Manned Flying Car Successfully Tested for the First Time (cnn.com) 110
The Japanese company SkyDrive "has announced the successful test drive of a flying car," reports CNN:
It was the first public demonstration for a flying car in Japanese history. The car, named SD-03, manned with a pilot, took off and circled the field for about four minutes... "We want to realize a society where flying cars are an accessible and convenient means of transportation in the skies and people are able to experience a safe, secure, and comfortable new way of life," CEO Tomohiro Fukuzawa said in a statement.
The SD-03 is the world's smallest electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle and takes up the space of about two parked cars, according to the company. It has eight motors to ensure "safety in emergency situations..." The success of this flight means that it is likely the car will be tested outside of the Toyota Test field by the end of the year. The company will continue to develop technologies to safely and securely launch the flying car in 2023, the news release said.
No price has been announced.
The SD-03 is the world's smallest electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle and takes up the space of about two parked cars, according to the company. It has eight motors to ensure "safety in emergency situations..." The success of this flight means that it is likely the car will be tested outside of the Toyota Test field by the end of the year. The company will continue to develop technologies to safely and securely launch the flying car in 2023, the news release said.
No price has been announced.
Not the hardest part (Score:5, Insightful)
The hardware and software to do a small one-person vehicle are a challenge, but not a big one. We already know a lot about that, and have various examples at small and larger scales.
The real challenge, and the one that none of the press releases talk about, is how to integrate such a thing safely into an urban environment. You would obviously need some kind of air traffic control, and that doesn't sound trivial, especially given the general level of human stupidity.
Not to mention safety -- falling out of the sky much? And noise -- if you think a chopper a thousand feet up is loud, try two or three of these at a couple hundred feet.
I wouldn't look for them any time soon.
Re:Not the hardest part (Score:5, Interesting)
The real challenge, and the one that none of the press releases talk about, is how to integrate such a thing safely into an urban environment. You would obviously need some kind of air traffic control, and that doesn't sound trivial, especially given the general level of human stupidity.
Not necessarily. It's VTOL, so if you set a height limit of a thousand feet or so, you'd basically only have to worry about other flying cars (except near airports), and if you limit the flying to paths that are directly above existing roads, you could use layer restrictions to largely eliminate accidents.
Basically, you specify a set of altitudes allowed for each road, and you ensure that those don't coincide with the altitudes for any road that crosses it. You specify that when flying over the on-ramps and off-ramps, you can change altitude to the altitude of the road you're getting onto. For city streets, you create a set of "virtual on-ramps" at every intersection that behave the same way. If you map all of this precisely enough, the cars should be able to trivially fly themselves.
And for VTOL, you require that it be done while above a parking lot. You have to have cameras and radar to ensure that you aren't landing on or taking off into another vehicle that picked the same parking space, but because your vertical corridors are isolated horizontally from your horizontal corridors, you don't have to worry being hit from every direction — just two.
There would, of course, need to be an outright ban on flying these things within the landing path of any major airport, which would eliminate some roads, but you could also ostensibly fly at 200 MPH over city streets instead of 25 MPH, so the fact that you would have to use a alternate route around those areas wouldn't be a show-stopper.
You could even build express layers up near the flight ceiling to accommodate traffic that is going point-to-point between major roads in certain nonstandard directions that don't follow the grid pattern of the physical streets on the ground. As long as it is mapped properly, the possibilities are almost limitless.
Not to mention safety -- falling out of the sky much?
That's probably why this thing is an octocopter. As long as you have two separate quadcopter systems with a joint controller, and triple redundancy on all the logic, one half could compensate for problems in the other half until you can shut it down. You would, of course, have to have redundant power, too, but... you get the point. It's possible to make them pretty darn safe, if you're willing to put in the necessary redundancy.
And noise -- if you think a chopper a thousand feet up is loud, try two or three of these at a couple hundred feet.
Quite likely, yes. Then again, more blades should translate to less lift per blade, which should reduce the noise pretty significantly compared with a single-blade helicopter, I would think. So maybe not. I'll reserve judgment for now. But probably, unfortunately.
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Certainly there are schemes such as layering and following roadways that would help with navigation, but unless there's some kind of foolproof centralized control, there's gonna be a lot of opportunity for mayhem.
And there would also be a limited airspace capacity in densely populated areas, so how do you license that?
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How do you license cars on the road now? I mean, the way I look at it, if you do it right, you're basically talking about adding... let's generously say three extra layers for each road. That basically means you have 4x the capacity of your current highway system. If that isn't enough, then things must be utterly horrible right now. :-) (Note that I am assuming 100% automation from takeoff to landing here; if the cars allow any human control while airborne, then yeah, licensing would be a special kind
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I just think about all of the detritus that I see along the roadways currently and I imagine garbage and car parts falling from the sky onto whatever is below. Seems like a nightmare to me.
The only way I could see this working is if flying cars are only ever owned and operated by organizations with strict oversight by regulators.
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One thing is for sure, we'll all get stronger roofs before this is over. :-)
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Well the roads today are a built infrastructure, designed to handle a particular level of traffic. So a municipality may get via eminent domain land and then pave roads and post signage for 1 car a time - many lanes of bidirectional traffic.
For air travel you don't need such infrastructure to control where cars go. I can go 1000 feet up and go straight to my capital city. Going over forests, farms, commercial and residential areas.
If this is going to be massively deployed to the common person. How will
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Certainly there are schemes such as layering and following roadways that would help with navigation, but unless there's some kind of foolproof centralized control, there's gonna be a lot of opportunity for mayhem.
And there would also be a limited airspace capacity in densely populated areas, so how do you license that?
Relax, it's never going to happen.
The energy requirements for keeping something in the air vs. rolling it along the ground will keep these in the "millionaire's toy" category.
Then there's the noise. You think little toy drones are noisy? How about one that weighs close to a ton...?
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Well the energy might be similar to a car.
There might be a few people who have to drive a long way around to get to places, sure. On average though? Not gonna work.
I don't know about taxes where you live but you can bet they'll tax these too. Plus they'll need a lot more inspection and maintenance.
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As for the tax, every time someone invents a new form of potentially popular transport they brag about avoiding tax. But rest assured that as soon as any other transport make significant inroads on cars, it will be taxed equivalently. G
Interesting analysis. (Score:2)
The parent comment gives an example of the kind of analysis that will possibly eventually make safe flying cars possible. It seems to me the necessary advancement in technology will require many years to achieve.
VTOL is Vertical Take-Off and Landing.
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Newton's third law guarantees there's no quiet way to fly. Not now, not in the future.
You have to displace something downwards in order to go upwards.
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Where in the third law does it say propulsion has to be noisy? Birds seem to do it quietly.
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Hi, I fly gliders. It's pretty quiet.
Re:Interesting analysis. (Score:4, Insightful)
Owls would like to have a word with Newton's 3rd law regarding the amount of noise they make when flying.
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Conversely, add a dimension and you've got splatting and falling chunks all over, not just in the road bed.
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Talking about falling - their marketing department or whoever came up with the name "Skydive" needs to be fired.
It doesn't exactly fill me you with confidence in the thing's ability to keep in the air.
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It looks like it is actually "SkyDrive" and was misquoted in the summary. However, AFAIK, "SkyDrive" is a registered trademark of Microsoft.
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Confining aerial routes to following surface roads is really bad idea. The big win in going to VTOL vehicles at all is that you can going point-to-point, minimizing the transit time, which reduces the opportunity for collisions.
As I said in my follow-up comment, it doesn't have to be strictly following the route of surface roads, but that's a decent first approximation. Eventually you can increase the complexity of the aerial paths, and you can obviously add interesting routes that don't exist on the ground, so long as they are at a different altitude. But it almost certainly can't be a free-for-all with craft flying in truly arbitrary directions, at least not any time soon, unless we completely ignore safety. :-)
We have accidents on roads largely because we're routing cars into very narrow paths where they're encountering other cars head-on at very close proximity, not to mention road intersections. Add a dimension, and you've got vastly more maneuvering options.
But it also add
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I disagree. The avoidance part might be easier, but the actual detection part is orders of magnitude harder. Why? Two reasons. First, you have to have cameras and radar pointing in every direction, including up and down. More cameras = more processing power. Second, just as your motion isn't constrained, neither is anybody else's. If the paths of other vehicles aren't predictable, then instead of it being the largely solved highway driving problem (path prediction for cars traveling in lanes), it be
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you have to have cameras and radar pointing in every direction,
Already available off the shelf, and they're surprisingly cheap.
The cost of the equipment isn't at issue. The computational complexity is. Because of the need for sensor fusion, I would expect an 8x increase in the number of RADAR emitters and a 2x increase in the number of cameras to increase the computational power required by at least an order of magnitude. And that's before you factor in the radically increased number of objects that it would have to track.
your motion isn't constrained, neither is anybody else's.
There are existing protocols for aircraft to avoid each other in VFR or IFR conditions. If you're approaching head-on at the same altitude, you both alter course to the right, for example.
Sure. But you're still thinking about airplanes, which is almost the same level of complexity as cars, give
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I don't see why there is such a back-and-forth on this. Seems pretty easy to me. Define a grid system of air-car highways: 1 mile, 2 mile, 5 mile (not sure how granular you need it). North is at 1000 feet, East at 1500, South at 2000, West at 2500. All traffic at one height is going in the same direction in a single stream in the corridor - so very little chance of anything bad happening between the air-cars.
Changing directions happens at the grid intersections: you go to the mid-level (say, 1250) as yo
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Straight onto other traffic. :-D
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but you could also ostensibly fly at 200 MPH over city streets
Yeah sure lol. You're already spending more energy than a normal car engine does by just keeping the vehicle in the air against gravity. Now you want to add another engine to get 200MPH horizontal displacement? You know that air resistance can't be ignored in the real world, right? You realize that drag is SQUARED with respect to speed, right? You realize that aircraft do require large engines, and these engines are ONLY used to deal with the horizontal component of movement because lift from the wings dea
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If they flew at 200 mph they'd be much more efficient. You can buy or build your own small fixed wing aircraft that flies around that speed and gets close to the fuel economy a car does. Flying can be pretty efficient, provided you don't want to go too fast or too slow.
Nobody ever accused a helicopter of being fuel efficient. Flying slow is very expensive.
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but you could also ostensibly fly at 200 MPH over city streets
Yeah sure lol. You're already spending more energy than a normal car engine does by just keeping the vehicle in the air against gravity. Now you want to add another engine to get 200MPH horizontal displacement?
I did say ostensibly. I wasn't saying that these should be able to achieve those speeds — merely that there are no pedestrians to worry about, so flying above a city street need not necessarily be slower than flying above a highway.
That said, there are helicopters that can easily exceed 200 MPH ground speed. The current (unofficial) record is almost half again faster than that [wikipedia.org].
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It probably won't be under human control, it will just be autopilot with the passenger selecting the destination. The list of available destinations will be pre-determined and so will the routes.
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It probably won't be under human control, it will just be autopilot with the passenger selecting the destination. The list of available destinations will be pre-determined and so will the routes.
Not if you want it to be a flying car. I mean yes on the first half (hence my comment "If you map all of this precisely enough, the cars should be able to trivially fly themselves."), but no on the second half. If it can't take you from your house to any other arbitrary place, then it isn't a flying car; it's a single-occupancy flying bus. Traffic would have to get *really* bad before that would make sense.
Flying cars and drones: Can't be made safe enough. (Score:1)
I agree. I don't want a "Manned Flying Car" near my house. Also, I'm against drones flying in populated areas.
Problems with flying cars and drones [slashdot.org]
Fly yes, but Not a car? (Score:3)
I don't see any wheels. How is this a car?
Okay here's the Dictionary to answer that (Score:2)
Definition of carriage
1a : a wheeled vehicle especially : a horse-drawn vehicle designed for private use and comfort
b British : a railway passenger coach
2 : a wheeled support carrying a burden
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Nobody has a clue how loud they are because nobody releases any videos with natural sound, for a good reason.
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Not likely. You can make them perform any number of integrity checks before lifting off, and mechanical failures in flight are already extremely rate in general aviation.
Aviation is, today, largely done from controlled environments: air fields and good maintenance. When you have these looked after the public you will have them in a poorer state of repair - they will break/fail.
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My bet. On the record. (Score:5, Funny)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't count. (Score:4, Interesting)
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40 years wait? (Score:2)
Well, at least (Score:2)
Avery Brooks is finally happy... [youtube.com]
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At least Moller knew the lift rotors would have to be ducted fans, for both efficiency and noise. The countra-rotating blades in this example are guaranteed to be very noisy!
Paul Moller unavailable for comment (Score:2)
Sucks when somebody beats you to the 40-year punch.
This is not a flying car. (Score:2)
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It's closer to a motor cycle, snow mobile or jet ski.
Not a flying car (Score:3)
It can't be considered a flying car.
1. It is as wide as a helicopter. You can't drive it on streets or even the highway. You probably can't even tow it on the streets or highway because it is wider than a lane. The struts holding the props don't look foldable.
*2. It is probably loud as hell, meaning you can't land it in most neighborhoods, at least not unless you want to star in Purge: The Documentary.
Note: *2 is an assumption, but even if it were quiet, point #1 makes it a non-flying car.
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Not true .. rotors, when unpowered, can help you land safer and better than wings due to autorotation.
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Heh, doesn't work with these
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Rotors yes, fans no. You have to articulate the blades and control them in their individual pitch axes through a swashplate. And they have to be bigger in diameter, and controlled by a highly skilled pilot.
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It seems like that would be a job for a computer. You could have an entirely separate system that would autorotate. It would need its own rangefinder and barometer, which is not too much to ask, along with its own tachometer and pitch sensor.
Still won't work on a multicopter for the reasons you describe, though. You're better off with an ejection seat with a parachute. It doesn't need to be very advanced as long as you can trigger it while the craft is still upright.
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Ejection seats require a high level of physical conditioning and training to give you even a chance of survival. Military ejections at low altitude are fifty percent fatal.
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The pitch on those blades can't be controlled? OK, then I guess it needs a parachute and external mega-airbags that can turn it into a giant beachball.
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I wouldn't say safer and better. You can land a plane just fine with no power. If it's on a runway, the passengers might not even notice anything was wrong, except for how quiet it was. And you can glide for a long way to find some open ground to do it.
Landing an autorotating helicopter can save your life, but it requires split second timing, you don't get much choice in where you land, and even if done well you might not get to use the chopper again. Or your spine.
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People fly fixed wing aircraft with no engines all the time, completely routinely. It's not an emergency, they take off that way on purpose.
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It doesn't even have wheels!
Finally, something to beat the internet... (Score:1)
Not a flying car (Score:2, Informative)
The thing to be called a car should have footprint of a car. A flying car should have the dimensions of a car and produce only minimal downwash. Crucially, the purchase and operation cost should be similar to a car.
Otherwise if we limit the criteria to staying in the air and being able to take off and land vertically then helicopters already fit the bill, as do a bunch of other things, like the VZ-8 airgeep.
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The thing to be called a car should have footprint of a car....
Having just spent my vacation towing a trailer for a week, I think it's not too unreasonable for personal vehicle to take up two parking spaces. A stretch limo is still a car, and the bigger ones are pretty long.
Glorified hedge trimmer (Score:2)
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ooo, a solution for looters and rioters
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Not a solution so much as a precipitate of body parts and chunks of flesh.
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depends if set on "chop" or "puree"?
Three Dimensions Are Hard For Some (Score:2)
Now you want to give them altitude, too? Car-house collisions will become MUCH MORE of a thing, among any other death-from-above scenario. Let alone drunks trying to fly into space or fly to Hawaii.
Re: Three Dimensions Are Hard For Some (Score:1)
No Airspace in Silicon Valley (Score:2)
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Yes. Ohmigod. It can't be operated in Silicon Valley?!?
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Actually, there is lots of airspace in Silicon Valley.
I used to fly out of SQL (near Oracle). We got quite close to the heavies landing at SFO. One of the good things about America is that the airlines and military have not locked up most of the airspace, unlike here in Australia.
First time ever? (Score:2)
Where are they getting this "first time" stuff from? I've seen flying cars around for what feels like 10 years now, at least. They'll roll a prototype onto the convention floor at a Google conference or what-not. Surely if it's a viable prototype, it's actually been lifted off the ground for a few minutes?
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Make that 70 years.
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Yeah... I don't recall if it actually flew, but there's a flying car in the Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle. Also, my grandfather built a flying car for one of his customers, which I'm pretty certain did fly (either that, or the customer ran out of money and it left my grandfather's shop, but it was a perfectly feasible design).
The one my grandfather was working on, I believe once the person landed the wings had to be folded back along the body, and then it could drive on surface streets. It was no rac
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Yeh. Baitclick headline. "It was the first public demonstration for a flying car in Japanese history."
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Yes, the original title says that the company made their first manned fight.
Somehow the title was shorted and the meaning changed.
Crewed (Score:2)
Granted, this is Japan, but the modern term is 'crewed', not manned, you sexist pigs.
And yeah, hardly the first by a long shot.
- Necron69
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Crewed seems to mean operated by a crew, with a crew being a group of people.
Manned means: "carrying or operated by one or more persons", no gender implied on dictionary.com. The description is slightly different but also gender neutral on websters site, and oxford's site.
Video of part of the test flight (Score:2)
You can watch some of the test flight on YouTube [youtube.com]
In the video it sounds quite loud, which other comments have mentioned is probably one of the biggest roadblocks to it being anything except a novelty.
A flying car has been on sale for 8 years now (Score:1)
There is a flying car, it's been on sale for 8 years, you can get one today for $94,000.
https://itecusa.org/maverickls... [itecusa.org]
Unlike the one in the article, it is a road legal car in the US and an FAA legal aircraft as well.
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This is the one I definitely want before 2021, when Mad Max happens.
If you want VTOL, use a helicopter (Score:2)
I frankly cannot see the point of this. It must be horrendously inefficient. You have to drive the rotors just to stay in the air, let alone move forwards. If you want a VTOL aircraft, use a helicopter. I can't see this so-called flying car offering any advantages over that known technology.
Moller Skycar (Score:2)
Anyone here old enough to remember that one, lots of great artwork, only just a few years from now (for many years). It had a few ducted fans so compared to many vehicles currently flying with a few unducted fans. Yes, that one with so many big promises that never materialized.
I remember finding a report (AIAA or ASME or ?) by Paul Moller from 1980s (or 1970s) where he discussed propulsion area vs thrust for vertical flight (something like that, it's been 35 years). He wrote helicopters are ideal because
No thank you (noise) (Score:2)
So flying cars have been "just around the corner" for a few decades now, and who knows ... maybe they will sort out the technology in near future. But do we actually _want_ flying cars?
I would argue that no, we don't - at least not in quantity. Imagine the noise of flying cars zipping over your house all day. And the visual pollution of looking up at the sky, and you see cars flying around everywhere. No thank you. And you could make the same argument about the "dream" of an army of drones delivering lunch,
Fuel efficiency - miles per gallon ? (Score:2)
If these catch on in any large number it will put a hole in our efforts to fight climate change.
That's an oversized drone, not a flying car (Score:2)
Yet another (Score:2)
Remember
https://terrafugia.com/ [terrafugia.com]
https://moller.com/ [moller.com]
and in 1949 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Making something that can fly and drive is ...possible, but you end up with it being terrible at both. Airplanes and helicopters are already quite marginal devices, with fuel weight often being a significant fraction of total vehicle weight, and very high operating costs. Adding the constraint of making them driveable tends to push them over the limit.
The x-copter types will be far to noisy for use in a residen
History is a tough teacher.. (Score:3)
Come on you "Cub" reporter.. Do some homework here before you report "the first time in history" because there HAS been multiple attempts at building a commercially viable "flying car". The first one I know of was in 1949, and 6 different models where porotyped (and most flew and one is till flying today) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So this isn't the "First"
This company will face the same problems as the Aerocar. In order to sell these things they will need to be compliant with product rules and certified by BOTH the FAA and the Highway Administration. Operation costs will be absolutely huge, requiring annual inspections by a certified FAA mechanic AND by someone certified to inspect cars to be both airworthy and keep your license plate. It will have to have a VIN AND an FAA issued tail number, it will have to have air bags, minimal crash ratings, lighting suitable for both aircraft and cars. In order to drive the thing, you will need a pilot's license AND a driver's license and meet all the medical and currency requirements. Further, unless the rules change, you won't be able to operate it as an aircraft (take off or land) on roads (not that you'd want too, because most roads make horrible runways).
Personally, I don't see a huge market for these things. They will be hugely expensive cars. For instance, a new Cessna 172, a basic high wing 3-4 passenger aircraft, start at about $250,000 and if you put a reasonable set of avionics into it you bump that to about 1/2 million. Seems to me that this little novelty will run you in excess of $250 K, and for what? To get maybe two people to a destination, leaving the baggage behind and then saving you from renting a car at your destination? Doesn't make financial sense.
I suppose they may sell a few to the stupidly rich who are into flying themselves around, but this is a vanishingly small group of people and MOST of them don't really care about flying someplace and then not having to rent/hire a car. IF you make it a home build kit, then you might sell a few more kits... But I just don't see how this is commercially viable. Right now the Cessna 172 is in grave danger of going out of production, building less that 200 per year these days. Those kind of production numbers make the business case for this kind of thing really tough.
Interesting... (Score:2)
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Helicopter (Score:2)
"Manned ultralight helicopter successfully tested for the first time" doesn't quite have the same ring, but is much more factually accurate.