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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

#101
post #90

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.

+1. Fliers can solve commute hell. Every building has roof, which can be used as a pad for fliers, which will solve problem with parking. Nuclear batteries can provide enough electricity for flier for years. We just need to develop safer nuclear batteries (LENR type?), which, in turn, requires better understanding of nuclear physics, which, in turn, requires to shoot some «shut-up and calculate» guys.

Not every building has a flat roof, or one that's so load bearing.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I doubt it, there's just so much space up there. So first, no concept of lanes. Thinking in 2D space, everything becomes a road. Increase that another dimension, so now everything is a road and there's hundreds of levels of road. As long as the flight software keeps the cars/planes a decent distance from each other traffic will never be an issue when flying. A much bigger problem will be parking, since no traffic mea…

I suspect that, even in 3d space, there will be a concept of lanes. You still want volumes of space designated for one direction or another, at the very least to reduce the number of collision-calculations the guiding system has to make.

Parking shouldn't be an issue? We'll have vertical parking structures that can be entered/exited on every level.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#103
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helicopters can land without power (autorotate) or if the tail rotator fails. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation

Yeah, I know a helicopter pilot, I was shocked when he told me that. Would love to hear a aviation enthusiast compare safety differences and failure modes between helicopter autorotation and plane glide...

I respectfully disagree with the other comment who said he'd rather take a helicopter. (I'm a private pilot of fixed-wing aircraft.)

For General Aviation safety, read the Joseph T. Nall report: https://www.aopa.org/-/media/files/aopa/home/training-and-sa...

To summarize, helicopters and airplanes enjoy a reasonably similar lethality. Approximately 15-20% of accidents (total) are fatal to one or more occupants. However, if you break it down to fatal-accidents-per-100,000-hours then helicopters are worse (1.5 vs 1.0) at least in 2013.

When it comes to general aviation safety, however, the far and away most important factor is the pilot. Unless you get damned unlucky, the vast majority of accidents are either avoidable or survivable if the pilot doesn't do something wrong. In helicopters, a controlled autorotation will be survivable most of the time. In airplanes, a controlled forced landing is the same.

Of course, you can have your cake and eat it too -- I recently purchased a Cirrus SR22-TN (airplane) which has a Ballistic Recovery System aka a parachute. If anything goes wrong you can pull the chute and the entire airplane will descend to the ground. :-)

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#104
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helicopters can land without power (autorotate) or if the tail rotator fails. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation

Yeah, I know a helicopter pilot, I was shocked when he told me that. Would love to hear a aviation enthusiast compare safety differences and failure modes between helicopter autorotation and plane glide...

Both are survivable, but in general a helicopter autorotation is much less forgiving. (source: I have a private helicopter pilot license)

In a airplane, a loss of engine power translates to slowing down. If you're on top of things, you will notice this and nose-down in order to maintain airspeed. If you fail to notice this, your airplane will stall, but even that can be recovered from by nosing down in time.

In a helicopter when you lose power this translates very quickly (with 4-5 seconds) into loss of rotor RPM. Within 1-2 seconds you must change the angle of the blades in order to enter the autorotation configuration - if your rotor speed drops below a certain RPM before you make this change, you drop out of the sky with no chance of recovery. Making this an automatic reaction is a big part of helicopter pilot training.

Once you have entered autorotation/glide, the next challenge is finding a suitable place to land. In both cases you ideally need a flat hard open surface, though airplanes generally need a longer area than helicopters. Unfortunately a helicopter has a very poor glide ratio - ~5:1 (5 feet horizontal for 1 ft vertical) while a light airplane has something like ~9:1 glide ratio. Furthermore most helicopters cruse at much lower altitudes (1K-3K ft above ground level) vs. light airplanes cruising 4K-8K ft AGL). So you end up having 1/2 to 1/4 the time and distance to find a suitable landing site.

When it comes to the actual landing itself, gliding vs autorotation are different but one is not necessarily more dangerous than the other. In both cases you have a well-defined set of ideal airspeeds, descent rates, etc. which will lead to everyone surviving the experience. And in both cases you don't earn your pilot license until you have demonstrated that you can consistently do this correctly.

One more nuance - light airplanes (eg: Cessnas) are easier to glide than heavier/faster airplanes because everything happens slower. Since light airplanes are also the cheapest to operate, they are most often found in the hands of new/inexperienced pilots - it is good that they are forgiving.

Meanwhile light helicopters like the Robinson R22 are actually much more difficult to autorotate than larger/heavier helicopters - everything happens faster and is less stable. Unfortunately since these helicopters happen to be the cheapest to operate, they also very often find themselves in the hands of new/inexperienced pilots. This was such a big problem that there is a special piece of federal aviation regulation (SFAR 73) which puts additional training requirements on pilots specifically for the Robinson R22 and R44 models.

In the big picture though, general aviation is incredibly safe. The vast majority of non-commercial accidents can be attributed to some form of human error - either poor pilot judgment or lax adherence to maintenance requirements.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>Not much to run into up there :) So far. In a future where people commute in flying cars while delivery drones descend from some flying warehouse I'm not so sure this stays true. The saving grace is probably that up there we don't have to accommodate legacy vehicles. We can just force all airborne vehicles to talk to each other with some universal collision avoidance/traffic routing protocol.

> We can just force all airborne vehicles to talk to each other with some universal collision avoidance/traffic routing protocol.

It's not exactly what you described, but in the US, the FAA already has a requirement for aircraft to broadcast their position and velocity in all but the least congested airspace by 2020 [1]. This has been in the works for over a decade [2], and among other things, the information provided by this system can be used to augment existing collision avoidance schemes [3].

[1] https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/adsb/faq/#o2

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillan...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#106
post #89
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The views! Obviously, these will be blocked by swarms of flying cars.

Long after they're blocked by swarms of delivery drones.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#107
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…

If we think it of as helicopter with less (?) noise and less helipad area the first market is probably the same that uses now helicopters for urban transport.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#108
post #91
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…

Two related things that first jump out to me as interesting: - Opens up a lot of potential living space which is geographically close, but not practically connected via transit arteries - Opens up living space in areas which are not passable by cars either because of terrain or in-tact wilderness (e.g. an off the grid home on a nearby mountain) Both would no doubt mostly benefit the rich, but well, nobody's shocked t…

Wouldn't you still have to build infrastructure to those places to build the homes in the first place? I guess if you are filthy rich you can just airlift things in and out again.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#109
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. Fliers can solve commute hell. Every building has roof, which can be used as a pad for fliers, which will solve problem with parking. Nuclear batteries can provide enough electricity for flier for years. We just need to develop safer nuclear batteries (LENR type?), which, in turn, requires better understanding of nuclear physics, which, in turn, requires to shoot some «shut-up and calculate» guys.

Not every building has a flat roof, or one that's so load bearing.

It's just expenses, not a challenge.

Re: Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars

#110
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bridge choke points, mountain ranges and other small body of water crossings is where electric flying cars / taxis will shine. It would be very useful in cities such as Seattle, SF or NYC. It would also be useful for places like Victoria-Vancouver or Victoria-Seattle. You either take an inconvenient ferry for ~3 hours or you could take an on demand air taxi for 30m.

But we already have point-to-point 4-seater "air taxis". They're way more expensive than a ferry otherwise they'd be everywhere, and there's no reason to think a flying car would be cheaper.

...I hate to be aggressive here, but did you read the darn article? It's the reason we're even on this page, and it directly addresses your point. That's even underselling it, the entire purpose of the article is to ask and answer your point.
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