Do you want your neighbors to own flying car?
Good point, theres a small airfield near us and the occasional plane does a circuit overhead, which is different. 1000s every hour? Not so much.
Flying cars
21–30 of 54 posts
Re: Flying cars
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Small planes flown by amateurs are extremely unsafe compared to most kinds of transportation.
It's about the same if not less dangerous than riding a motorcycle. https://inspire.eaa.org/2017/05/11/how-safe-is-it/
Riding a motorcycle is extremely unsafe.
Re: Flying cars
#23Most 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…
Disagree. Autopilots for aircraft have been proven technology for 100 years . It's a dramatically easier problem because there are many fewer edge cases, more degrees of freedom for the control system to exploit, no fixed roads to follow, and less traffic. And with widespread use of transponders, aircraft talking to each other is already common. It's still considered future technology for cars.
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).
Re: Flying cars
#24In our small town Nitra/Slovakia/EU, there is one very motivated and intelligent inventor, who created a Car (that can actually drive on public roads)... Also the car can transform into plane... and fly 700km.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzYb68qXpD0
Actually now, He struggler's after investors took all the IP and removed the him self from the company. Very interesting story! Part of there sorry is "He" crash-landed the plane and survived! That's something you can't test on real person :) in fact very interesting story about a person who dedicated his life to a vision of flying car.
Re: Flying cars
#25Re: Flying cars
#26True 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.
>nobody told us only rich people would be able to afford them
Rich people will also have professional pilots anyway.
Re: Flying cars
#27True 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.
Even so, rich people don't seem to be "driving" them. They can afford overpriced Rolls Royces or Bentleys but don't see them buying flying cars. Wondering why, given that the technology has been around for a while.
Re: Flying cars
#28True 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.
> nobody told us only rich people would be able to afford them
This is not correct: William Gibson has warned about that as early as 1993: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." [0]
Re: Flying cars
#29Most 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?
> collision rate will be much much lower?
The issue is that when there's a failure of any kind, you can't just "pull-over" in a flying car. You need to land.
Flying cars just aren't going to be a big market, IMHO, in the foreseeable future. Pilots need to be qualified, and even then, they need to be in a place that can truly accommodate flying vehicles-- the middle of nowhere. And if you're going to that, you might as well buy an actual plane rather than an all-in-one hot mess of a flying car.
Re: Flying cars
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree. Autopilots for aircraft have been proven technology for 100 years . It's a dramatically easier problem because there are many fewer edge cases, more degrees of freedom for the control system to exploit, no fixed roads to follow, and less traffic. And with widespread use of transponders, aircraft talking to each other is already common. It's still considered future technology for cars.
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 each start, along with defining an emergency landing area. So I would assume the Hudson river often gets scoped in those preflight discussions, even though such incidents rarely ever happen.
Source: I took flight lessons a long time ago.