
Flying cars - qqn
https://spmx.ca/flyingcars
======
blunte
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 die before that becomes a thing.

Some HN readers are working for auto driving companies, and they know how hard
it is to be safe on the ground. Now add the whole of vertical space, plus
aerodynamics, to the equation. These people might as well put their energy
into teleportation (not really a pun intended, but it's kind of there).

s/trans/tele

~~~
harperlee
On the other hand, software that manages traffic in the air automatically
might be much more simple. No kids suddenly crossing the street, no traffic
deviations due to construction, no obsolete system of signalling that can be
manually overriden by any construction worker, etc.

~~~
onemoresoop
No unpredictible flying things like birds, no invisible wind gusts, no air
currents, clear trajectories, etc

~~~
bdamm
Birds already do most of the work to avoid collisions, and automated control
of low-flying "cars" can work if there's a good system of coordination
(ADS-B++) and "lanes". Yes, we can have lanes, which I imagine will exist in
layers above freeways. Of course there will be times where weather shuts down
the air traffic, but with computer control of the aircraft's navigation they
could be usefully integrated into the national highways and airspaces.

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dreamcompiler
True 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.

~~~
trilila
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.

~~~
scottlocklin
I'm pretty sure there are no quarter million dollar flying cars which are not
obvious death traps.

The original flying car was the light helicopter, particularly the designs by
Robinson Helicopter in the 1970s. The idea was that upper middle class
professionals (doctors, lawyers, maybe computer programmers, etc) would prefer
to learn the helicopter and commute into the city from the countryside than
drive to work. This idea didn't pan out, because many/most professionals
prefer city life (once the race riots stopped in the 70s), and flying light
helicopters is both difficult/stressful, extremely expensive ($200/hr) and
fairly dangerous (motorcycle tier or worse). Those who do it, do it as a
hobby.
[https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/helicopters](https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/helicopters)

------
vtrips
"We have flying cars today, they're called helicopters" \- Neil deGrasse Tyson

~~~
i_feel_great
"We have self-driving vehicles today, the are called buses and trains" \- lots
of people

~~~
TeMPOraL
"We have level-5 autonomous vehicles today. They're called horses." \- me.

------
hestipod
I remember the Moller Sky Car ads that were in every Popular Science magazine
of my youth 35-40 years ago. That beautiful, deep red, futuristic machine with
the rotating engine pods was something little me was sure I'd be flying around
in some day. Life disappoints.

~~~
diggernet
I know how you feel. I used to live in the same town as them, and dropped by
their location once to check it out. But still no SkyCar in my garage.
Surprisingly, it appears they still exist.

[https://moller.com/](https://moller.com/)

~~~
hestipod
Yeah I read some article years ago saying they were embroiled in lawsuits. I
am surprised they are still claiming the M400 is "in development" after this
long. Sadly seems more of a long term money siphon than any real project.

------
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](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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thomasdd
In 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](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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroMobil_s.r.o._AeroMobil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroMobil_s.r.o._AeroMobil)

[https://www.aeromobil.com/](https://www.aeromobil.com/)

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dvh
Do you want your neighbors to own flying car?

~~~
benj111
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.

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mettamage
For people who are into this, also check out the goflyprize.com

It was pretty fun to see what designs people came up with. I think some of
these companies even had YouTube videos with prototypes already working.

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gkfasdfasdf
I wonder what a typical sky would look like in any semi populated area if
flying cars take over. Seems like open blue sky would become another luxury of
rural living.

------
coldtea
(...) the American imagination has frozen up solid around the unworkable
fantasy of the flying car.

Listen to most discussions of flying cars on the privileged end of the
geekoisie and you can count on hearing a very familiar sort of rhetoric
endlessly rehashed. Flying cars first appeared in science fiction—everyone
agrees with that—and now that we have really advanced technology, we ought to
be able to make flying cars. QED!

The thing that’s left out of most of these bursts of gizmocentric cheerleading
is that we’ve had flying cars for more than a century now, we know exactly how
well they work, and—ahem—that’s the reason nobody drives flying cars.

Let’s glance back at a little history, always the best response to this kind
of futuristic cluelessness. The first actual flying car anyone seems to have
built was the Curtiss Autoplane, which was designed and built by aviation
pioneer Glen Curtiss and debuted at the Pan-American Aeronautical Exposition
in 1917. It was cutting-edge technology for the time, with plastic windows and
a cabin heater. It never went into production, since the resources it would
have used got commandeered when the US entered the First World War a few
months later, and by the time the war was over Curtiss apparently had second
thoughts about his invention and put his considerable talents to other uses.

There were plenty of other inventors ready to step into the gap, though, and a
steady stream of flying cars took to the roads and the skies in the years
thereafter. The following are just a few of the examples. The Waterman
Arrowbile on the left, invented by the delightfully named Waldo Waterman, took
wing in 1937; it was a converted Studebaker car—a powerhouse back in the days
when a 100-hp engine was a big deal. Five of them were built.

During the postwar technology boom in the US, Consolidated Vultee, one of the
big aerospace firms of that time, built and tested the ConVairCar model 118 on
the right in 1947, with an eye to the upper end of the consumer market; the
inventor was Theodore Hall. There was only one experimental model built, and
it flew precisely once.

The Aero-Car on the left had its first test flights in 1966. Designed by
inventor Moulton Taylor, it was the most successful of the flying cars, and is
apparently the only one of the older models that still exists in flyable
condition. It was designed so that the wings and tail could be detached by one
not particularly muscular person, and turned into a trailer that could be
hauled behind the body for on-road use. Six were built.

Most recently, the Terrafugia on the right managed a test flight all of eight
minutes long in 2009; the firm is still trying to make their creation meet FAA
regulations, but the latest press releases insist stoutly that deliveries will
begin in two years. If you’re interested, you can order one now for a mere
US$196,000.00, cash up front, for delivery at some as yet undetermined point
in the future.

When people insist that we’ll have flying cars sometime very soon, in other
words, they’re more than a century behind the times. We’ve had flying cars
since 1917. The reason that everybody isn’t zooming around on flying cars
today isn’t that they don’t exist. The reason that everybody isn’t zooming
around on flying cars today is that flying cars are a really dumb idea, for
the same reason that it’s a really dumb idea to try to run a marathon and have
hot sex at the same time.

Any automotive engineer can tell you that there are certain things that make
for good car design. Any aeronautical engineer can tell you that there are
certain things that make for good aircraft design. It so happens that by and
large, as a result of those pesky little annoyances called the laws of
physics, the things that make a good car make a bad plane, and vice versa. To
cite only one of many examples, a car engine needs torque to handle hills and
provide traction at slow speeds, an airplane engine needs high speed to
maximize propeller efficiency, and torque and speed are opposites: you can
design your engine to have a lot of one and a little of the other or vice
versa, or you can end up in the middle with inadequate torque for your wheels
and inadequate speed for your propeller. There are dozens of such tradeoffs,
and a flying car inevitably ends up stuck in the unsatisfactory middle.

Thus what you get with a flying car is a lousy car that’s also a lousy
airplane, for a price so high that you could use the same money to buy a good
car, a good airplane, and a really nice sailboat or two into the bargain.
That’s why we don’t have flying cars. It’s not that nobody’s built one; it’s
that people have been building them for more than a century and learning, or
rather not learning, the obvious lesson taught by them. What’s more, as the
meme above hints, the problems with flying cars won’t be fixed by one more
round of technological advancement, or a hundred more rounds, because those
problems are hardwired into the physical realities with which flying cars have
to contend. One of the great unlearned lessons of our time is that a bad idea
doesn’t become a good idea just because someone comes up with some new bit of
technology to enable it.

JMG

~~~
balt_s
Wow, I thought that writing sounded familiar; fancy encountering you here, Mr
Greer! Huge fan.

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reggie44
Most people cant handle driving on the road, let alone in the sky. Especially
if there are more people in the air. Wait until the cars start falling out of
the sky killing people.

