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Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

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Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#141

Post by elmar »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #134
elmar wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

off course it will be possible when batteries tripple the density without increasing weight. You will get a 25 minute around 30 miles ride with 20 minute reserve

Biofuels. Otherwise, you're waiting another 20 years.

to do a small combustion engine VTOL vehicle its even harder I have only seen it work with several two stroke engines.

Another optin is turbine like the AirMule, but will be hard to use it for civilian operations the hourly cost is brutal and noise and heat is really annoying for nearby people and even passengers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Aeronautics_AirMule

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#142

Post by Spooky23 »

overcast wrote: post #69
Spooky23 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? With self driving, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than autonomous cars. Any point in a 30 mile typical travel radius is a <15 minute flight.

Because we need to think realistically, and economically. Improving, and incrementing familiar technology now. Not introducing another mess in the air. We haven't even got self-driving land vehicles, and we're just going to make the jump to aircraft that NO ONE is familiar with? We still rely on primitive controlled explosions to get off our planet. Sure it's a neat idea, but this isn't the Fifth Element world yet. U…

Self flying aircraft are much easier than cars. Fewer variables and years of experience in military contexts.

My parents live in a rural area 16 mikes from our city center. Due to terrain and roads, it's a 30 mile/60 minute trip. With a flying car/shuttle, its no more than 20 minutes.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#143

Post by phkahler »

_ph_ wrote: post #49
phkahler wrote: post #30

Forget electric. That's just a gimmick that allows these companies to say "in five to ten years because batteries." Prove it. Make a gas powered one to prove your concept. The simplest flying machine is probably an autogyro. Automate that for point to point transport, show the automation, redundancy, and safety for urban use. Solve those real issues and then we can talk about fancy designs.

Electric is a game changer for popular aviation. Why? Because aviation has (fortunately) very strict safety standards. So the aviation version of common car engines are vastly more expensive than their car counterparts. They also require expensive maintenance regularly. Electric engines are mostly maintenance-free, and the biggest point is, you can have any number of electrical engines on your aircraft - the common d…

People put common car engines on aircraft all the time. The problem is that "certified" aircraft engines are expensive due to that designation (think regulatory capture). There are several cheap auto-engine options for homebuilts. Maintenance can be done by the builder for homebuilts too. The costs are almost completely due to the small market size.

I agree with you that electric motors are awesome (they're what I do) and you're right that you can easily put 2-4 of them on a fairly conventional aircraft for amazing redundancy.

The problem with the quad-rotor configuration is that the motors are doing all the work. With real wings you get a better lift to power ratio but you also lose VTOL capability.

Having said all that, I'd still like to see a small short field aircraft automated to the point that the general public could use it.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#144

Post by cmurf »

smallnamespace wrote: post #114
paulddraper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if we took existing traffic and moved it 10,000 feet up in the air Wouldn't you move it 1,000 feet up, 2,000 feet up, 3,000 feet up... There's a lot more space in the air than on land. Plus, in 3D you can make two non-intersecting non-parallel straight paths. Can't do that in 2D.

> There's a lot more space in the air than on land. But that's mitigated by the fact that the failure modes and much, much worse. I can drive safely at highway speeds with a couple hundred feet of separation between cars. FAA rules on safe separation between planes laterally is about 3 miles , or about 50 times the distance, or 2500 times the surface area. Plus planes compete with one another for access to airports,…

That's for visual flight rules. There's no way this works with VFR. For one, the examples are all major cities where there's Class B airspace, requiring positive separation. So it's basically "clear of clouds", however that assumes you're cleared into Class B. There's no possible way this works with the existing ATC system.

Flying cars won't use the same airspace as turbine powered airline planes, so a new airspace designation could exist just for cars. And drones. Because drones and flying cars will be competing for the same airspace so all of them will need to use the same system.

Added: Flying cars (and to some degree drones) do compete with the same airspace as existing general aviation flights. And that's a big problem. The legacy aircraft would have to avoid the new airspace, most won't ever get an upgrade to fly autonomously; alternatively, the flying cars will have to be programmed such that they can always yield right of way to legacy aircraft.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#145

Post by zombees »

civilian wrote: post #83
nrjdhsbsid wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automatic flight is much easier than autonomous driving. Not much to run into up there :).

Are you familiar with Smeed's Law? I think that it will also apply to flying cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeed's_law

In general aviation (anything other than the airlines for our purposes) midair collisions happen with alarming regularity anywhere there is any congregation of aircraft (typically within 10mi of a non-towered airport). Add to this that they are nearly 100% fatal, unlike traffic collisions, and you have a recipe for disaster. There are systems coming online to help mitigate this issue (ADS-B) but they've been in the pipeline for years and won't see universal adoption until 2020 in theory.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#146

Post by nrjdhsbsid »

civilian wrote: post #136
NickNameNick wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't want to fly any kind of helicopter or multicopter into a door in the side of a traditional multi story parking building. the sudden and asymmetric entrance into ground-effect will roll the aircraft, and I'm not sure what having a roof above your rotors would do - possible choke them of airflow and force them into high-speed-stall. airflow near walls is turbulent, and the funneling effect may suck the aircr…

Totally true. I imagine you'd have to have some kind of checkerboard of landing pads. And, if our flying cars are helicopters or multicopters, we've got more problems, because we can't actually stack that many helicopters over eachother, due to the interference of their air columns. :-/

I think realistically all of the caroplanes will be built more like quadrocopters than normal aircraft. It's much less efficient but the only thing that really meets manuevability and safety constraints

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#147

Post by cooper12 »

bobsil1 wrote: post #81
danbruc wrote: post #31

Do we actually want flying cars? They are probably less efficient because you have to overcome gravity, they are probably going to be pretty noisy, falling out of the sky and smashing into the ground is a new failure mode, ... Flying cars are certainly a nice gadget, but do we really need or want them? I can only think of two good arguments for flying cars, entering the third dimension if we run out of space on the s…

You're thinking too narrowly. - Solve traffic - Live in Santa Cruz, commute to SF - Buy a mansion in Modesto, commute to Palo Alto - The views! These will be VTOL, electric, autonomous air taxis, not road-drivable cars.

Do people really believe that flying cars would solve traffic? Now all the traffic is in the sky! And thanks for ruining everyone else's view with your cars. Not to mention flying cars would be extremely hazardous depending on the height. You'd pretty much be required to create specific airways and means of signaling at busy locations. Congratulations, you just created another layer of roads.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#148

Post by cmurf »

paulddraper wrote: post #119
smallnamespace wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a lot more space in the air than on land. But that's mitigated by the fact that the failure modes and much, much worse. I can drive safely at highway speeds with a couple hundred feet of separation between cars. FAA rules on safe separation between planes laterally is about 3 miles , or about 50 times the distance, or 2500 times the surface area. Plus planes compete with one another for access to airports,…

A 3 mile horizontal radius has little to do with flying and a lot to do with speed. At ordinary commercial airline speeds, it's the equivalent of a "20-second rule" (i.e. it's the distance covered in 20 seconds by a 500-600mph vehicle).

There is a 250KIAS speed limit below 10000'MSL that applies to everyone flying VFR including airlines. They're quickly climbing out above that and end up being a non-factor. The real issue is all the other general aviation aircraft.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#149

Post by overcast »

Spooky23 wrote: post #142
overcast wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we need to think realistically, and economically. Improving, and incrementing familiar technology now. Not introducing another mess in the air. We haven't even got self-driving land vehicles, and we're just going to make the jump to aircraft that NO ONE is familiar with? We still rely on primitive controlled explosions to get off our planet. Sure it's a neat idea, but this isn't the Fifth Element world yet. U…

Self flying aircraft are much easier than cars. Fewer variables and years of experience in military contexts. My parents live in a rural area 16 mikes from our city center. Due to terrain and roads, it's a 30 mile/60 minute trip. With a flying car/shuttle, its no more than 20 minutes.

I'm going to infer you're talking about drones. There is a quantum leap difference between self flying military robots, and ones that carry humans around safely during rush hour crowds.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#150

Post by cooper12 »

dimino wrote: post #140
danbruc wrote: post #31

Do we actually want flying cars? They are probably less efficient because you have to overcome gravity, they are probably going to be pretty noisy, falling out of the sky and smashing into the ground is a new failure mode, ... Flying cars are certainly a nice gadget, but do we really need or want them? I can only think of two good arguments for flying cars, entering the third dimension if we run out of space on the s…

Yes, we want flying cars, and yes we "need" them if we want to solve congestion and traffic as our planet grows beyond 10 billion people.

> if we want to solve congestion and traffic as our planet grows beyond 10 billion people

These are all symptoms of a badly designed city. What a place like this needs is better infrastructure, especially public infrastructure such as bike lanes, buses, and trains so that a lot of that traffic isn't necessary. Getting more people into cars will only create more problems. All you're doing is moving that traffic and congestion into the sky. If you said we needed an airbus, I'd point you to my friend who is named "airplane".

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