Up, Up And Away
Half a century ago the flying car was a symbol of the miracles that technology would bring us in the future. Now, after 50-60 years of being just around the corner, it is a symbol of the false promises of over-enthusiastic technofiles. It is a campy vision of a future that perhaps will never come, right up there with ray guns, jet packs, and meals in a pill.
Yet all this time believers never gave up on the concept of a flying car, and home-grown engineers have optmistically promised that they would be the ones to finally deliver. It seems that every year the various tech magazines will have the picture of the latest flying car concept on the cover – it’s a tease they know will sell magazines. I always smile whenever I see yet another news outlet reporting that the flying car has finally arrived.
Well – I’m smiling again. The Times Online reported yesterday the “World’s First Flying Car.” They are referring to the upcoming test flight of a “flying car” by Carl Dietrich, who runs the Massachusetts-based Terrafugia.
Of course – we need to define exactly what a flying car is. There are two basic flavors of vehicles that are billed as “flying cars.” The first is a car that flies like a helicopter – it has either blades or some kind of engine for thrust and it can hover or fly quickly through the air. One can imagine getting into such a car in the driveway, taking off vertically in the air, and then flying straight to your destination at a casual 100 mph. The second kind of “flying car” is a car that drives on the road and then can convert to a plane, so that it can take off and land on the same road.
Dietrich’s car is of the latter variety. He estimates the car will coast $200,000. In needs a bit of road to take off, and at present only Alaska would allow such a vehicle to take off from a public road, as opposed to an airport runway. You will probably need a pilots license to fly it, and insurance will be more in line with a plane than a car.
In other words, the thing is a plane. It’s a plane with wings that can fold up so that it can drive on the road and maybe fit into your garage – but it’s a plane.
Dietrich is quoted as saying:
“In the long term we have the potential to make air travel practical for individuals at a price that would meet or beat driving, with huge time savings.”
Right. I don’t see how this vehicle will change anything. Maybe this is an affordable plane – but so what. No one is going to be commuting to work in this thing. It may be a good option for a pilot. You can keep your plane at home, then drive it to the airport to take off and fly. This may make flying a plane more convenient for some – but it will not diplace cars as a mode of transport.
I suspect, if this vehicle ever comes to market, it will be like the Segue – i.e. a huge flop. It will not change the way we travel. It may find a niche that no one currently envisions (like the Segue did for airport security) but it will not become mainstream. It would simply require too much of an infrastructure change. Also – I don’t think many people are going to get a pilot’s license so they can fly instead of drive to work. Small planes (unlike commercial airlines) are also a significant risk. And finally, the price-tag alone is prohibitive. I could be wrong, but I think I have a few decades of past history to go by.
Now, the other kind of “flying car” I can see working – by which I mean it could be practical for everyday use. If you can take off vertically, you don’t need an airport, and you can likely find someplace to land near your destination. If it were operated by computer, the safety profile could be at or better than driving on the roads. If the price could be as low as a high-end SUV, then it is already established that there is a market for such vehicles.
However, the reason we have not seen such a flying car on the mainstream market, and the reason why we are not all flying to work like George Jetson, is a matter of physics. Keeping a flying car in the air takes a lot of energy. Much much more than rolling a car along the ground. It’s just a simple fact that rolling happens to be a highly efficient mode of transportation. Gliding can also be efficient, but these vehicles are not gliders – they hover and fly by brute force. It is likely that energy efficiency is going to be a bigger issue in the future. A flying car of this mode is not likely to be “green.” Also, the same factors would limit their range.
My pessimism is even assuming that engineers can work out the issues of how to have either blades that are small and contained enough to be safe (otherwise you just have a helicopter), or a controlled exhaust with enough thrust, but still safe for public use. And design software to make the thing easy and safe to fly. At present there is just no way around the ultimate limiting factor of energy.
I’m sad to say that the flying car, as we would all want it to be (think Back to the Future), is not around the corner. I don’t think we will ever have one that flies on a form of gasoline. We will likely need some major technological breakthroughs in terms of energy before such a vehicle will become practical for everyday use. Oh, we may have them (in fact reasonable prototypes exist), and again like the Segue they may fill some niche – just not the next comuter car.
But boy, I can’t help hoping that I’m completely wrong about that.
This is probably the closest we have to a flying car, the moller skycar. They claim to be able to get 20mpg on ethanol. Not sure how much that is per gallon.
http://www.moller.com/
The article you linked to doesn’t get it right at all, as there already was a “flying car” with the same basic design back in the ’30s with the Waldo Aerobile.
and *ahem*, “segway”
Actually, a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) machine isn’t limited to hovering only. Many VTOL aircraft exist that direct the thrust of their rotors or their engines down for take-off and landing, and point it back again for level flight. There’s no reason a flying car couldn’t use a similar mechanism. In fact, one of the more promising flying car projects, the Moller Skycar, uses this principle – although I have to admit they’ve made disappointingly little progress since I first read about them and saw them on Discovery channel and such.
Personally, I don’t think the technical difficulties aren’t the greatest obstacle, though. I think the legal obstacles are a lot bigger. What use is a sky car if the FAA won’t allow you to take off from your driveway, and land in the parking lot of your workplace? If instead you have to limp it to an airport first? Unless this changes, there will be precious little market for flying cars, and not many companies can be expected to want to invest in the necessary R&D.
I think that there can never be a flying car for the home. It has nothing to do with technology, it has everything to do with safety.
When you drive your car to work and it breaks down or has a flat you limp to the side and call for a tow.
When you fly your car to work and it breaks down you fall and die.
At #4, Phil SP: the Moller skycar has redundant engines, and even if too many fail at once, it has a parachute for the whole car.
Thinking about my experiences with those drivers who would most obviously be able to afford a flying car leads me to believe they would be the most likely to cause large scale damage and injury. Oblivious, aggressive and incompetent people do not need an air force.
Moller is a good example, he’s been claiming that he would have his flying care ready next year, for the last 30 years,…
As an aside, the goofy two-wheeled vehicle that GOB rode around on Arrested Development is a Segway, a homophone of the actual word segue.
The safety and regulatory issues are solveable, in my worthless opinion, with redundancy and computer control.
The biggest problem with flying cars is one that no one has mentioned here yet: noise.
You’re not going to get a car-sized object to fly straight up without making your neighbors very, very upset.
Flying cars, jet packs, ray guns, and meals-in-a-pill may never come, but Popular Science will never run out of material.
The military could be a customer for a lot of these technologies. They already have the Organic Air Vehicle, directed energy weapons, exoskeletons, and what have you. Though they already gave up on jet packs.
And what ever happened to that retro favorite, the car-boat? I can’t even remember which model/make it was…
Oh yeah “Skycar” is making headlines this week :)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7821979.stm
Imagine the skies over LA filled with flying cars – but not for long. Considering the pathetic control which most people have of their cars and the obvious lack of discipline of over half the people on the road, I definitely don’t want them in the air. Pilot training takes an awful lot of time and money and commercial pilots have to ‘keep current’ on a lot more certificates than a weekend joyrider – and despite all the training and so on they still make disastrous mistakes now and then or are the victim of some failure beyond their control (remember that Concorde).
Now gliders may not be so bad; a good glider pilot with good conditions can stay airborne for quite some time but you do need to launch the glider somehow and there’s no way you’ll just park that thing on your lawn – they have a large wingspan. As with flying cars, I wouldn’t want the skies over the cities crowded with gliders.
Jetpacks do exist – they remain exotica and I’m glad they do. If you think a pigeon crapping on you is bad (not as bad as a pelican, believe me), imagine some idiot with a jetpack losing control.
@Wrysmile:
Do you mean that for each gallon of ethanol Moller consumes, he stumbles about for around 20 miles? That would be pretty funny to watch.
If you think a pigeon crapping on you is bad (not as bad as a pelican, believe me), imagine some idiot with a jetpack losing control.
If by “losing control” you’re implying the jetpacker would be crapping on people as well, I agree. Horrible.
If and when a flying car becomes commercially viable (whenever in the future that may be), I’d love for it to find its niche in the trucking industry.
I think a major problem is human factors. It is very complicated to fly a plane, and especially a helicopter like vehicle. You cannot fly in 3 dimensions and be nearly as distracted as you can while driving, either. We don’t need a bunch of flying all these vehicles around. Only if the system is automated, and doesn’t give you manual control, can I see it working. The “pilot” would just enter a source and destination into the controls.
It’s too bad our atmosphere isn’t dense enough to let us practically build bouyant cars. That would solve the energy problem.
Car-boats rule, and there’s some good ones recently that manage to be pretty decent in both areas. I’d REALLY love to get my hands on this baby:
http://www.gibbstech.co.uk/aquada.php
And I think we’ll see flying cars in the urban area some day, but probably only after we see the urban cars on the road driving by themselves. Driving without a human is a must. Give it 20 more years. But we’ll see the military using them much sooner.
Flying cars, eh? Adds a whole new horror to the very common crime of drunk driving….
I say we all fly balloons. Problems solved.
A few things will be required to have a viable, safe and cheap flying car.
A way more efficient, safe and enviromental friendly power source. Something that we haven’t discovered yet, or might just be starting to show up in labs. Think anti-gravity :p
A good enough Artificial Intelligence that will take the control of the vehicle out of the hands of us humans. This will also force the car to stay in lanes, which will help avoid traffic jams. Well maybe. We’ll probably see normal automated cars long before we see flying cars. You can give people control of the cars, but only after they have done at least a modern pilot equivalency course. We will see air races along the lines of F1 and touring cars. Nascar for you Americans.
I think those are the two minimum requirements, of course by the time that is a reality Mars should be colonised :(
There are other things to consider, such as what happens when a teen circumvents the AI and goes on a joyride and stuff like that.
Dr. Novella:
Not to play the spell/grammar Nazi, but…
“…of over-enthusiastic technofiles.”
That should be “technophile.”
Since the Transition appears to need a runway, I guess we should hold off building the Jetson houses on poles for a bit.
The flying car is such a deeply ingrained idea that hard-headed engineers will never let it go. To these dreamers it is the pinnacle of Space Age Technology. The garage tinkerer who finally manages to sell a single vehicle and put it in the air will have, at least in his or her mind, brought us fully into the 21st century.
Flying car? Bah! Obviously none of you were present when I drove my 71 Valiant Pacer (Dodge Dart) at top speed without seeing the dip in the road. I can tick “flying car” off of my TO-DO list.
Check this out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7821979.stm
@Jose:
There only ever was one ‘Cannonball Run’ in Australia but during that run one car (I think it was a Mazda) hit a dip, got airborne, and hit a race marshall.
I don’t think a flying car will meet automotive crashworthiness requirements. If it did, I don’t think it would be able to fly (too much mass). Now, you can get waivers for specialty automobiles, but then it will not be a mass-market item.
Also, I don’t want flying cars over my house just as I don’t like planes or helicopters over my house (unless very high up, and heading somewhere else fast – but definitively not commuters).
And last but not least . . . transfer booths! Much nicer than flying-anything, nearly instantaneous (at least here on Earth), and has the potential to be turned into a Xerox(TM) machine. I could use another me to go to work while I surf the net.
Ludicrous.
Cost prohibitive, energy inefficient, and hominids have a rather nasty habit of insisting upon less than logical/rational actions.
Considering the fact that all of our energy processes are modes of extraction, this fanciful idea is nothing more than fantasy and fiction.
I agree with the author, except on the issue of “hope”. There is no reason to believe our species is smart enough to overcome energy inefficiency, gravity, and friction.
@ Scoops
I love the Arrested Development reference and I can never see a Segway again without thinking of Gob Bluth!!!
As for flying cars, I’m against them. I mean if we had cars that could fly then how special would Superman be then?
I’ve figured out how I’d pull a flying car trailer with my boat, but how would I pull my boat trailer with a flying car?
This is brilliant, a simple and effective flying car
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2009/jan/14/parajet-skycar
Just attach a large hydrogen balloon to your boat trailer.
“Just attach a large hydrogen balloon to your boat trailer.”
Well… Ok, but this thing is getting so combersome that instead of buying a flying car, I might as well buy a helicopter and adapt it to freeway driving.
It seems like business is still getting hit hard. Is anybody seeing an upswing in their respective niches? Health reform seems like a mess. I generate long term care insurance leads and annuity leads for the insurance industry, but volume has been terrible in the last two months. I am afraid the worst is yet to come, but maybe it is just my attitude.