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Flying cars

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Re: Flying cars

#41

Post by onemoresoop »

harperlee wrote: post #7
blunte wrote: post #2

Most people are lucky to drive a year without a costly mistake. Put them in the air, and their mistake (or a self-driving mistake) means death. And even if we can make personal air travel safe, how ever are we going to coordinate it? I appreciate the advances we gain from the crazy/idealistic people who invest time or money on flying car ideas, but it is just never going to happen. The earth will burn and humans will…

On the other hand, software that manages traffic in the air automatically might be much more simple. No kids suddenly crossing the street, no traffic deviations due to construction, no obsolete system of signalling that can be manually overriden by any construction worker, etc.

No unpredictible flying things like birds, no invisible wind gusts, no air currents, clear trajectories, etc

Re: Flying cars

#42

Post by brownbat »

unrealhoang wrote: post #10
blunte wrote: post #2

Most people are lucky to drive a year without a costly mistake. Put them in the air, and their mistake (or a self-driving mistake) means death. And even if we can make personal air travel safe, how ever are we going to coordinate it? I appreciate the advances we gain from the crazy/idealistic people who invest time or money on flying car ideas, but it is just never going to happen. The earth will burn and humans will…

Isn't it going to be easier to be safe on the sky as there's much more space, i.e. collision rate will be much much lower?

There's a lot of open space available, but transportation doesn't evenly distribute itself among the available space. There will be clustering points because people want to go the same places or use the same thoroughfares, and those areas will have higher risks of collisions.

Before the 60s, collisions were rare per mile traveled, but a roughly yearly occurrence across major commercial airlines. It took a lot of policy and engineering work to reduce their frequency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-air_collision

Automated systems might be able to fix this? They wouldn't have to deal with the paper bag problem, just avoiding every obstacle, so that's a plus. But sudden braking isn't the near universal solution or mitigation that it is with driving, and predicting the movement of other airborne objects is really hard, so those are minuses.

Beyond collision prevention, there's an interesting general question in this thread about whether automated flying or automated driving is a more difficult engineering problem.

I can see arguments for both sides, would love to hear a really thorough analysis, preferably by someone who has worked on either or both problems.

Re: Flying cars

#43

Post by gkfasdfasdf »

I wonder what a typical sky would look like in any semi populated area if flying cars take over. Seems like open blue sky would become another luxury of rural living.

Re: Flying cars

#44

Post by lordgrenville »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #18

True flying cars exist. I watched one go from car mode to plane mode, fly around, land, and drive off the runway in car mode again at EAA in 2013. They work and they meet all the expectations we had when we were kids. Except one: They cost over a quarter million dollars. Everybody said we'd have flying cars, but nobody told us only rich people would be able to afford them.

This is why I hate when people say "we were promised flying cars, we got 140 characters". We totally have flying cars! We just don't use them because learning to fly safely is way too expensive and impractical for most people. (The relevant corollary being, if it wasn't, more producers would enter the market and flying cars would become affordable.)

Re: Flying cars

#45

Post by balt_s »

coldtea wrote: post #36

(...) the American imagination has frozen up solid around the unworkable fantasy of the flying car. Listen to most discussions of flying cars on the privileged end of the geekoisie and you can count on hearing a very familiar sort of rhetoric endlessly rehashed. Flying cars first appeared in science fiction—everyone agrees with that—and now that we have really advanced technology, we ought to be able to make flying c…

Wow, I thought that writing sounded familiar; fancy encountering you here, Mr Greer! Huge fan.

Re: Flying cars

#46

Post by tannerc »

blunte wrote: post #2

Most people are lucky to drive a year without a costly mistake. Put them in the air, and their mistake (or a self-driving mistake) means death. And even if we can make personal air travel safe, how ever are we going to coordinate it? I appreciate the advances we gain from the crazy/idealistic people who invest time or money on flying car ideas, but it is just never going to happen. The earth will burn and humans will…

Undoubtedly you're right: getting flying cars to work is an unfathomably difficult task.

But does that mean it truly will "never" happen? I imagine saying we'll never see flying cars reach mainstream is akin to those who once thought attaching a motor to a horse carriage would never work (though, to your point, the triumph of the motorized vehicle has brought disastrous outcomes along with its benefits)[1]. It's hard to see the future when all we've got is the past and present to evaluate it by.

And yet, we've had private aircraft for hundreds of years and that's gone reasonably well. Scaling that private fleet up and including car-like vehicles doesn't seem too far off, though the challenges are numerous and daunting. Flying cars will likely not include the same amount of training and preparation as private planes. The gamble seems to be software can help take on much of the burden, only time will tell if that's going to pan out.

1. What about those who could never fathom a globally connected network of information? Or the precedence of touch-based interfaces? Or the reliable, safe electric car?

Re: Flying cars

#47

Post by [deleted] »

harperlee wrote: post #7
blunte wrote: post #2

Most people are lucky to drive a year without a costly mistake. Put them in the air, and their mistake (or a self-driving mistake) means death. And even if we can make personal air travel safe, how ever are we going to coordinate it? I appreciate the advances we gain from the crazy/idealistic people who invest time or money on flying car ideas, but it is just never going to happen. The earth will burn and humans will…

On the other hand, software that manages traffic in the air automatically might be much more simple. No kids suddenly crossing the street, no traffic deviations due to construction, no obsolete system of signalling that can be manually overriden by any construction worker, etc.

[deleted]

Re: Flying cars

#48

Post by bdamm »

onemoresoop wrote: post #41
harperlee wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, software that manages traffic in the air automatically might be much more simple. No kids suddenly crossing the street, no traffic deviations due to construction, no obsolete system of signalling that can be manually overriden by any construction worker, etc.

No unpredictible flying things like birds, no invisible wind gusts, no air currents, clear trajectories, etc

Birds already do most of the work to avoid collisions, and automated control of low-flying "cars" can work if there's a good system of coordination (ADS-B++) and "lanes". Yes, we can have lanes, which I imagine will exist in layers above freeways. Of course there will be times where weather shuts down the air traffic, but with computer control of the aircraft's navigation they could be usefully integrated into the national highways and airspaces.

Re: Flying cars

#49

Post by simonebrunozzi »

blunte wrote: post #2

Most people are lucky to drive a year without a costly mistake. Put them in the air, and their mistake (or a self-driving mistake) means death. And even if we can make personal air travel safe, how ever are we going to coordinate it? I appreciate the advances we gain from the crazy/idealistic people who invest time or money on flying car ideas, but it is just never going to happen. The earth will burn and humans will…

I don't agree with your sentiment. There are many possible ways to make this work in a useful way. Let me try with just the first example that comes to mind. I live in the Bay area and I'll use it as the environment.

Imagine a dozen or so "carports" for these flying cars, conveniently located close to where people need to commute to/from. Trace routes between these, and setup scheduled travels between them with a high enough frequency. Now all of a sudden you can commute from Marin county to downtown SF, or from SF to Oakland, in just a few minutes, while at the same time removing cars from the existing road infrastructure.

Yes, there's the problem of noise. Cities are already very noisy, what if you limit these flying cars to a time window where it doesn't annoy people too much, e.g. 8am to 7pm.

Still on noise: what if you devise a way to limit the noise when close to the actual carport, e.g. with sound barriers that mitigate the noise for the first 50-60 feet of take-off or landing.

What if the first 300 feet of take-off and landing are assisted with a different vehicle, built on purpose to make less noise than a flying car?

Or, what if noise is too bad, and you limit this to placing carports in areas where you won't disturb neighbors too much, and where the path between two carports is over the ocean, e.g. Santa Cruz to San Francisco, or Miur Beach to Ocean Beach.

On the driver: I wouldn't want a human being to be in control. These routes should be taken by completely automated vehicles. It's easier to accomplish than a level-5 autonomous car, because you don't have obstacles - especially if these route corridors become a no-fly zone for other things like drones, etc.

Here you are, it's a poorly designed plan, but it's a start.

And I'm sure that by iterating more and more the plan can become acceptable, then viable, then a good idea.

Re: Flying cars

#50

Post by hestipod »

diggernet wrote: post #14
hestipod wrote: post #9

I remember the Moller Sky Car ads that were in every Popular Science magazine of my youth 35-40 years ago. That beautiful, deep red, futuristic machine with the rotating engine pods was something little me was sure I'd be flying around in some day. Life disappoints.

I know how you feel. I used to live in the same town as them, and dropped by their location once to check it out. But still no SkyCar in my garage. Surprisingly, it appears they still exist. https://moller.com/

Yeah I read some article years ago saying they were embroiled in lawsuits. I am surprised they are still claiming the M400 is "in development" after this long. Sadly seems more of a long term money siphon than any real project.
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