
Yup. Ridden in them hundreds of times. Marine infantry.
The downdraft is considerable, but the many small rotors on these aircraft produce less than a single big rotor on a conventional helicopter. They are also much lighter, and need less lift.
But a conventional parking lot shared with cars is not going to work. They will need dedicated pads.
Having many smaller rotors won't matter - the force and work involved are all pegged to the mass of the craft. Have you seen the size and shape of these things? They'll require wider clearances than a standard chopper.
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Having many smaller rotors won't matter
Multiple small counter-rotating vortices will dissipate more easily than one big vortex.
The symmetrical shape will allow the landing "pads" to be bowl shaped, directing the draft upward and outward, while the enclosed ground effect reduces the needed lift. The aerodynamics works out very well.
They'll require wider clearances than a standard chopper.
Not at all. A Huey has a rotor diameter of 48 feet, and an overall length of 57 feet. This new aircraft is way smaller.
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"There is plenty of space in the air, but there will never be plenty of landing places in cities (or anywhere else that the "congestion" is headed for) and those will be the bottlenecks."
You didn't read the post closely enough. They're designing them to be VTOL vehicles, Vertical Take Off and Land. Any parking spot will do ...h
You have obviously never seen London, which is what I am thinking of, and which has few open spaces available. FTFA : "30 feet long and 28 feet wide" - no normal "parking spot" is going to take that, nor are most existing flat roofs on office buildings (which are often far from flat) going to take the weight without re-inforcement. There are some places, but by the time you have unloaded what sounds like at least a couple of dozen passengers there is going to be a bottleneck queue for the helipad unless t
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It can hover and drop off the passengers in a drop pod. There's no need for it to fully stop there.
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I have seen London and poor parking situation aside I feel like if these VTROL vehicles do somehow become a staple means of transportation finding a way to briefly land them won't be a major obstacle. This of all things is not the big thing holding back air taxis'.
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They obviously feel some billionaire suckers in the ME will pay them enough to make the development worth it.
No western city is going to allow this.
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No western city is going to allow this.
They'll sell a shedload of them in Dubai, etc., where things like this are the equivalent of a US citizen owning the latest iPhone.
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No western city is going to allow this.
Of course cities are not going to simply allow it . . . they are going to lucratively license it.
Want to putter about in your flying car . . . ? Fine, just pay $1 million for your flying permit. The high price will keep the riff raff out of the skies. $1 million is chump change for seriously rich folks.
Ordinary folks aren't going to be car flying from JFK to Manhattan . . . any more than they take a helicopter shuttle from JFK to Manhattan, which is already available today.
Too expensive. Playground f
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No western city is going to allow this.
They already allow helicopter shuttles. How is this different?
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I don't why Boeing is doing this but I don't believe that "Boeing believes the vehicles, more commonly referred to as air taxis or flying cars, will be a solution to traffic congestion."
Especially since air taxis and flying cars are two different things. This is clearly an airplane, and what's more, it's not even roadable. There's absolutely nothing "car" about it. What a shit show.
Re:2D Space (Score:5, Interesting)
autonomous vehicles can barely handle 2 dimensional space... and people think we're ready to tackle the intricacies of safely navigating 3D space? good grief, flying is not even remotely similar to driving a car. You need to worry about your airspeed, generating enough lift to safely take off, fly and land, you need to worry about wing-loading during turns, the vehicle would need to be able to interpret the way the wind 'feels' against the control surfaces when flying in order to judge what's going on, lest the aircraft fall from the sky... this is not the best way of doing this....If anything, an autonomous aero-stat would be safer. no aerodynamic forces to worry about, and it's slow... but even then...
Drones have been flying a lot longer than they have been driving and they are actually pretty good at it these days. I still wouldn't get in one and let it fly in close proximity to loads of other ones though.
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Drones have been flying a lot longer than they have been driving and they are actually pretty good at it these days.
The problem with using drones as a comparison is scale. At their weight, the standard drones people think about can perform feats of maneuverability that are amazing. Scaled to the size and weight required to transport a single human the realities of physics look very different. As a simple example, think about dropping an ant. An ant is one mm thick. A fall from one foot above the ground is ~300 mm or 300 times its height. The ant will survive this fall and walk away. A person is roughly one foot thick lyi
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The woman that was killed wasn't on the bike, she was walking the bike, and she didn't "dart" out in front of anything.
She jaywalked, and should have fucking looked to see if it was clear, but the car should have seen her and stopped, and the human driver should have seen her and stopped. The video they released was doctored bullshit, and it has been proven many times over that the area is well lit and visibility is good at night.
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There are large drones out there. Some are developed with enough capacity to carry humans, such as the ElectraFly.
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Funny how your argument changed from the physics won't work to regulators haven't approve it.
Safety is heavy and/or expensive. There is no way to make this affordable, safe and functional concurrently.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Aviation is expensive because of the regulatory overhead. Plenty of car engines last as long as aviation piston engines, but the ones approved by the FAA costs 5 times as much.
Safety on the other hand, is not expensive at all. The vast majority of accidents are pilot-related.
Here's the leading causes of accidents for GA:
1. Loss of Control Inflight
2. Controlled Flight
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I said nothing about the cost of regulation. Any person owning one of these is unlikely to be satisfied with trav
The race is on !: Fusion or Flying Cars or ... (Score:3, Funny)
...Long File Paths in WIndows File Explorer.
Which will we have first ?!
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...Long File Paths in WIndows File Explorer.
Which will we have first ?!
Duke Nukem Forever.
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That's what we need (Score:3)
28 feet wide cars.
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at least that width makes sure they will not be allowed on roads, so no parking your flying vehicle close to the shop.
But A Kardashian Was Flying The Prototype (Score:2)
Who does this benefit (Score:1)
- not the average Joe .1 percent in their mission to destroy everyone else
- not the energy crisis
- not climate change
- yes: the top
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Re: Who does this benefit (Score:1)
No, lifting a ton or more hundreds of feet into the air and keeping it there for an hour or so is definitely not more efficient than driving.
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Flying across country in a large aircraft is more efficient than all those people driving their cars across country. Problem is, all those people taking a bus across country is more efficient still. Have them take a train, and it's yet more efficient. Turns out gravity is a bitch.
George Jetson here we come! (Score:1)
So much better to have the skies cluttered with self flying aircraft, drones, and such then on our highways. What could possibly go wrong??
It's a first test flight (Score:2)
Literally, topic. "Ends in fewer than 60 seconds" implies some kind of a failure with test flight. Most of the first test flight for rotary wing aircraft is literally take off within ground effect, see that it hovers successfully and land.
The point being that if there's unforeseen point of failure, uncontrolled crash would not be catastrophic from that height.
Re:It's a first test flight (Score:5, Interesting)
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Says the AC that has never built an aircraft.
1) It is called "ground effect", not "ground air cushion".
2) My first flight was a hop in ground effect down the runway. It provided valuable lessons in the handling characteristics at the moment the wheels left the ground. Extensive taxi runs had already allowed to get used to the ground handling.
3) The short hop gave me an idea of the control authority (and that I HAD control authority), while I was in a situation to just pull power and land straight ahead.
4)
PR Fail (Score:3)
Yeah, I don't know who Boeing had in charge of PR for this story, but they need to find someone new. With these sorts of 'news' stories (advertisements), no reporter goes out and writes a story. What happens is that Boeing writes the story and issues a press release. The various media outlets will then take the press release, get some automated script or the intern to mangle a few names and all the units of measure, and then stick it on their website for a couple of hours. Someone must have messed up the or
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How's any of that going to make any sort of clickbait?
If it had had some flame throwers and maybe some lasers, preferably some blockchain and maybe a raspberry pi or two in a 'supercomputer' cluster, then it could have made for some good headlines. As it is, "early test works out okay" is pretty boring.
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I've got nothing. You win.
Let's weep for journalism together.
Re:where do they all land? (Score:5, Funny)
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I shudder to think how you get on.
You climb up a rope ladder as its flying away into the sunset like bond or some shit
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Wait, you're saying that if I put a brick on my accelerator and jump out of the car it's not doing autonomous driving? :)
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The real answer is to stop people travelling insane distances and lengths of time for everyday schooling, work, shopping , whatever. Having everyone travelling 3 hours or more everyday for these destinations obviously doesn’t scale that’s why big cities are gridlocks,
The answer to solving congestion is to not require these travels. It would appear the faster the transport instead of cutting times down , the distances increase even further hence the result of grid lock and hours of traffic.
As a simple example why do so many kids need to ride a car , bus etc to school, why can’t they simply walk to school around the corner like everyone else did not that long ago. The argument that they are going to a better school can’t be true, every kid can’t be going to a better school than their closest one.
You must never have lived outside a city or lived in small town USA. Growing up in northwest Illinois pretty much REQUIRES you to ride many miles on a bus just to GET TO the "closest" school.,
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You must never have lived outside a city or lived in small town USA. Growing up in northwest Illinois pretty much REQUIRES you to ride many miles on a bus just to GET TO the "closest" school.,
You aren't kidding. Years ago I worked in Northwest Ohio. Flat as a board, and mostly rural.
Asking directions from locals, you'd get a "Drive down to Bryan, take a left and then a little ways down the road from there."
Their "little ways down the road" was something like 50 miles.
I write all this off to people not thinking that others might live in a different environment. People in SoCal can't understand that here in the soggy Northeast, we often have too much water. People in urban environments th
Clumsy but necessary (Score:2)
It's a clumsy first step, but a step in the right direction nonetheless. The fact that we're still moving about on the freaking wheel some several thousands of years after its "invention" makes me shake my head a little.
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The fact that we're still moving about on the freaking wheel some several thousands of years after its "invention" makes me shake my head a little.
That's just one of the 6 types of simple machines - and every more complex machine is built from simple ones. That semi-drone that Boeing is building has a lot of wheels in it.
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That semi-drone that Boeing is building has a lot of wheels in it.
Not following. I didn't suggest annoyance at the presence of round things loosely called "wheels". I was referring to "moving about on" wheels as the primary means of propulsion. We can't make big things without small things or big advances without small advances. But to still be rolling around on rubber versions of the original stone things from a few thousand years ago does suggest some stagnation in our mindset.
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That semi-drone that Boeing is building has a lot of wheels in it.
Not following. I didn't suggest annoyance at the presence of round things loosely called "wheels". I was referring to "moving about on" wheels as the primary means of propulsion. We can't make big things without small things or big advances without small advances. But to still be rolling around on rubber versions of the original stone things from a few thousand years ago does suggest some stagnation in our mindset.
So what machine would you suggest? Mere time of use doesn't equate obsolescence - at least for me. Wheeled vehicles can be remarkably efficient. They are also pretty forgiving of failure, whch my personal experience with drones shows they are remarkably unforgiving. A wheeled vehicle can roll to a stop if say the engine quits. That drone? Engine faileure turns it into a rock.
Even this semi-drone looks like a failure wouldn't be instantly fatal, but last time I was in the heart of a city, landing spots we
That's not a flying car should look like (Score:3)
https://c1.staticflickr.com/7/... [staticflickr.com]
and should sound like this
http://paulweb.org/Pweb%20back... [paulweb.org]
anything else is just an airplane
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why are we trying to get rid of the pilot?
on long flights sure, but these sound like puddle jumpers which would be like 10 minute commuter flights and if there are dozens per city/area then finding qualified pilots start becoming harder and harder the more planes you have in the air and I would kind of trust a computer to fly me than a 18 year old named Jake who flies for both uber and lyft constantly looking down at his/her smartphone for directions. just saying :)
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Energy is the expensive part of flying. The tunnels aren't ready yet, though.
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Energy is the expensive part of flying.
So is the noise [youtube.com]. Flying quietly will be a hell of a trick
Sigh! (Score:2)
Flying cars, as generally understood, should meet the following requirements:
1. No wings, or externally-visible propellers.
2. Able to hover, effortlessly, almost quietly, indefinitely.
3. Complete maneuverability at very low speeds.
4. Affordable - the LAPD should be able to have a fleet, and even down-on-his-luck detective like Rick Deckard, or a greasy Korben Dallas could afford one.
5. Relatively inexpensive to run.
6. Generally quiet.
With current technologies, we probably can't meet any of those requirement
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Buy a horse.
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Should buy a pig. They can fly now... And the lipstick option makes it go faster.
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Flying cars, as generally understood, should meet the following requirements:
Why?
Eventually yes, but I'd settle for:
1) Practical to drive on the road.
2) Able to fly.
That's all it really needs to be in the broadest sence. If it's capable of driving on the road but not practical that would be a roadable aircraft.
Boeing's offering however meets none of the above definitions.
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You can't in the US. You have no control of the airspace starting at 500ft above your land. That's above your land, not your house. I can come do aerobatics at 700ft above your house. (I won't. That'd be stupid. But, it would be legal.)
Unlike most of the flying car abortions of logic I've seen, this looks like it has actual wings. Once it exceeds stall speed, you're house will be very safe.
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The FAA will not like your sub 1000ft AGL aerobatics. Not generally enforced is not the same as legal.
What happens (Score:2)
when an autonomous air taxi meets a delivery drone, or a large burd?
'Autonomous air car'? Oh, hell no! (Score:2)
2 stage? (Score:2)
Would it be feasible instead to have a 2 stage vehicle? The regular electric car and the osprey design for the flying housing that it drives into. The housing has enough capacity to fly itself around without the car, but with one it needs to draw from the cars battery.
If only to avoid a pile up of housings on one side of town and none left on the other, they can fly back on their own.
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I think your bot is broken.