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Where The Hell Are The Flying Cars? It's The 21st Century!

There are several flying quadcopters about for one person, based on the 'drone' model. E.g.

http://newatlas.com/workhorse-suref.../49866/?li_source=LI&li_medium=default-widget

workhorse-surefly-helicopter-range-extended-electric-quadcopter-6.jpg


I suspect that battery life/capacity is the hold-up to large-scale deployment at the moment, as it is for most electrical things.

The next hold -up will be training and regulation.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
Back around 1947 or 1948, when I was six or seven, I watched an American newsreel which featured a gentleman who'd invented his own flying automobile.

Upon landing, the wings, rudder and propeller came off and got stored on the roof of the vehicle, which was then ready for regular road travel. The car could then be re-fitted for air travel again in about 30 minutes,

The newsreel added that the inventor was launching a factory to mass-produce his flying automobiles.

I wondered long after why I never heard again of this guy or his invention.

It was at least two decades later that I learned that this fellow had fatally crashed his sky-car within a few months of the newsreel being shown in theaters.
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I wonder if it was the Airphibian ? (without checking the dates) ..

 
hunck said:
... You wouldn't want to fall off with those rotors inches away.
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It appears to me they took crash safety into account ...

Any off-center / hard landing that would splinter the rotor blades and sheer off your legs at the knees would breach the battery packs, and the ensuing fireball would instantaneously cauterize the wounds ... :thought:

:evillaugh:
 
It looks pretty stable in that demo flight. Probably some computerised stabilisation technology?
 
Probably, otherwise I suspect it would need a gifted helicopter pilot, which seems rather to piss on the whole concept.

I'm sure we'd all fancy a go on one, though it's a Ground Effect Vehicle rather than an aircraft as such....but it sort of flies, and looks cool.
 
What would be the stopping distance from,say, 60 MPH ?

INT21
 
Back on September 2004,(just thirteen years ago) annonymous wrote..

...
I'd say it was more feasible in the short term to have everyone's car controlled at a central point. Simply punch in your destination and sit back. No road rage, no speeding, optimized traffic flow, near zero accidents, less stress, never get lost.
Giving some of the assholes on the road a flying car is laughable...

Does it not sound familiar today.

INT21
 
INT21 said:
Back on September 2004,(just thirteen years ago) annonymous wrote..

...
I'd say it was more feasible in the short term to have everyone's car controlled at a central point. Simply punch in your destination and sit back. No road rage, no speeding, optimized traffic flow, near zero accidents, less stress, never get lost.
Giving some of the assholes on the road a flying car is laughable...

Does it not sound familiar today.

INT21
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Yes, it really is a daft idea if you ask me, which you didn't.

Certainly in a UK context, the Powers That Be don't seem to much like the General Aviation scene even as it exists now, despite their protestations to the contrary. There aren't that many privately operated aircraft in these islands and yet they are being squeezed out more and more through airspace grabs and airfield closures - the landowners (including councils) aren't interested in popular flying, they're interested in making cash out of building roads and houses, which is far more profitable and far, far easier. If, as a private pilot, you barely stray into the wrong airspace for thirty seconds you can expect the most almighty bollocking, Kafkaesque persecution from the CAA, a painful fine, and worse. Thefore the idea that anyone who fancies it could just fly about where they like isn't at all realistic.

The only way the 1950's-style consumerist fantasy of every man and his dog bimbling around in flying cars might come close to working would necessarily involve massive automation along the lines of 'driverless' cars (see quoted post above) to ensure any reasonable level of safety, the introduction of low altitude 'motorways in the sky', the construction of countless more landing sites in the places people need to get to - complete with complex approach procedures - all of which would no doubt be publicly subsidised via our taxes.

Any mass-produced flying car would have to be VTOL/VSTOL, unless we find a way to build runways every few hundred yards all over the place, but even with rotary-wing aircraft nowadays only a handful of wealthy types are actually able to do anything as car-like as land in their gardens or workplaces - even those ones with autogyros that you can put down on a snooker table. I know people who fly VIPs about in choppers and, excluding the odd helipad atop a building or at posh country hotels, such journeys almost invariably involve long taxi/limousine rides at each end. It's mainly done for show.

So I can't see people using little fibreglass drone things to nip to the primary school or take a faulty barbeque set back to Morrissons. It might be possible to build futuristic 'cities in the sky' designed around the flying car, but that's not the built environment we live in right now. And in any event we might want to ponder the ugliness and pollution that our automobile obsession has wrought and think about whether we want our skies permanently darkened with streams of traffic.
 
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A feasible future flying car? Perhaps a good prototype to develope from.

 
Yes, for sports / recreation below, and away from, controlled airspace, buildings and other structures etc etc...
 
Whilst driving recently back from Manchester in the fairly heavy traffic on the M62. Cars to the left of me, trucks to the right (stuck in an (auto)mobile with you). Cars to the front and to the rear, all doing between 50 and 70 mph whilst jostling for position at the turn offs. It crossed my mind that some looney wants all this to be controlled by AI.
And you want this in three dimensions ?

INT21
 
INT21 said:
... And you want this in three dimensions ? ...
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Yeah - this is the bit that baffles me. Modern humans have amply demonstrated their inability to safely navigate and maneuver in two dimensions. What chance will they have with three at issue? :nails:
 

Despite appearances this must be a flying car; it has a clutch and a gear shift!

:plane: :omg: :omg::omg:
 
Vardoger said:
A feasible future flying car? Perhaps a good prototype to develope from.
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I do not believe this exists, as a genuine commercial offering. And I am unconvinced as to precisely what it is we see depicted here.

This will not be on sale 'later this year'.

There are far too many similarly-produced videos of home-built/startup flying machines.

Let me emphasise a word from the sentence above. Videos. With multiple splice-edits and post-production tweaks...and more.

What I want to see, now, is a range of proper technical specifications.
  • Details on the energy density of the batteries versus flying range / endurance
  • Maximum all-up weight (including passenger weight-ranges).
  • Maxima in terms of cross-winds.
  • Mechanisms to automatically prevent exceeding a (safe) flight altitude.
  • Mechanisms used for ground/sea detection to assist auto-landing.
  • Auto ground proximity push-back for nap-of-earth flying.
  • Lift capacity per propellor/motor assembly.
  • Vehicle behaviour following total failure of all power.
  • Options for safety recovery systems eg ballistic....
  • Automous deconfliction and navigation systems

This so far is just tech-porn. It's like Google Glass. Something fractionally-beyond an aspiring prototype, but not a product.

Fictional tantalising quasi-concept demonstrators, that are little more than visual marketing exploits.

I would be among the first be all over this, if it were a tangible reality. But it doesn't convince me at all.

And I'm unsure what is really going on, here, beyond social stimulation and distraction.
 
Quite, these non-stories crop up all the time. Which doesn't mean that someone hasn't invented a lightweight material or clever electric motor or whatever.
 
An 2015 interview with Paul Moller, President of Moller International and the inventor of the modern Flying Car – known as the Moller Skycar, joins David to discuss his development, and the challenges represented by the idea of flying cars.

 
It looks so cool. But! All those years in development, and I don't think I have ever seen a video of it flying untethered.
Some people have accused Moller of just using it as a way of attracting investment.
 
Mythopoeika said:
It looks so cool. But! All those years in development, and I don't think I have ever seen a video of it flying untethered.
Some people have accused Moller of just using it as a way of attracting investment.
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He says in the interview that he has personally piloted it at an altitude 'high enough to kill himself', but I confess that he set of my dissembling & obfuscation-radar more than once in his replies.
 
Yithian said:
He says in the interview that he has personally piloted it at an altitude 'high enough to kill himself', but I confess that he set of my dissembling & obfuscation-radar more than once in his replies.
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Yeah, he said '100 feet', but then he said 'even 10 feet was dangerous'. I'd want to fly it higher than 10 feet off the ground. I think there are some serious issues with the design that he's not acknowledging or revealing to the public.
 
Here's another one. Not so much a flying car as a passenger carrying drone.

2 seater, 18 motors, & parachutes just in case! Only 30 minute flight time, being tested in Dubai. Never going to be any use in crowded areas though.

The-flying-taxi-is-seen-in-Dubai.jpg
 
Only any use as an 'emergency bailout from tall building' vehicle.
 
Awesome. They can do it over there because they're a bit lax with regulation.
It'll be a long time before these things are authorised in Europe or the USA.
 
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