Flights of fancy - Why airborne automobiles will never take off | Hacker News Reader

Flights of fancy - Why airborne automobiles will never take off

economist.com

8 pointsemontero114 comments

I think there's another problem -- ease of driving. When driving a car, you don't have to make many choices. Any directional choice is binary: do I turn right here or not? As long as you stay on a road, the choices are limited for you. Driving doesn't tax the mind. In an airplane, you have 360 degrees of choice in addition to your climbing or descending angle. Drivers of air cars will have to take a cue from airline pilots today, and set a heading, and then correct it later. This requires more effort and planning than driving down Rt. 1 until the third stoplight, than turning left. It's more of a mental load than many drivers are willing to take.

Also, when driving a car, you can use the brakes as a safety valve -- just hit them if anything goes wrong. On any road, at any time, you can stop the car and deal with the problem. There's nothing like that in an airplane; you can't just land anywhere you want, anytime (there might even be other airplanes below you, so you can't even descend).

The first problem could be solved by having intelligent autopilot -- GPS with control over the system. The second could be solved by having air cars that could hover.

It's usually a mistake to say never about technology. The future is very long. Your correspondent would have done better to pitch this as an argument about why flying cars are harder than people think, and say precisely what would have to happen to make them work.

Hobby pilot here. This is one of my pet topics. A "flying car" is like "land-running sailboat" - a "flying car" wouldn't be anything like a car, but would serve the same purposes. Journalists always make this mistake.

Möller's approach won't work because their design uses too much energy. We need a design that combines the great fuel efficiency of a good airplane with the VTOL capability of a helicopter. This could be done.

Some of the remaining issues which make this difficult are, in short:

  Mechanical reliability (you can't just pull over if the engine fails)
  Existing regulation (airspaces are organized manually, rigidly and labor-intensively)
  Liability (one lawsuit after a crash and a new company is history)
  Investment (aviation is really expensive and no one wants to touch it)
  Weather (the plane must work in clouds and darkness)
  Training (landing a plane is a little harder than driving a car)

I think the wheather issue cannot be budged in the forseeable future - sometimes it's just not safe to fly. So these hypothetical machines can't replace cars.

In my opinion, most of the problems in this field are related to the US political climate for aviation. Due to airline disasters, all of aviation is kept to a really strict safety standard, and any failure can and will be sued to oblivion privately. The problems that these "flying car" companies are actually shared by every company that tries to make progress in aviation. If you do anything that doesn't use 1960s technology, you have mountains of certification and bureaucracy before you. For this reason, most of the really cool planes are certified as experimental designs, and you have to assemble them yourself.

The existing air traffic control system employs thousands of people and is very resistant to change. It is very labor- and training-intensive, both on the part of the controller and the pilot. But the part of it that doesn't involve airliners could be automated if it wasn't for the culture of excessive safety.

I actually wrote a comprehensive article about this last summer, but I'm really self-conscious and didn't publish it. Pehaps I should.

Please do so.

Private pilot and car nut here. I am having a hard time coming up with a scenario where I'd want a flying car (or roadable aircraft).

I hate to be a Debby Downer, but:

Every pound matters in a light airplane. Why would I want to saddle the flying portion of my trip with all the weight from the safety features designed to protect me on the road or meet federal crash standards, etc? All that weight means more drag, which means lower performance (of at least one of the speed, climb, range, runway required, and/or fuel efficiency variety)

Every pound also matters differently when dealing with the road portion of that vehicle's life. How much mass and engineered passive safety features do I need to protect me from yuppies holding a phone in one hand, a latte in the other and driving with their knees? What happens when a minor fender-bender 600 miles from home means I can't fly home?

My plane (a light, slow single engine Cessna 182) can already beat the airline's time door-to-door from my house in Cambridge to most destinations east of the Mississippi and north of Myrtle Beach. (It can't touch them on cost on most routes, but neither will the Transition...)

Is a roadable car going to shave any time off that? To do so, it would have to be faster in flight, take less time to unfold the wings than it does to pack my airplane, or take less time to secure the wings than it does to hop in a rental car which usually meets me right on the ramp.

Need fuel? Call the airport and it'll be fueled and ready for you. Need minor maintenance or even the annual inspection? Pick up the phone, tell them what you need and when you need it. No need to arrange a ride to the airport to drop off and then another to pick-up your roadable aircraft.

Then there's the matter of cost: My airplane cost me well under $70K. All my cars together over a lifetime, including 2 classic Mustangs, haven't cost more than $60K total. Add in a $40K hangar at the airport and my total cost for 5 cars, an airplane, and a hangar is still under what the Transition costs. (Yes, there's new vs used pricing mixed in there. That's an accurate reflection of what the Transition is up against though: the capabilities and market for used and new aircraft and cars.)

I just can't see it happening as a significant economic win. I'm sure the Terrafugia guys can make it happen technically, just as Eclipse did with their "million dollar" jet.

I think for flying cars to even be plausible ( I.e. people would consider mass manufacturing of them ) Unlimited clean energy sources would have to be found - At least that would be the case here with this gravity.

Gravity does not make flying require a lot of energy per se. The primary problem is one of impulse not energy. (Force over time is impulse. Force integrated over a distance is energy. If you keep your height, in theory no energy is required.)

At any moment, anti-gravity could be discovered and we would be off to the races! Never say never!

The problems then, as now, were more regulatory than technical or economic. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was aghast at the volume of additional air traffic Ford had in mind. The air-traffic control systems of the day would have been overwhelmed. Ford promptly abandoned the idea, even though its flying car would have been cheaper to build and operate than the helicopters that subsequently took over most of their intended roles.

Is this true?

Comments also at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687191

They need built in parachutes for the whole plane. That way amateurs can just screw everything up and hit the parachute button.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Recovery_Systems

It just gives amateurs more confidence to do stupid things (Like buy a hot sport plane full of electronic gizmo's with nasty landing characteristics as their first airplane). We do not want that.

What we need is the piper cub to be brought back cheaply. and more local airstrips available to the public.

The initial description on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Recovery_Systems reminded of what my uncle - an amateur aerobatics pilot - says:

A good landing is one you can walk away from.

A great landing is when they can use the aircraft again.

Looks sweet, and sounds like it works quite well. I don't think having a safety net is a bad thing. Would people not buy sports cars if we removed seat belts and airbags?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com