Flying Car Crashes In British Columbia
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
You can do a lot of damage with a regular car which is why we put fences and guardrails between our streets and buildings, but just imagine how much damage you can do if you add a 3rd dimension. It would be like visiting Flatland. No way the FAA is going to allow flying cars for the masses until they are basically self-piloting.
I doubt flying cars will ever be a reality. What will be reality are sustainable, electric, self-driving vehicles.
Not the pipe dream of 20th-century futurists.
What if they invent one that flies like helicopters? Who knows what will come in the future...
If falling of the sky is the trouble, you can still use parachutes as a safety measure. Like this one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Recovery_Systems).
Anyways, I don't think flying cars are impossible. We just don't have enough technology yet to make it viable.
It's not hard to imagine an autonomous helicopter that can manage autorotations. Some drones already do. But for people-carrying operations, it would need to have an extremely fine-grained terrain database (better than we probably have today) to pick suitable landing spots and avoid low-level obstacles.
Same goes for gyrocopters, which are sth in between regular plane and helicopter (they have powered propeler to gain horizontal speed, and unpowered rotor that is speed up by autogyro effect that replaces the need for wings).
Of course in dense 3d traffic you may collide with sth before you can slow down the fall, so there will be a need for some system that sygnalizes everybody below you to quickly get out of way.
That sort of applies to normal cars as well of course: a wonderful technology, as long as they're only used by a few (wonderful for those few, naturally)—and a source of massive misery and damage once everybody has them.
First is the Jetsons version of the flying car. This is the aviating equivalent of the personal automobile. You get in, you fly it to work from your driveway, land it on the roof of your office building, and walk in.
Second is what this was: a machine that's both a road car and an airplane.
The first one is at least conceptually very neat. If it worked, it could completely eliminate traffic jams, eliminate pedestrian-vehicle accidents, and vastly improve the efficiency of local transport. There's been little attempt to build such a thing. It basically demands VTOL operation, which vastly restricts its range and increases its cost and noise. The Moller Skycar is the only real-world attempt at this one that I can think of, and it didn't get very far.
The second one is completely pointless. The "flying car" as it actually (barely) exists, as in this example, is just a car that is also an airplane. You drive it to an airport, reconfigure it to be an airplane, fly it to another airport, land, reconfigure it to be a car, and drive off.
The problem is that design tradeoffs mean that such a "flying car" is both a bad car and a bad airplane. They have inherently different needs for things like wheels, engines, drivetrains, etc. Putting both into the same machine means it's not going to do either one well.
For every "flying car" out there, you can take the same money and buy a better car, a better airplane, a second better car to keep at your most frequently used destination airport, and have enough money left over to rent cars at other airports for years and years. This is unlikely ever to change.
The Jetsons idea is interesting, but roughly nobody is working on anything at all applicable to it.
EDIT: ... which is exactly the design that crashed. AFAIK these don't require a pilot's license, but that doesn't mean they're easy to fly.
As for being hard to fly, I believe the rationale behind not requiring licenses is simply that you're unlikely to kill anyone else when you crash, so do what you will. At least in the US, licensing requirements for different kinds of aviation scale fairly directly with the number of innocent civilians you can take out if you screw up too badly. Not 100% the case, but a decent approximation.
AFAIK licensing requirements scale with aircraft size and complexity -- which does correlate nicely with its danger to bystanders.
You're right that licensing requirements go up with size and complexity, but it's a bit beyond that as well. For example, carrying people in exchange for money has stricter licensing than carrying people for fun, because the idea is that 1) you'll do it more often and 2) people paying you for services are less aware of the risk they're taking.
I always felt that calling this design a flying car was cheating this was cheating -- when I hear "airplane" I think of a fixed wing design.
And even readily field reparable.
(I am a bit shocked by the $100K price tag.)
Maybe you should re-word that.
Haha, I guess whatever the hell I drove on today is not a road because I am in Africa and Africa has no roads.
Sad because they mention the name of the actual vehicle, which has "powered parachute" in it.
after reading the article: oh, it's just a steerable parachute powered by a propeller attached to a something like a car.
I guess this is how sensationalist headlines work.