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Flying cars

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Re: Flying cars

#51

Post by tabtab »

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…

Re: 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.

I would expect bots to control masses of flying cars in populated areas, not human drivers. The air is actually simpler to navigate because there's not much around besides other flying vehicles. You don't have pedestrians, potholes, fallen trees, fading lane paint, etc. (Maybe flying sharks during a sharknado, but those are relatively rare.)

Re: Flying cars

#53

Post by speakeron »

blauditore wrote: post #30
reacweb wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take off, landing and cruising are easy to automate. IMHO, the single purpose of a pilot is to handle failures. The experience (for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 ) shows that it is difficult to react correctly when inputs are unreliable and that many crash are avoided thanks to smart (and creative) pilots (see Hudson landing).

> Take off, landing and cruising are easy to automate. Agree with take off and cruising, but landing is magnitudes more complex, at least much more difficult for humans. Do you have a source that this is reliably automated? > many crash are avoided thanks to smart (and creative) pilots (see Hudson landing). Actually, the emergency plan in case of engine failure after take off always gets discussed on ground before ea…

> Agree with take off and cruising, but landing is magnitudes more complex, at least much more difficult for humans. Do you have a source that this is reliably automated?

Landing has been automated since the 1960s. The first airplane to do it in service was the De Havilland Trident[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flVcxfOnWi0

Re: Flying cars

#54

Post by qqn »

Thanks for the commentary guys, it’s been fascinating churning over all this even more. Thoughts:

- Safety is the same issue as always, only it’s being ironed out faster than before. Controlled vertical landings, 3D space, and redundancy help a lot. I don’t foresee many flying high enough to get really hurt. Maybe things like undercarriage cushions or redirected waterways underneath major traffic flows could help even more.

- Noise cancellation tech is already out there, as well as near-silent aircraft without moving parts: https://youtube.com/watch?v=boB6qu5dcCw

- Main arteries will be less condensed, but much more, much smaller traffic will appear and that’s going to be a new problem. The death knell for intracity public transport?

- Well-made points about “actual” flying cars not actually being used. Maybe it would have been the same for cars if someone made motorized horses instead of the automobile?

Thank you for all the resources. I really liked the random touchdown point, underlining how exact our tech already is. I've polished the post quite a bit, adding a lot of these extra things to it. If anyone can clarify the paper bag problem @brownbat mentioned and what @blunte meant by "s/trans/tele" I'd really appreciate it.

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