Dutch flying car gets permission to drive on European roads
psychnewsdaily.com
psychnewsdaily.com
Addendum: This means they cannot sell them yet as they first have to show production compliance. And have more stringent testing for those vehicles.
Addendum 2: It also has no aircraft license so flying is not an option.
Because a newly designed plane (with a rescue parachute, and a modern engine) is so much more expensive than one from the 1950s (leaded gas, possibly with grandfathered certification) everyone keeps flying the old ones. Cars have had many iterations on safety since the '55 Chevy, but planes not so many.
I think there can be little argument against the assertion that modernizing the general aviation fleet would improve safety. The majority of GA aircraft are using 60's technology carburetted reciprocating engines and running on leaded gasoline, and the cockpit is mostly analogue gauges with mechanical vacuum-driven gyros. Every car manufactured since the 90's uses fuel injection, yet GA pilots still need to worry about carburetor icing. That's not even going into other modern safety improvements like digital autopilot or ballistic recovery parachutes.
But for this comparison to make sense you need to assume that the counterfactual scenario involves zero decrease in air and car accidents between then and now.
This beggars belief; people seek to avoid accidents for other reasons than "regulators frown on them".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Edit: Interesting to note that pedestrian fatalities took a sharp rise from 2010
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
More than that; the chart shows fatalities per vehicle mile starting at their all-time high and falling steadily thereafter. Exactly like you'd expect if people were trying to avoid fatalities. Nothing special happens in 1970, where fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled have already fallen to 4.7 from, say, 21 in 1923.
47 years in the other direction, fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 2017 are 1.16, a decline of 75.5% compared to the previous 47 years' 77.4%.
It might be that commercial interests often align with public safety and perception, but I bet that on the lower-end of the price spectrum, people would be willing to buy cars that endangered themselves and others. If only for lack of options.
Most people will say: "Yeah, it's a big unsafe (they won't even phrase it like that), but I will be more careful and it will be all right".
Then the next day they'll go to that party and drive home tipsy.
The cognitive dissonance won't even register.
This legislation is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Until a car is created that can take off from the streets and has low energy consumption, it cannot be said that we have a "flying car", at the moment we only have a "car-helicopter hybrid".
I just hope cars regulated better than the 'Stint' was, whatever that fall under.
The stint was something different. Those were not tested as they were technically not cars and treated as mopeds which have very limited testing requirements as far as I know.
I jest of course. The official English name being "Flying Dutchman" could definitely work, and "Vliegende Nederlander" as the official Dutch name would be funny.
-Inexpensive and reliable. Far simpler to build and fly vs a helicopter
-Can fly at very low speeds without stalling
-VERY short landing, pretty much anywhere. Not quite so short take-off, but pre-spooling the horizontal rotary wing can mitigation this.
Cost and low stall speed are probably the biggest factors for their choice of autogyro.
* Cheap to maintain, run and store (take up much less space than a plane)
* Cope much better than a plane with strong cross winds on take off and landing (I've had several lessons when all the fixed wing pilots were stuck in the cafe)
* Much smoother ride when going through turbulence - the rotor does a lot of the moving around and leaves the cabin much less affected
* Often fly around at a lower altitude than a plane, particularly if you're over fields (often cruise around at 1000 ft above ground). This means that get a better view (things on the ground aren't too small), and the cloud ceiling can be lower.
* Manoeuverable and 'fun' to fly
Some disadvantages (limiting myself to the main commercially available pre-built ones, i.e. AutoGyro and Magni):
* Slower than a plane (max speed of any is I believe 125 MPH)
* Can only take two people, and often limited luggage space
* Haven't been around as long (in their modern form), so while they're cheaper to buy than a plane, you are limited to new or fairly new.
* None are instrument rated, and only one model is night rated (in the UK)
* You don't really want to fly them in the rain - erodes rotor and propellor
I'm intrigued, could you elaborate on why this is different from what happens with a helicopter or a plane in the rain?
Also, plenty of gyrocopter pilots fly in the rain.
Indeed. I think it's just a question of shortening the life of the rotor a bit.
Another problem is visibility. We had to land in a hurry at the end of my lesson on Monday due to rain arriving at the airfield. I fly a Magni M16 which is an open cockpit and it was quite hard to see with the rain on the windscreen and my visor. There are no wipers or anything to help with that (like you might have on a fixed wing). I don't have the comparable experience in the closed cockpit aircraft though (e.g. Magni M24), so that may be better anyway.
I agree that the GoPros attached to the mast vibrate a lot, but I got the same when I attached one to a car on a track. These bodycam shots from James Ketchell don't vibrate very much for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn5gVZ4PnmY
Not exactly cheap, but neither is spending significant time in a flight club.
Think of how many safety checks and procedures you go through with a plane before you entrust your life to it to not fall out of the sky. Are you really going to be wanting to take it on the road, park it in a garage or on the street, and alternate back and forth the use as a car vs. plane? With all the potential abuse a car gets?
When I am grounded due to weather, I can continue my trip.
When I arrive at my destination, at a small airport in middle of nowhere, I don't have to figure out transportation.
So it's really not about going back and forth, it is about making your plane usable in a few extra cases.
As an aside, I enjoyed how these people got their gyros to Iceland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmwEbjzLtDo
I could see this being a little more viable if it was less than double the cost of a modern autogyro.
It does fold up a lot more compactly than some of the recent flying car designs with conventional wings. One of those looked more like a car plus a small trailer in size.
As an example to disprove the rule, the Grob G 109 motor glider[1] goes 1500 km (vs flying car 1315 road range) on the same amount of gas while probably going faster (180km/h economical cruise).
edit: I have seen different versions of these too in the past(with wings). But still this one looks more compact.
Btw, not so nice: This time I already started the movie and only THEN yt ask me if I want to log in (pauses the vid for it).
The European Aviation Safety Agency is still examining the company’s request to have the vehicles certified to fly.
So yes, the company does show a few videos of flight tests, even though they are not licensed to sell it to be flown by customers.
Of course, the real struggle is to find enough customers at this high price point. Since customers will still need to drive to the airport and clear a flight plan with ATC when they want to fly, the situations where this drive/fly combination is useful are not widespread.
It's not 100% accurate though: "Can land vertically" isn't true unless there's a lot of wind (although you can almost always land with very little ground roll). "Cannot hover" is less true. In my aircraft you need 35mph of airspeed to maintain height (when relatively fully loaded). You often have 35 mph of wind at altitude, so a ground relative hover is often possible. "Can often be flown without a licence" doesn't apply in the UK.
If you do a sudden nose down and throttle up in a gyro at the wrong time a couple of things can happen - you can build up an unsafe amount of airspeed and you can put air the wrong way through the rotor, slowing it down. If you do that too low you'll crash (a gyro without a spinning rotor is just a brick).
Basically avoid doing things which cause negative G. This is important enough that it's printed on a placard on all UK certified Gyros, but is also really easy to avoid doing.
> Extremely safe, unless you do the one thing you instinctively do to escape a stall in a normal airplane, in which case it will crash immediately.
> Autogyros are considered safe due to their slow landing speed, which is important in emergency landings, their forgiving behavior in windy conditions and the fact they are almost impossible to stall. This is thanks to the freely spinning rotor. Unfortunately, as soon as the rotor stops spinning, the whole aircraft falls like a brick and the rotor may be impossible to restart in flight. This is a situation that should be avoided at all costs.
> Normally it is not a problem since the weight of the aircraft keeps the rotor spinning. However, if the weight becomes too low or even negative, the angle of attack will become negative, and the rotor will slow down and eventually stop. It can happen when the pilot "pushes on the stick" and dives.
> Unfortunately, "pushing on the stick" is also how you escape a stall in a fixed wing (normal) airplane as it is a way to regain airspeed. This is actually a counter-intuitive maneuver but because a stall is an emergency, pilots are trained to do it instinctively. It can trick a pilot trained in fixed wing aircraft into doing the one thing that shouldn't be done on a gyro.
/me grabs coat and exits building
I'm learning to fly an autogyro in the UK. They're great fun to fly, and in theory safer than a plane because the short landing distance means that in event of engine failure you have a much greater selection of places to land (in practice modern safe autogyros have only been around 5-10 years so we don't have enough data to compare).
The only electric (or in some cases pneumatic) assist is the pitch trim. In event of failure that would usually stay in the same place, but in the worst case where it moves to one end of the spectrum you can absolutely control the aircraft against it (your arm just gets a bit tired after a while maintaining the pressure).
Given how much power appears to go into making helicopters rise, its surprising to see an autogyro do it without actually powering the main rotor.
(fwiw, I'm not arguing that I'm correct. obviously I'm wrong).
So no, it's not a helicopter, is a car/helicopter hybrid, a.k.a. flying car.
Off-topic: some UAV prototypes developed in Europe during the 80s and the beginning of 90s was of the type autogyro, because of its simplicity and short take-off and landing distances.