Hacker News Reader

Comment by nrjdhsbsid | Hacker News Reader

Automatic flight is much easier than autonomous driving. Not much to run into up there :).

>Not much to run into up there :)

So far. In a future where people commute in flying cars while delivery drones descend from some flying warehouse I'm not so sure this stays true.

The saving grace is probably that up there we don't have to accommodate legacy vehicles. We can just force all airborne vehicles to talk to each other with some universal collision avoidance/traffic routing protocol.

> We can just force all airborne vehicles to talk to each other with some universal collision avoidance/traffic routing protocol.

It's not exactly what you described, but in the US, the FAA already has a requirement for aircraft to broadcast their position and velocity in all but the least congested airspace by 2020 [1]. This has been in the works for over a decade [2], and among other things, the information provided by this system can be used to augment existing collision avoidance schemes [3].

[1] https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/adsb/faq/#o2

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillan...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...

"Not much to run into up there :)"

Birds, hills, turbulence.

Ya. Having just taken a 6 personal commercial plane in stormy, windy weather I'm glad I had two professional pilots driving. It was absolutely terrifying, and I can't imagine your ordinary person feeling comfortable with it. I couldn't wait to get off the plane ASAP and thought we might crash on landing.

Honestly the plane was likely flying itself 90+% of the time. The computers are much better and giving a smooth ride in turbulance.

For fun take a lot at the outer trim tabs when flying in rough skies. The computer adjusts them like 20 times a second to keep the wings stable, kinda cool to see

Other flying cars.

Are you familiar with Smeed's Law? I think that it will also apply to flying cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeed's_law

I doubt it, there's just so much space up there. So first, no concept of lanes. Thinking in 2D space, everything becomes a road. Increase that another dimension, so now everything is a road and there's hundreds of levels of road.

As long as the flight software keeps the cars/planes a decent distance from each other traffic will never be an issue when flying.

A much bigger problem will be parking, since no traffic means everyone will fly everywhere all the time. Parking will be an extreme issue for city centers. The wait in traffic will probably turn into a wait to park

I suspect that, even in 3d space, there will be a concept of lanes. You still want volumes of space designated for one direction or another, at the very least to reduce the number of collision-calculations the guiding system has to make.

Parking shouldn't be an issue? We'll have vertical parking structures that can be entered/exited on every level.

I wouldn't want to fly any kind of helicopter or multicopter into a door in the side of a traditional multi story parking building. the sudden and asymmetric entrance into ground-effect will roll the aircraft, and I'm not sure what having a roof above your rotors would do - possible choke them of airflow and force them into high-speed-stall.

airflow near walls is turbulent, and the funneling effect may suck the aircraft towards the wall.

Solvable problems - you just have to build a landing pad away from the side of the building.

Totally true. I imagine you'd have to have some kind of checkerboard of landing pads.

And, if our flying cars are helicopters or multicopters, we've got more problems, because we can't actually stack that many helicopters over eachother, due to the interference of their air columns. :-/

I think realistically all of the caroplanes will be built more like quadrocopters than normal aircraft. It's much less efficient but the only thing that really meets manuevability and safety constraints

In general aviation (anything other than the airlines for our purposes) midair collisions happen with alarming regularity anywhere there is any congregation of aircraft (typically within 10mi of a non-towered airport). Add to this that they are nearly 100% fatal, unlike traffic collisions, and you have a recipe for disaster. There are systems coming online to help mitigate this issue (ADS-B) but they've been in the pipeline for years and won't see universal adoption until 2020 in theory.

Until everyone has a flying car?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com