Minnesota Becomes Second State To Pass Law For Flying Cars (fortune.com) 54
Minnesota has become the second state to pass what it's calling a "Jetsons law," establishing rules for cars that can take to the sky. New Hampshire was the first to enact a "Jetsons" law. From a report: The new road rules in Minnesota address "roadable aircraft," which is basically any aircraft that can take off and land at an airfield but is also designed to be operated on a public highway. The law will let owners of these vehicles register them as cars and trucks, but they won't have to obtain a license plate. The tail number will suffice instead.
As for operation, flying cars won't be allowed to take off or land on public roadways, Minnesota officials declared (an exception is made in the case of emergency). Those shenanigans are restricted to airports. While the idea of a Jetsons-like sky full of flying cars is still firmly rooted in the world of science fiction, the concept of flying cars isn't quite as distant as it might seem (though it has some high-profile skeptics). United Airlines, two years ago, made a $10 million bet on the technology, putting down a deposit for 200 four-passenger flying taxis from Archer Aviation, a San Francisco-based startup working on the aircraft/auto hybrid.
As for operation, flying cars won't be allowed to take off or land on public roadways, Minnesota officials declared (an exception is made in the case of emergency). Those shenanigans are restricted to airports. While the idea of a Jetsons-like sky full of flying cars is still firmly rooted in the world of science fiction, the concept of flying cars isn't quite as distant as it might seem (though it has some high-profile skeptics). United Airlines, two years ago, made a $10 million bet on the technology, putting down a deposit for 200 four-passenger flying taxis from Archer Aviation, a San Francisco-based startup working on the aircraft/auto hybrid.
Not Very Useful (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can't take off from your driveway, and land same, but have to make a journey to the nearest airport which may be 5 or more miles away esp for suburban folk, then not only would it be highly inefficient, but would concentrate air traffic to small spaces of the sky around airports and probably be raining vehicles that bump into each other.
But I expected this. Once again, the flying car is only 10 years away, and will be so when we get to that 10 years. Can you say never? I knew you could.
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Flying cars will never happen at scale because they are too limited and inefficient. They're fun to dream about but not practical.
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They'll never happen because they can't be built at a price that anyone but the idle rich can afford. There's been a number of companies in the last few years making bold promises in their prospectus, but not one that had any chance if hell of a price tag less than a quarter of million bucks. Flying cars have always been, will always be, expensive toys for rich people.
Re:Not Very Useful (Score:5, Interesting)
That part I don't think will remain true. If all you want is a drone scaled up to hold a human, we can do that pretty damn cheaply.
Of course, every feature you add (road-worthiness, range, wind tolerance, ballistic parachute) adds mass and expense, but they also add an additional compromise between flight mode and driving mode.
Those compromises will kill the concept long before the price tag does.
Re:Not Very Useful (Score:4, Interesting)
If all you want is a drone scaled up to hold a human, we can do that pretty damn cheaply.
Yes, and a scaled-up drone can take off vertically, so it doesn't need an airport and doesn't need to be roadable.
That makes way more sense than a car-plane hybrid that has to drive to the airport for a horizontal takeoff.
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"Drone" now seems to mean a flying machine with multiple rotors which is not a helicopter.
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Sadly true, but you have to adapt to common parlance or you're not communicating.
People had trouble saying 'quadracopter', and use UAV or other terms for other things. What's particularly stupid about it is we are starting to occasionally use drone as I did today, to include vehicles with an onboard pilot.
But again, if that's the way the language drifts you can be 'correct' or you can communicate effectively.
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Even worse - for anything human rated, we're talking at least an octocopter. Got to have redundancy.
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Most of these flying cars fit the old definition of drone, because they are autonomous. One of the major barriers to flying cars is the need for a pilot licence, or to pay a trained pilot to fly it for you.
An autonomous passenger drone on a fixed route that has been cleared of other air traffic is a more viable business proposition. A way for rich people to get around quickly, but more cheaply than a helicopter.
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It needs to be "roadable" to the extent that it can get off the landing pad and be stowed into a hanger somewhere. Otherwise, you have a "one flying car, two landing pads - one occupied" situation.
Which admittedly, is do-able. Given a skilled fork-lift driver, and a modified version of one of those "auto-load-auto-retrieve parking lot crane systems. But then you have a "flying car" where you ha
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If it's big enough to carry a human, the FAA will consider it an aircraft, and impose various design and testing requirements, as well as safety features.
And then the price is back up well into six figures.
This isn't new. These kind of "invest in our magic flying cars" companies have been coming - and going - for 20 years now.
None has actually put anything up for sale, so far as I know, and certainly not for a price any but the idle rich can afford.
Re: Not Very Useful (Score:3)
Re: Not Very Useful (Score:2)
Flying cars are not stupid shit from a 1950s black and white newsreel, a small piper thingie with foldable wings that can putt putt around. It's the thing with multiple inboard rotors that actually looks like a Jetsons car.
"Roadable plane", sigh, they missed the point. Plug in destination, it takes off, goes there, and lands. No runways or airports or even flying it yourself. The time is now for the engineering.
Re: Not Very Useful (Score:5, Insightful)
Given how well self driving cars (don't) work, self flying cars, adding a third dimension, will work even worse.
Aside from being too expensive for any but the idle rich, for whom this will do nothing, since they can already afford helicopters, and trained pilots to fly them.
This is exactly the same thing as every other "flying car" story in the last 20 years: ad copy for their fundraising. Yet another company that will never sell anything but their stock.
What "flying car" company is headquartered in Minnesota? And how much have the donated to the reelection fund for whoever introduced this?
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And generally, they don't own these things, they rent them - and the pilots. And the maintenance crew, indirectly.
And still they (rich, self-important idiots) pressurise the pilots to fly outside operating envelopes, then complain (via lawyers) when the aircraft fly into mist-shrouded hillsides. Shrug. So sad losing a pilot like that. The passengers - evolution in action.
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I expect that if and when adoption increases, "airports" restricted to self-navigating vehicles will start springing up, and eventually the restriction will be effectively null; you'll drive 3 blocks to the designated vtol point, take off, whoosh, land, 3 blocks to destination (assuming your destination hasn't set up their parking deck with a vtol point on the top floor)
Of course, we're still looking at... 20+ years? And that's being rather optimistic about the adoption rate...
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On the other hand, Larry Niven suggested that life extension would make people more cautious and less willing to take
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In the "West", we're barely a couple of generations into the period where increasing average lifespans are happening because of people living longer. Until ... the 1950s, pushing into the 1960s (we're watching a pertussis epidemic starting in this country - I lost most of my hearing to pertussis as a child, a few of years before vaccines for it became common), increasing average lifespan in the West was mainly a result of decreasing infant mortality, not leng
Puffin VTOL (Score:1)
The Puffin vertical takeoff prototype seemed a possible work-around.
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What we're actually talking about here are aircraft that use wings rather than rotors but can have their wings folded in one way or another, in order to be slightly less cumbersome on the ground, than traditional fixed-wing aircraft. This does have some real-world use cases, but if you're thinking about George Jetson's car, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what's going on here. Being able to drive them on public roads is u
Rest assured (Score:5, Funny)
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Minnesota legislature confirmed for jackasses (Score:2, Insightful)
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Didn't they have anything more important to be working on than this? 'Flying cars' will never be practical enough to be anything more than a curiosity for the rich. I guess Minnesota has no crime, no infrastructure problems, no homelessness, and no poverty problems, as they apparenlty have so much free time on their hands that they can spend it on ridiculous things like this.
You were close, but failed to connect the dots. The government exists to protect and serve the rich. The rich like new stuff, and some of them like the idea of flying cars. So, all those other issues can wait. Somebody wants their flying car to be legal. Now. And they clearly have the money to make it happen.
Re: Minnesota legislature confirmed for jackasses (Score:3)
Most new tech goes through a bleeding edge, high cost stage. Cell phones, car nav computers.
See that iPhone you're holding, the one you angrily thumb in, "I hate the rich and capitalism and stuff!"? Yeah. How do you think they invent it then whittle costs down so you can afford it? "Free government phones" and "free government Internet connections" doesn't even become a rallying cry for pandering politicians until capitalism gets bored of it and the costs are wrung out, making it cheap.
Fascinating (Score:3)
The most fascinating part of this story to me is:
New Hampshire was the first to enact a "Jetsons" law
because I think of that state as the most unregulated state in the union...
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> because I think of that state as the most unregulated state in the union...
IIRC before you couldn't drive an airplane on the highway so that needed deregulating.
Cue the "Is that mosquito licensed?" jokes. (Score:2)
The FAA has the ultimate authority (Score:2)
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I expect FAA will if they have not done so already set a rule that says anything below say 300' is not regulated except within X distance of an airport.
That is true already. Brief description of FAA airspace classes [atpflightschool.com]. It can be complicated.
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Well done. Spoofing GPS has now become a viable target for terrorists wanting to create the 2051-09-11 Memorial Smouldering Pile.
Many of the dead will be recorded making frantic phone calls home wanting someone to read them the pages of the manual in the desk drawer about how to override the autopilot in an emergency.
Remind me again - what proportion of car drivers can't set the clock on their car twice
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This law does not attempt to regulate these vehicles as airplanes (that's definitely the FAAs department) but instead to allow them to be legally driven on the roads and be registered as road vehicles and etc.
Laws for the nonexistent (Score:3, Insightful)
Meaning the difference between driving to an airport, getting in an aircraft, flying somewhere, and then getting into a normal car again is probably the same or less financially as a flying car, the same logistics as a flying car, and unlike a flying car relies on purpose built machines that are all probably much safer than a flying car.
I For One Welcome Our Rich Guinea Pigs! (Score:2)
Hey, let rural plutocrats be the guinea pigs! They'll help companies get the kinks out. Hopefully with enough R&D and real-world experience, they'll grow into ordinary consumer products like cell-phones did.
And yes, they'll probably need to be computer-controlled if done over cities.
Re: Laws for the nonexistent (Score:2)
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Re: Laws for the nonexistent (Score:2)
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But the response to fog sufficient to keep the recovery "stand-by" vessel outside the 1km limit from the installation is "do not take off". This is consequent of multiple multi-fatality incidents in the 1970s when the helicopter hit the installation, fell into the sea, the people exited the sinking chassis - then drowned or froze in the water because the stand-by vessel couldn't see the water surface to hunt for them. This is not a flight pro
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... you need to file a flight plan with an authority about where you're taking off from, where you're going to, and when before you ever get in the air.
In the US, the FAA doesn't require flight plans when operating under Visual Flight Rules and outside of Class A airspace (above 18,000 feet Mean Sea Level). Although filing a flight plan ahead of time is strongly encouraged because of, like, crashes and stuff. So they have a hint where to look for the remains. I mean "rescue", of course. So they can find the people who need to be rescued.
Flying taxis (Score:2)
United Airlines, two years ago, made a $10 million bet on the technology, putting down a deposit for 200 four-passenger flying taxis from Archer Aviation, a San Francisco-based startup working on the aircraft/auto hybrid.
Usefully idiotic journalists need to stop equating flying cars with e-VTOLs. If it can't be driven on a road it's not a car of any sort, flying or not. When you say car, people expect it can be driven on roads. Companies are duping you and trying to generate publicity to impress their investors you clowns.
Dumbasses.
If it's VTOL it doesn't need roads (Score:3)
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Rolling on the floor, helpless with mirth.
I spent 10 minutes yesterday watching the street entertainment of a (presumably qualified - there was no co-driver) driver failing to get his car to fit into a plenty-large enough space.
Adding a dimension is going to make those videos disappear by a factor of several-fold.
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I thought his-Elon-ness had created a car that can't be driven on the road, or off it? Ugly as sin, weighs a ton. So the VTOL version will be announced soon. To be delivered by the working HyperLoop.
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Well the alternative is that they would work on something that actually will impact us. Which is why I rather they waste their time on BS.
I wonder what the FAA has to say about this? (Score:2)
Cuz, you know, they're the ones with final authority to license aircraft, and all. And if they do license it, there isn't much the state can do to block it.
Re: I wonder what the FAA has to say about this? (Score:2)
Amazon (Score:2)
Roadable Aircraft (Score:2)
In other words, Gay Deceiver before she was fitted with the Burroughs Continua Device
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"roadable aircraft" (Score:2)
A relevant issue - groundspace requirements. (Score:2)
Specifically, do they need a concrete "apron" (and the associated drainage to deal with heavy rain), and the space to store the parked vehicles off the landing pad. Or can they do with a grass strip, taxiways, landing pad, etc and lines of parked "roadable aircraft".
Archer - the cited company [archer.com] (I care nothing about flying cars, so won't dig further) picture vehicles on concret