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

Meanwhile, the inventors keep on experimenting ... 'Experiment' seems to be the right term, insofar as this one describes his design as "a trial and error process."

Inventor-takes-flying-car-for-successful-test-flight.jpg

Inventor takes flying car for successful test flight
A Philippines inventor said his homemade flying car has completed its first successful test flight after six years of development.

Kyxz Mendoza of Quezon City said his "Ultralight Aircraft" reached heights of 25 feet during the test flight, which was recorded on video and posted online.

He said the test flight came after six years of working on his invention, which uses drone-style multicopter technology to attain flight.

''We've been having bad weather so it took as a while after our deadline before we can finally show it to our followers. But after two months of tuning, here it is. I hope everyone will give this vehicle a positive reaction. This was only a dream for us five years ago," Mendoza said.

The inventor said he is seeing investors so he can mass-produce the vehicles.

''It's a flying car type of vehicle that uses drone technology or multicopter technology to fly. It's like a drone car," he said. ''I wanted it to be a sports car, a flying Lamborghini, maybe. The design was a trial and error process. Some materials burned up on use. Other materials didn't quite work.''

SOURCE: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2018/0...or-successful-test-flight/5401536777428/?sl=5
 
Actually quite impressive, considering the low budget he probably has.
Could be improved with computerised stabilisation.
 
This one doesn't have wings but it does have legs.

Like the sushirrito and the Rollie Eggmaster, the wheel is the certified product of the human brain, unmatched in ingenuity by eons of evolution.

Now, after 5,000 years of transportation advances built on the ability to roll from A to B, Hyundai has decided it's time to move on. Today at CES in Las Vegas, the automaker fleshed out the details on an insect-like concept car that isn’t limited by its wheels. This thing also has legs, which allow it to go where there are no roads, by trekking or climbing over difficult terrain, fording rivers, clambering over crumbled concrete, or even climbing stairs.

In this city without restraint, CES is a safe space to showcase outrageous concepts unlikely to make it to production. But Hyundai has thought through a business case for the machine it’s calling Elevate, or the Ultimate Mobility Vehicle (how about the ummmm … V?). It pitches the blend of car, robot, and Mars rover as the ideal machine for first responders. While a car or truck would get stumped at the edge of a debris field of broken buildings, for example, the Elevate can just clamber on over, to the heart of the problem, instead of leaving firefighters or anyone else to trek in on foot. Hyundai says that, with a modular platform, the body atop the walking wheels could be swapped out for different applications. It also shows a taxi concept that can climb entrance steps to a building, to allow wheelchair users to roll in and out easily.

https://www.wired.com/story/hyundai... NL 010819 (1)&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nl
 
What ever happened to walking ?

Is Wall-E the future ?

INT21.
 
And now...

Flying Cars On Stilts!

PLATTSBURGH, NEW YORK, is a tough place to be outside in early January. The small city sits on the western shore of Lake Champlain, 20 miles south of the Canadian border. I’ve just arrived with Kyle Clark and a few of his colleagues, after a quick flight in a 40-year-old Cessna from Burlington, Vermont, on the other side of the lake. It’s snowing, and as we shuffle across the mostly abandoned former Air Force base toward a secluded hangar, I ask Clark if the weather might ice today’s flight plans.

He looks at me and laughs, opening the hangar door. “Not a chance.”

It’s no surprise that Clark—tall, athletic, copiously tattooed, and a former pro hockey player—doesn’t mind the winter weather. But these seem like conditions that would threaten the test flight of a rather complex, entirely new, fully electric aircraft. One whose eight motors and rotors must work in computerized synchrony to keep the ship aloft and true, whether going up, down, or forward.

Clark will have none of such worries. He bounds into the cavernous building that once housed B-52 bombers and introduces me to the Ava XC. The gleaming white contraption, with stilt-like landing gear and eight propellers jutting out in every direction, looks like what Tony Stark would build if he had an Edward Scissorhands phase. It is, in fact, the prototype that Clark’s company, Beta Technologies, has built to not only probe the challenges of electric aviation, but also prove it has the aerospace knowhow itself to compete in the crowded, yet-to-be-realized market for battery-powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft—what you might call flying cars.

https://www.wired.com/story/beta-av... NL 011019 (1)&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nl
 
Posts relating to the technology and prospects of autonomous / driverless / self-driving cars have now been moved to a thread dedicated to that subject:

Autonomous / Self-Driving Cars and Other Ground Vehicles
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...driving-cars-and-other-ground-vehicles.65274/

Update:

Posts relating to odd incidents, uses or behaviors relating to autonomous / driverless / self-driving cars have now been given their own thread:

Oddities & Idiocies In Using Autonomous / Self-Driving Vehicles
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...using-autonomous-self-driving-vehicles.66329/
 
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Cochise,

Yes, you are correct. Here are the important bits from the CAA.

How much training will you need?
Everyone differs in their learning ability. Legally you require a minimum of 40 hours of training. Of these 40 hours at least 15 hours must be under dual instruction and at least 10 must be flown solo under the supervision of an instructor. The other 15 hours can be dual or solo as required. These are minimum requirements but a student with good aptitude, enthusiam and dedication should expect to train for between 40 and 50 hours.

Looks pretty expensive to me.

INT21


A pedant writes, if only to agree with Cochise and INT21 on this point:


From a UK perspective it's a bit worse than that: the minimum for the European fixed-wing Private Pilot's Licence ( EASA PPL(A) ) is technically 45 hrs as you also need 5 hours solo cross-country flying and anyway hardly anyone passes in 45 - 55 being closer to the average and in fact many people take much, much longer - especially those who can't afford very frequent lessons and therefore tend to learn more slowly ... and so the costs mount up. You can also expect to spend £250 or so on books and materials. Radio and skills tests will cost another £300 or thereabouts, then there are nine written exams at roughly £30 each - and then you'll need to get a medical certificate...

In other words a student pilot won't see any change out of ten grand (and the rest).

However there's also the somewhat more restricted LAPL (Light Aircraft Pilot's Licence) which is slightly cheaper and requires only 30 hours in the air, but even this ain't a cheap option. Also I've no idea how the 'flying car' might fit into current (or future) licensing and safety regulations and I don't think the current syllabus even touches on the subject of electric powerplants; all the technical 'systems' stuff being about cylinders, carburettors and magnetos. A helicopter licence probably wouldn't be much help with the various machines that derive their lifting power from rotors as these would necessarily have different, simpler controls compared to a conventional chopper. In any case, learning about aerodynamics, air law, the intricacies of the various classes of controlled airspace, meteorology and so on is a serious and fairly academic commitment and therefore I've got to say the idea seems unlikely to (ho, ho) 'take off'... which would probably be for the best.

Putting aside the issue of training, there is, I suppose, the possibility of most airborne taxi-type vehicles being self-flying, but as drones (or some of the people playing with them) can be a menace and the autonomous car hasn't proved as safe as expected either these still seem some way off being certified as airworthy. An all-party parliamentary enquiry into the state of General Aviation in the UK and how to manage its future kicked off in December as the best (read: more revenue generating) way of dealing with existing private air traffic is getting various bodies' knickers in a twist even without chucking skybound mopeds into the equation.

There's an old meme, if you like, in GA: the "£100 Bacon Sandwich" - that is once you've got your expensive licence you can pick a nice day to fly to another airfield, have a cuppa and a sarnie and come home - which will be very pleasant, but you'll be a ton or so lighter in the wallet.

Of course an electric thing with a bunch of rotors on it should be cheaper to run and maintain, if not necessarily to buy, but the whole thing seems like a really bad idea to me.

At best, flying cars and amphibious cars will never be more than rich people's playthings. I suspect that most of the ones "in development" exist for one of the following purposes:

1) To generate exciting publicity for a technology firm that never really intends to produce the actual flying/amphibious car, but does want to promote its image and its mainstream products.

2) To generate a tax loss for creative accounting purposes.

3) To attract investment from the gullible, with a view to siphoning some of it off — or maybe just having a lot of fun with the project.

All good points, and quite a few people share your cynicism: it seems some company sends out a press release about their prototype - or 3D model of prototype (flight testing to start soon, on sale next spring) every month or so, and yet...

A slightly sarcastic piece in the February issue of Pilot magazine addressed the latest VTOL example of these, under development by a German start up called JETCopter, under the headline "Believe it if you will department". As aviation journalists they've heard it all before!
 

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AlchoPwn,

..In many ways the question becomes, will peak oil mean the death of the automobile, or will cities become so congested that the gridlock can only be solved by adding a 3rd dimension ..

I suspect the answer to that problem will be further development of the 'Park and Ride' system.

Them many people will decide to drop the car completely and use the train or bus to get into town.

Either way, simply traveling about will become very expensive.

INT21.
 
Well....a third dimension has been added in many cities thanks to the underground railway.*

As for extending upwards in relative safety...where are the monorails??

* off-topic, it's only just occurred to me that London's new Class S (?) tube trains are still manned by drivers (sorry, train operators) and should be good for forty or fifty years, so the predictions of autonomous trains putting countless humans out of work have not come to pass!
 
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..where are the monorails ..

Same problem as any city has. You need to build in the rails (mono, or conventional Elevated (Ells) before you put in the building infrastructure.

Subways get around this to a large extent.
 
Quite true (I had my tongue in my cheek) but monorails mightn't be a bad idea for the new eco-futuristic garden cities we apparently have to start building.
 
Could you afford to buy or rent in a garden city ?

Or would you be one of the proles crammed into the morning commuter Maglev from a dorm town twenty miles away ?

INT21.
 
I dunno. Isn't the idea to have a mixture of private / privately rented and social housing? We have a District Plan round here that's highly controversial and to which I haven't paid nearly enough attention in detail.

It could be just as miserable as being crammed into a groundling train twenty miles from the city (I've done my share of that) but at least the thing could whizz over the unimproved grasslands rather than ploughing through them, perhaps only startling the bees briefly :) I was thinking more of monorails within such a new city - perhaps a sort of ringway, as I'd imagine there'd be less of a distinction between residential / suburban areas and central business district.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not a fan of the idea of building on Green Belt land that's been cunningly reclassified as 'brownfield' or whatever, but I feel it may be a fait accompli in whatever form such developments eventually take.

Wasn't there a disaster movie featuring a monorail?

A supplementary question might be: "Where are the personal teleporation bracelets? It's the 21st Century".

Over to any quantum physicists on here...
 
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More than likely. There seems to be a disaster film for every occasion.

I seriously think that if we are going to build HS2 (The fat cat express), we should go the whole hog and make it a Maglev. Or not build it at all. Just modify the conventional link.

With a clean sheet of paper and a few billion Pound you could come up with a pretty good city.

But that will not stop the population growing. and needing more cities.

INT21
 
No, it won't.

And with the advent of Greggs' vegan sausage roll millions of Britons for whom there are no future employment prospects will be living more or less forever.

And yes, what on Earth is the point of being able to get to Birmingham twenty minutes faster at such great cost (and not just financial)?
 
It may not be forever, but living of Vegan sausage rolls will make it seem so.

Anyway, can't call them sausage rolls. breaks EU rules.

Good job we're getting out.

INT21;)

(But if it contains 60% Vegan then it passes as a sausage)
 
It may not be forever, but living of Vegan sausage rolls will make it seem so.

Anyway, can't call them sausage rolls. breaks EU rules.

Good job we're getting out.

INT21;)

(But if it contains 60% Vegan then it passes as a sausage)

Ha ha! Yes, good point - they've already 'cucked' by obediently reclassifying their wrongly-formulated Cornish Pasties.

I've yet to try one.

They're more of a Shelbyville idea.

Just remembered that episode. IIRC the project was not a success.
 
Thought you meant Shelbyville, Indiana.

Dr wu's stamping ground.

INT21.
 
what on Earth is the point of being able to get to Birmingham twenty minutes faster at such great cost (and not just financial)?

This exactly- not one single person has been able to explain to me any comprehensible reasons for the apparent dire and costly need to get anywhere 20 minutes faster than before. No one's life is that important.
 
This exactly- not one single person has been able to explain to me any comprehensible reasons for the apparent dire and costly need to get anywhere 20 minutes faster than before. No one's life is that important.

There was a report yesterday that due to spiralling costs [who'd a thought?] & construction overrun, to achieve opening on the projected date there may have to be less trains than projected & they may have to run slower.
 
Meanwhile our local rail link to a nearby conurbation where thousands of my townsfolk have jobs is being cut as part of 'improving your services'. It all makes sense.
 
Every damn time I scroll down the list of threads with new posts I see "...Flying Cats..."
 
Meanwhile our local rail link to a nearby conurbation where thousands of my townsfolk have jobs is being cut as part of 'improving your services'. It all makes sense.
Same as when a certain bank closed a large number of branches and the spokesperson on the tellybox declared the closures were made to "provide more choice for customers". Utter cobblers.
 
If we cab go Back To The Future 2 in this thread for a moment what with the flying cars thing, NIKE are just about to release these self 'lacing' shoes ..

 
Great for portable exhibition spaces, etc. Maybe OK for emergency housing (although expensive for that).
 
Flying Cars as part of the Green Agenda.

In the 1960s animated sitcom The Jetsons, George Jetson commutes to work in his family-size flying car, which miraculously transforms into a briefcase at the end of the trip.

A new study of the environmental sustainability impacts of flying cars, formally known as electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or VTOLs, finds that they wouldn't be suitable for a Jetsons-style short commute.

However, VTOLs -- which combine the convenience of vertical takeoff and landing like a helicopter with the efficient aerodynamic flight of an airplane -- could play a niche role in sustainable mobility for longer trips, according to the study, scheduled for publication April 9 in Nature Communications. Several companies around the world are developing VTOL prototypes.

Flying cars would be especially valuable in congested cities, or in places where there are geographical constraints, as part of a ride-share taxi service, according to study authors from the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems and from Ford Motor Co.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190409135923.htm
 
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