Terrafugia's flying car model has been approved for tests in US airspace

"Now, before you get too excited, the model they’ll be testing in US airspace is not only unmanned - it's a mere tenth of the size of their actual flying car prototype."

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Re: Terrafugia's flying car model has been approved for tests in US airspace

#6

Post by lukev » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 2:10 PM UTC

I'm not an aeronautical engineer, but the fuselage/wing size ratio on that is way bigger than anything I've seen that actually flies.

Is something that looks like that even a little bit possible?

Re: Terrafugia's flying car model has been approved for tests in US airspace

#7

Post by geff82 » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 2:12 PM UTC

"Flying Car" seems so cool, but really think about it. Would you drive your car-airplane around on the ground all the time? An airplane already costs lots of money to maintain when it is only flying and sitting at the airport. Now you also have to pay even more for it for the wear of driving on the streets. I mean, this is really only an option to drive from your home to the airport from time to time (not for every flight). And in those cases, you might be able to find some kind of stowable airplane where you can remove the wings from, store them on a trailer and just get that thing home safe.

Honestly, I hope we one day have a solution for some Quadcopter-style of private transportation (best: electric). That would make completely new styles of cities possible as streets would be only used to walk around. Endless nature, no streets in it... just houses with Quadcopters on their roofs, ready to fly away... (still hope they have some kind of crash avoidance system, so flying to the next big time baseball match doesn't result in many deaths each time).

Re: Terrafugia's flying car model has been approved for tests in US airspace

#8

Post by Xophmeister » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 2:14 PM UTC

Why would anyone realistically -- i.e., outside the realm of pure fantasy -- want a flying car? People can barely handle one-and-a-bit dimensions at 70mph (i.e., a road with discrete lanes), how well do you think the general population would cope with this? Maybe autonomous flying vehicles would be more practical, but that still leaves the other two main problems wide open:

1. The energy required to keep the vehicle in the air.

2. The boarding-and-alighting (i.e., landing) bottleneck.

Re: Terrafugia's flying car model has been approved for tests in US airspace

#9

Post by balabaster » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 2:27 PM UTC

Xophmeister wrote: post #8

Why would anyone realistically -- i.e., outside the realm of pure fantasy -- want a flying car? People can barely handle one-and-a-bit dimensions at 70mph (i.e., a road with discrete lanes), how well do you think the general population would cope with this? Maybe autonomous flying vehicles would be more practical, but that still leaves the other two main problems wide open: 1. The energy required to keep the vehicle…

> People can barely handle one-and-a-bit dimensions at 70mph

+1 just for this statement alone.

So far, statistics say that flying is safer by orders of magnitude than driving your car... that statistic will likely plummet to many orders of magnitude in the opposite direction if flying cars become a thing.

If we do end up with flying cars being the norm, I would hope they will be autonomous and not have people manually flying them without a full pilots license being required.

Re: Terrafugia's flying car model has been approved for tests in US airspace

#10

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 2:28 PM UTC

lukev wrote: post #6

I'm not an aeronautical engineer, but the fuselage/wing size ratio on that is way bigger than anything I've seen that actually flies. Is something that looks like that even a little bit possible?

There is such a thing as a lifting body but this at first glance does not seem to be one of those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_body

A scale model can easily be over-powered to the point that it will fly (anything can fly if you strap a large enough engine to it and you can vector thrust), but to make this work for a life-sized design the amount of power required to make it fly would likely cause the vehicle to be so in-efficient it would not be economical to use.