

Flights of fancy - Why airborne automobiles will never take off - emontero1
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13974188

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zck
I think there's another problem -- ease of driving. When driving a car, you
don't have to make many choices. Any directional choice is binary: do I turn
right here or not? As long as you stay on a road, the choices are limited for
you. Driving doesn't tax the mind. In an airplane, you have 360 degrees of
choice in addition to your climbing or descending angle. Drivers of air cars
will have to take a cue from airline pilots today, and set a heading, and then
correct it later. This requires more effort and planning than driving down Rt.
1 until the third stoplight, than turning left. It's more of a mental load
than many drivers are willing to take.

Also, when driving a car, you can use the brakes as a safety valve -- just hit
them if anything goes wrong. On any road, at any time, you can stop the car
and deal with the problem. There's nothing like that in an airplane; you can't
just land anywhere you want, anytime (there might even be other airplanes
below you, so you can't even descend).

The first problem could be solved by having intelligent autopilot -- GPS with
control over the system. The second could be solved by having air cars that
could hover.

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pg
It's usually a mistake to say never about technology. The future is very long.
Your correspondent would have done better to pitch this as an argument about
why flying cars are harder than people think, and say precisely what would
have to happen to make them work.

~~~
marvin
Hobby pilot here. This is one of my pet topics. A "flying car" is like "land-
running sailboat" - a "flying car" wouldn't be anything like a car, but would
serve the same purposes. Journalists always make this mistake.

Möller's approach won't work because their design uses too much energy. We
need a design that combines the great fuel efficiency of a good airplane with
the VTOL capability of a helicopter. This could be done.

Some of the remaining issues which make this difficult are, in short:

    
    
      Mechanical reliability (you can't just pull over if the engine fails)
      Existing regulation (airspaces are organized manually, rigidly and labor-intensively)
      Liability (one lawsuit after a crash and a new company is history)
      Investment (aviation is really expensive and no one wants to touch it)
      Weather (the plane must work in clouds and darkness)
      Training (landing a plane is a little harder than driving a car)
    

I think the wheather issue cannot be budged in the forseeable future -
sometimes it's just not safe to fly. So these hypothetical machines can't
replace cars.

In my opinion, most of the problems in this field are related to the US
political climate for aviation. Due to airline disasters, _all_ of aviation is
kept to a really strict safety standard, and any failure can and will be sued
to oblivion privately. The problems that these "flying car" companies are
actually shared by _every_ company that tries to make progress in aviation. If
you do anything that doesn't use 1960s technology, you have mountains of
certification and bureaucracy before you. For this reason, most of the really
cool planes are certified as experimental designs, and you have to assemble
them yourself.

The existing air traffic control system employs thousands of people and is
very resistant to change. It is very labor- and training-intensive, both on
the part of the controller and the pilot. But the part of it that doesn't
involve airliners could be automated if it wasn't for the culture of excessive
safety.

I actually wrote a comprehensive article about this last summer, but I'm
really self-conscious and didn't publish it. Pehaps I should.

~~~
eru
Please do so.

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bprater
At any moment, anti-gravity could be discovered and we would be off to the
races! Never say never!

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asdlfj2sd33
_The problems then, as now, were more regulatory than technical or economic.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was aghast at the volume of
additional air traffic Ford had in mind. The air-traffic control systems of
the day would have been overwhelmed. Ford promptly abandoned the idea, even
though its flying car would have been cheaper to build and operate than the
helicopters that subsequently took over most of their intended roles._

Is this true?

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RiderOfGiraffes
Comments also at: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687191>

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staunch
They need built in parachutes for the whole plane. That way amateurs can just
screw everything up and hit the parachute button.

~~~
spitfire
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Recovery_Systems>

It just gives amateurs more confidence to do stupid things (Like buy a hot
sport plane full of electronic gizmo's with nasty landing characteristics as
their first airplane). We do not want that.

What we need is the piper cub to be brought back cheaply. and more local
airstrips available to the public.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
The initial description on
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Recovery_Systems> reminded of what my
uncle - an amateur aerobatics pilot - says:

A good landing is one you can walk away from.

A _great_ landing is when they can use the aircraft again.

