Flying Cars Airport of the Future To Land in England (reuters.com) 31
An airport for flying cars will thrust the English city of Coventry into the future later this year, with a project aimed at demonstrating how air taxis will work in urban centres. From a report: Urban-Air Port, a British-based start-up, has partnered with car giant Hyundai Motor to develop the infrastructure required for when flying cars take to the skies to ferry around people and goods. From November, visitors to Coventry will be able to see what a flying car airport looks like and see a passenger-carrying drone and an operational electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicle on the landing pad. Urban-Air Port was selected by a government programme aimed at developing zero-emission flying and new air vehicles, winning a 1.2-million-pound ($1.65-million) grant to help fund the temporary installation of the airport in Coventry city centre.
Flying cars? (Score:5, Insightful)
So far most of the "flying cars" I am seeing demo'd from GM, Hyundai and others are failures. Aside from a few companies, most of these guys just don't get it. This is what always happens at big companies with vision-less leadership .. like cell phone manufacturers laughed at the iPhone when it came out. Like when car manufacturers laughed at Tesla. And NASA laughed at SpaceX/re-usable rockets. A flying car must be drivable on roads and fit in a parking spot. Otherwise it's basically a helicopter. Make something that fits in a parking spot and can be driven on the highway. I'm even OK with it requiring a helipad or special zone to land, but for fuck's sake after landing it needs to be drivable on the roads and fit in a parking spot if you're gonna call it a "car."
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Yes, even that Fifties fad for building houses attached to municipal airports made more sense. There is a certain demographic of wealthy commuters who like the idea of flying to the office in a big city, so keeping a Cessna in their garage next to a taxiway was a use case.
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People on slashdot said the same thing years ago when smartphones were coming out, they thought a PDA and a phone should be two separate devices. Various arguments were made as to why smartphones would never work out. Everything from "the phone presenting a number pad and a keyboard and different times will mess up your muscle memory", to "it will cost double, and "it will be bulky" and "the PCB will generate interfering RF so phone calls will drop more." Meanwhile counter-arguments from me and others in
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Just look at how this is already solved on a more micro scale: airports. When you need to move to a different terminal, do they have you just hop in a cab to whisk you o
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Inconvenience number one those noise of the flying car impacting, hundreds of thousands of people, all day long, rich inner city living people. Inconvenience number two, lots of spinning blades in pigeon and more and more, native bird populated cities, to be blended and sprayed on the people below. Inconvenience number three, the more you have up there, the more accidents you will have, and not car 'Bingles' but crashing to the ground killing rich inner city living voters. Inconvenience number four, flying
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By that reasoning we will eventually have a combination grain harvester / ballistic nuclear missile. It doesn't seem possible or a good idea now, but phones and PDAs merged, so those will too.
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Well I was trying to make the point that combining features wasn't necessarily bad -- now you're drawing an unreasonable extreme. I didn't say things should be combined regardless of what it is being combined.
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OK, but the obstacles to combining cars and planes are much different than combining phones and PDAs, so it isn't a good analogy. Combining features is great, if it's feasible. Making a vehicle that's both a viable aircraft and a street legal car currently isn't.
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Flying cars already existed in 1979. (Score:2)
Dodge actually make the car and it was flying every week in Georgia for seven years. The original two drivers drove every year except for when they were temporarily replaced for all of year five. For safety reasons the doors on the car could never be opened so the driver and passengers had to always climb in & out through the windows. To make it more visible in air it was painted bright orange with a large "01" on
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If it's a car that's legal to drive on roads, it has to meet crash safety standards. It's going to be a long time, if ever, before either something that heavy can fly with a suitable range, or something that safe can be light enough to fly. I would guess before either of those happen the entire fleet of cars will be autonomous and crash regulations will be repealed. So don't hold your breath.
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I am not sure if weight necessarily equates with safety. It depends on the type of accident. I don't think there is anything in the safety regulations about weight. Also, with autonomous, the probability of crashing can be reduced even if the whole fleet isn't autonomous.
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No, the regulations don't actually require weight, but it's one of those triangles. Between safe, lightweight, and cheap, you can pick any two, and of course they are required to choose safe as one of them. If manufacturers knew how to economically make safe light cars, they would be doing it already. There are safe light cars, but they are made of carbon fiber and are fantastically expensive.
Also, with autonomous, the probability of crashing can be reduced even if the whole fleet isn't autonomous.
Yes, but it has to get far enough that the federal government is willing to repeal the safety regulations. They'
Innovation? (Score:3)
*flying cars are typically called airplanes and helicopters.
Brexit effect (Score:2)
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"Flying Cars Airport of the Future" (Score:5, Funny)
Okay, now we know you're not even trying any more.
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I'm thinking someone conned clueless city officials out of muni money:
winning a 1.2-million-pound ($1.65-million) grant to help fund the temporary installation of the airport in Coventry city centre
signature (Score:5, Insightful)
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Next time you're out driving in a town or city, look up. Tons of wires overhead. Nobody will ever be allowed (or want) to take off or land on city streets for that and many other reasons. City parking lots have most of the same problems. So a "skyport" of some sort is needed. Whatever that turns out to be it won't be anything like this land-wasteful glorified heliport.
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Presumably a flying car can drive on the road as well as fly.
So you can drive into town, park on the top (outside) floor of a multi story car park above the wires. Then fly home, avoiding the fee to exit the car park.
That's the value prop of flying cars - free parking.
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Yes free parking until a parking enforcement drone EMFs you in mid-air.
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I'll just get a steam powered drone, so the EMF will not affect it.
Missed opportunities. (Score:3)
Shouldn't they have called it a carport instead of an airport?
But seriously, somebody missed the boat of what was being asked for. This is personal helicopters, not flying cars.
Airport for flying cars? (Score:3)
How is an "airport for flying cars" different from just "an airport?
And why does a "flying car" need an airport? I think these people are missing the whole point of the idea of flying cars.
Park it in your garage, take off from anywhere, drive on roads...now you have a flying car.
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How is an "airport for flying cars" different from just "an airport?
Because it is a heliport. Oh, wait, we already have those.
Media gets it wrong, because it was reported wrong (Score:2)
Surely this has nothing to do with 'flying cars' - as others have pointed out, stating the blindingly obvious.
Unless you can drive the damn thing on the road to park near your house, it isn't a flying car.
If it requires an airport, it is not a flying car.
So, yeah, drones? ... not a flying car.
But why would drones need an airport?
The article mentions drones - but that's
Erm ... helicopters? - but that's not a flying car.
er...
Well, it's an airport, right, for stuff that flies to like, well, do what airports ha
A more realistic option (Score:3)
I expect in reality one of these points will look like a standard parking garage with one or more large car elevators on it. So you pull into the garage and park, or you pull into the car elevator and are lifted up ten stories and you launch from there. So the launching car is clear of ground traffic, you don't need to worry around foreign object damage from debris being thrown around.
Or the top of the parking garage is NO PARKING. It is a take off and landing zone. You fly in, land on the top deck and then drive around like a car, and either drive out of the garage or park in a standard parking slot.
Nostalgia (Score:2)
When I was a young boy, I started reading Popular Mechanics magazine and continued for quite a few years. Every 8 or 10 years, the magazine would run a feature article touting the advent of flying cars. The magazine cover would include an illustration of a George-Jetson-type flying vehicle zooming around over a futuristic city with a lot of other similar vehicles. The flying car was always proposed as a solution to traffic congestion, but this is pretty stupid when you consider it. What would LA be like