Are flying cars finally here?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
https://img.tecnomagazine.net/2017/07/Moller-Skycar-popular-...
Quadcopter drones are already used routinely for information gathering purposes. We might get autonomous small aircraft that do van sized cargo delivery quite soon. Those and other similar systems then get enough repetition and practicalities sorted out that eventually humans can be transported.
Obviously probably an oversimplification, but I could imagine one or more of the following:
- reliable ejection + personal parachute
- gliding mechanism
- parachute for the vehicle itself
The latter two assume the vehicle is fairly small and/or lightweight.
Of course, similar to airplanes, multiple redundancies would also mitigate risk.
A number of mitigations could help reduce risk below that of driving cars (which can be quite risky in some areas/situations, but we take the risk anyway).
Meanwhile your 3 ton vehicle plummets onto the people below. I guess that's their own fault for living at street level.
“Ejection” means a rocket motor under the seat and a 50% chance of spinal damage. Not sustainable for consumers and no one in GA use them outside fighter jets.
I was under the impression that the reason ejection from a jet fighter is so strenuous is because the ejector seat needs to eject fast enough to clear the tail of the jet which may be travelling at several hundred miles an hour.
The vast majority of planes focus on #2, the gliding mechanism, which gives pilots the time to bail out out from a side door and allows for much more forgiving aerodynamics (thrust is up, pilot falls down).
For a consumer flying car you're really going to want zero-zero ejection seats that can survive engine failure during takeoff. That's the most dangerous phase of flight and the seat has to be extra powerful (to get the user high enough for the parachute to work).
Would "Ejection" from a much slower aircraft require a rocket motor that has a 50% chance of spinal damage?
Yes.
people with a BMI of over 25 seem quite fine on rollercoasters.
Most rollcoasters are under 4g and they max out around 6g.
For example, I know few people, crashed when engine broken at about 200m (300feet). Fortunately all alive, but rehabilitation to state when we could drink beer, takes almost half year.
On first page of google search: probability of accident on road "for every 1000 miles driven, your chances of getting into a crash are 1 in 366. Insurance companies report that customers file a claim once every 17.9 years"
"Approximately 1.19 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes." "Between 20 and 50 million more people suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability" https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...
For planes: "about .01 deaths per 100,000 departures from 225 accidents between 2013 and 2021" “The industry 2022 fatality risk of 0.11 means that on average, a person would need to take a flight every day for 25,214 years to experience a 100% fatal accident,” stated the I.A.T.A. https://www.nbc.com/nbc-insider/how-common-are-commercial-pl...
To achieve reliability mostly used two approaches - more strict regulations on design and production (one cannot sale unsafe plane), and same with maintenance.
Some countries going even farther then others, for example, all Soviet helicopters required to have at least two engines and to make safe landing on only one.
Also, for aviation regulators typical to sacrifice modern hype technologies and be extremely conservative on electronics and software, so planes still achievable but reliable (yes, I don't like npm, I think planes will be hundreds times more dangerous if use npm).
Private, personal aircraft usage by licensed operators, like how cars are owned and used, generally falls into the general aviation bucket. At 1.5 fatalities per 100,000 flight hours [2] that is less safe than cars per distance unless the average flight speed is ~1000 mph, or around mach 1.3 (it is not, it is probably 1/3-1/5 that). That is despite the vastly greater training required for a pilot’s license.
[1] https://www.iaopa.eu/what-is-general-aviation
[2] https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20211117.as...
You confusing typical humble car owner with certified plane owner.
Automobiles could for years don't see any care, even could be used without insurance, but still considered in statistics.
Planes of general aviation, are closer to city buses, which are under constant care and have very good support.
And yes, exist planes without rules, but this is difference, nobody care about non-certified automobile on private land, but you will lost pilot license if you'll get caught flying on non-certified plane, except very few special cases.
Also you should be careful, when compare statistics of US and EU, they have significant differences.
As you note, car owners are vastly less careful than certified plane owners and pilots, and yet the basically untrained car owners are 3-5x safer driving. As this thread was about enabling private flight vehicles for "everybody", it is clear that private flight vehicles are nowhere near safe enough for "everybody" if even the comparatively highly-trained certified plane owner is much less safe than a basically untrained car owner since private flight vehicles for "everybody" would undoubtedly be operated by basically untrained flying car owners making the danger even more pronounced than a mere 3-5x.
I EXACTLY stated: IN USA, aviation safety few times worse than in EU. But when you consider pure numbers, you should understand, that in EU totally different distribution of planes sizes and of airfield sizes. Sure, Frankfurt is safer than ground field somewhere in Austrian Alps, and number of small airfields in USA far exceed any other country.
The dream of flying cars is to reduce City traffic, and until we can take off and land safely in a city there is no point.
There are other scenarios where small, autonomous VTOL aircraft would be very useful, and in such cases, the question of whether such vehicles could reasonably be called flying cars becomes mainly a lexical/usage one.
eVTOL over rivers, lakes, or designated ‘flyways’ could work but such limitations would make flying cars far less useful, unless they can also operate as cars.
You know what does reduce city traffic? People travelling by foot, subways and bikes.
There are reasons that air travel won't do too much in this regard in the foreseeable future -- mostly around cost and the fact that ATC-managed airspace actually has quite a low capacity. Those are practical issues, not fundamentals.
You can extend 2d space with bridges and tunnels a lot easier, but it isn't cheap. Which is why cities need metro systems - it is the only way to get masses of people into a dense area.
If we're talking about fixed-wing, runway takeoff aircraft, then I absolutely agree with you. If we're not, I'm somewhat (but not highly) confident that coordinating these vehicles will be the long pole re: capacity. That's mostly because it's a really long pole. We haven't developed distributed actor algorithms for this the way we have for cars, it's unclear if this is actually possible, and there's no way the current way of doing ATC can handle the load that even 1% of upper middle class commuters could create.
as you say we also don't have traffit control that works.
Believe me, air have so much more volume, autopilots for planes are simpler than for cars.
Definitively, air transport is more dangerous physically than land transport, but with stricter regulations on build planes and on maintenance/using them, we now have magnitudes (about 100-1000 times) better safety at air than on land.
Where: NOT for urban mobility despite the claims. Instead they match PERFECTLY the substantial green new deal, or the large sprawl of single family homes and small buildings because no one want flying things in a dense are, take off and landing are nightmarish etc while in a moderately spread area they are the perfect match: you have nature, space to evolve, and anything is still nearby because 60km is just 10' flight.
How? Well, at first I think not eVTOL but some VTOL with various tech, simply because the battery is too heavy to be efficient in such form, we can make eSTOL that for not-so-short range flight are nearly efficient as cars, but they can be used in a mid-dense scenario, so they are possible and practically useless.
A small note: https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... EU/McKinsey focused NOT on the possibility of flying stuff but on public acceptance of them. Take a serious note on that. Some small planes are already as efficient as car for many kind of flights and they do not demand the road infra from any point A and B of a flight, of course there are various constraints, but roads have others constraints as well. The reality is that we have roads because we can naturally work, ride animals who walk etc, modern era means also modern means.
Even if it means crippling its own economy and the economies of its allies
Think of the trillions of dollars lost per year globally because some seppo modernist urban planners were arrogant enough to think they’d uncovered the ultimate solution to designing cities regardless of the nuances or context
Want to begin repairing Pax Americana? Get private interests out of your public infrastructure operations. Be a role model for other countries within the American Empire to emulate
https://innovationorigins.com/en/dutch-flying-car-soars-with...
> It’s often remarked upon, in boosterish circles, that American society allows about forty thousand road fatalities a year but refuses to tolerate even one aviation death.
We shouldn't tolerate that either!
That isn't to say we shouldn't always try to make them safer. But if you put every passenger in a pod like the president in "Escape from New York" you'll make planes safer and still cause more death
I think we can demand the same from cars, or at least something better than 30,000 deaths per year.
- Licensing and renewal requirements are extremely lax
- Many states have extremely lenient DUI punishments
- Road conditions and design are often extremely lacking (e.g., stroads with high speed and high conflict points make up an outsized proportion of fatalities, there could be more emphasis on traffic calming than traffic flow and high average speed).
- Lack of safer alternatives (e.g. public transit) despite generally having the population numbers and density to support robust public transit.
- Too many safety loopholes for popular passenger trucks where the differences in regulations were intended to accommodate commercial activity with professional drivers, but the market has shifted to regular consumers driving large heavy vehicles with poor pedestrian safety like full size pickup trucks.
We now have the technology to have very realistic driving simulators. (I've seen what they give snow plow drivers) We should require drivers spend several days per year in a simulator to make sure that they can do things right in the weird situations. Pilots rarely fly in the worst weather (they will fly above, around or stay on the ground - though they will fly through what looks like bad but isn't - I don't know how to tell the difference), but they get lots of simulator time in the worst case situations.
But, people don’t care so much about a “small” car or even a “small” plane crash. Even if they add up to an insane number as high as 40k per year!
(It was fine when I moved in… all the roads were empty due to the pandemic).
Why should we allocate scarce infrastructure land for marginal increases in bike-lanes (that are chronically under-used), for perhaps uniquely the worst form of transit?
If someone told you that they wanted you to provision funding/space for a new form of transit that was:
* Slow/short range
* Impractical in all but basically nice weather
* Requires parking
* Not family-friendly
* Not friendly for the elderly or anyone who is disabled to almost any definition of "disabled"
* Unsafe
* Has low to no cargo capacity
You'd call them crazy. But somehow we've got the meme that bikes are good.
Just visited philadelphia. Used to be clogged with cars. Now it's still clogged with cars. But also has great new bike infrastructure with lots of bikers (that weren't there 15 years ago)
The city is better for it, more mobility options, less noisy, less degraded. So awesome!
Well 'never' is a long time, but at least quite a long way away before the AI, technology and materials can support a lot of traffic, mid-air fender benders, breakdowns etc.
Flying cars are a fetish: because they are futuristic technology, therefore they are desirable. That is the motive force behind them.
It's only when this was obviously impossible that futurists pushed the "mostly a car but can also fly sometimes" angle.
Yes and no. In some EU countries, helicopters accepted to land near highway, and pick up (or disembark) passengers just like ordinary taxi. Also there very typical case, helicopter landed near Gas station to refuel.
Generally, strict restrictions exists on flights over large cities, but over rural area and over big water, regulations easier. Even so, if in large city exists big river, aviation could flighting over it with very easy restrictions.