
Terrafugia's flying car model has been approved for tests in US airspace - prostoalex
http://www.sciencealert.com/terrafugia-s-flying-car-has-just-been-given-approval-to-run-in-air-tests
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Kurtz79
"Now, before you get too excited, the model they’ll be testing in US airspace
is not only unmanned - it's a mere tenth of the size of their actual flying
car prototype."

HN submissions should come color-coded according to link-baitness level.

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geff82
"Flying Car" seems so cool, but really think about it. Would you drive your
car-airplane around on the ground all the time? An airplane already costs lots
of money to maintain when it is only flying and sitting at the airport. Now
you also have to pay even more for it for the wear of driving on the streets.
I mean, this is really only an option to drive from your home to the airport
from time to time (not for every flight). And in those cases, you might be
able to find some kind of stowable airplane where you can remove the wings
from, store them on a trailer and just get that thing home safe.

Honestly, I hope we one day have a solution for some Quadcopter-style of
private transportation (best: electric). That would make completely new styles
of cities possible as streets would be only used to walk around. Endless
nature, no streets in it... just houses with Quadcopters on their roofs, ready
to fly away... (still hope they have some kind of crash avoidance system, so
flying to the next big time baseball match doesn't result in many deaths each
time).

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jobu
Their promotional video shows this vehicle as a VTOL aircraft, so
theoretically you could drive to a parking lot and go :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=188&v=wHJTZ7k0BX...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=188&v=wHJTZ7k0BXU)

However, even if they do get the VTOL working successfully (many others have
failed) there will likely be some regulatory hurdles for flying out of a
neighborhood. That isn't unheard of though. There are suburban communities
built around small airports with direct access to the runways (similar to golf
course communities).

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Xophmeister
Why would anyone realistically -- i.e., outside the realm of pure fantasy --
want a flying car? People can barely handle one-and-a-bit dimensions at 70mph
(i.e., a road with discrete lanes), how well do you think the general
population would cope with this? Maybe autonomous flying vehicles would be
more practical, but that still leaves the other two main problems wide open:

1\. The energy required to keep the vehicle in the air.

2\. The boarding-and-alighting (i.e., landing) bottleneck.

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balabaster
> People can barely handle one-and-a-bit dimensions at 70mph

+1 just for this statement alone.

So far, statistics say that flying is safer by orders of magnitude than
driving your car... that statistic will likely plummet to many orders of
magnitude in the opposite direction if flying cars become a thing.

If we _do_ end up with flying cars being the norm, I would hope they will be
autonomous and not have people manually flying them without a full pilots
license being required.

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jacquesm
Correction: statistics say that _commercial air travel_ is safer by orders of
magnitude than driving your car.

General aviation is already a lot worse than that today, and even pilot
certification does not preclude accidents in general aviation. It is the whole
process around safety put into practice at commercial airlines and numerous
design details present in commercial aircraft that make flying with a
commercial carrier as safe as it is.

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ufmace
I was going to say something like that, but also, consider the maintenance
differences. You can get away with treating a modern car pretty badly, and
many people do quite often. What happens when people start putting off
standard maintenance for months or years because they couldn't afford it or
never got around to it?

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dogma1138
It's a 1 to 10 scaled model basically a custom themed drone. It will be using
batteries rather than the proposed final powerplant and will be most likely
crafted out of different materials.

Size doesn't scale, even if the thrust to weight ration will be similar there
would be probably 1000 of other differences that will not translate in any
meaningful manner to a final full sized model.

Also why do they need permission at all? this is a drone flown in closed
private airspace. This is pretty much stretching it as far as veil press
releases go.

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matheweis
> Also why do they need permission at all?

Because in the last few years as the FAA has gone on their power trip to gain
control of small unmanned aircraft, they have deemed any and all commercial
activity involving model aircraft illegal unless there is an exception in
place.

> this is a drone flown in closed private airspace.

According to the FAA, there is no such thing as "closed private airspace"
unless you are flying indoors or at least some kind of enclosure.

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billbail
They claim "1 MW" of power is supplied to the motors with batteries and a
300bhp engine but since 1 bhp =(roughly) 0.75 KW the batteries would need to
supply 775KW the power and the combustion engine would not be able to keep the
batteries charged sufficiently.

I'm not an expert on car power systems but this doesn't appear to be feasible.

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daveguy
flying cars will never be a thing because the efficiency of getting an object
into the air and keeping it in the air is always going to be more inefficient
than rolling it along the ground with wheels. Ok, never is a long time, but
not until we have "mr fusions" and more cheap safe power than we know what to
do with. We will get automated cars before this (as people have pointed out
automation would be required for flight). When automated cars are ubiquitous
the efficiency and speed of ground transport will be that much higher and
personal flight will be even less attractive.

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lukev
I'm not an aeronautical engineer, but the fuselage/wing size ratio on that is
way bigger than anything I've seen that actually flies.

Is something that looks like that even a little bit possible?

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jobu
Not the most successful comparison, but it looks proportionally similar to the
V-22 Osprey (also a VTOL aircraft).

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jacquesm
Not really, the Osprey has much more horizontal wing surface relative to its
size and it has a tail surface and double stabilizer as well. That's a
completely different geometry much closer to a conventional aircraft than the
subject of this thread. This new vehicle also has a ducted fan for more
forward thrust (I suspect this is because mounting larger tilt rotors was
impossible given the constraints on height of the vehicle).

It'll be a close race between this one and the Moller sky car which one will
hit the dealerships first.

/sarcasm.

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MichaelGG
Didn't they already do a test flight of their first model, the one they took
reservations on? The Transition?

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MrBuddyCasino
I'm confused, are they powered by batteries or what?

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markbnj
After watching the video on the linked page it seems to be a hybrid gasoline-
electric system. But you can be forgiven your confusion, since the video
apparently could get some of the other details straight. Moments after show
the prop blades extending they described the power head as a "ducted fan," and
then a few seconds later showed it scooting through the air with the blades
folded.

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matheweis
It appears to me that the "power head" / vtol portion is electric, and that
there is a separate - presumably gasoline - "ducted fan" in the rear of the
vehicle.

That would eliminate a substantial number of drivetrain complexities for the
vtol / early forward portion of flight.

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markbnj
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for clearing it up. So they use the fans for lift
until you get enough forward speed then tuck them.

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thingsgoby
Will never happen

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xgbi
1MW for take-off? Lol?

