Potential of the Moller Skycar

Great Debates
21

No, hovering is the easy part. You can make a barn door hover if you give it enough power.

Moller is a real engineer, and he’s doing real engineering. But he’s building a prototype of a vehicle that will not be viable transportation for decades. And you will never, ever, see them become common commuter vehicles.

What Moller is guilty of doing is fudging all the numbers surrounding this thing to make it sound attractive. NO ONE believes his estimates of top speed, range, and fuel consumption. The numbers simply don’t add up. NO ONE believes that he can sell this thing for anywhere near the amount of money he claims it could sell for.

And here’s a very fundamental flaw with the thing - it’s hideously complex. Complex is not good. Light airplanes can be flown by average people and maintained by average aviation mechanics in a safe manner because they are very simple craft. Much simpler than a modern car. You’ve got an air-cooled engine designed in the 1930’s swinging a simple propeller, and flight controls that are just hinged bits of structure connected with pushrods and cables directly to the yoke the pilot manipulates. Very few moving parts and complex systems. And yet, even these simple craft now cost upwards of a quarter of a million bucks for a low-end, slow, 4 seat runabout.

The Moller Skycar, if it ever flew, would require multiple rotary engines spinning multiple full-feathering adjustable pitch ducted fans in computer-controlled movable housings. The flight controls are computerized. The thing has to transition from hover to forward flight and back again. It’s simply hellishly complex, and this makes it much less safe and orders of magnitude more difficult to keep running safely.

Airplanes are also dynamically stable, and have survivable failure modes. If the engine quits in a Cessna, you glide to the ground. If the engine quits in a helicopter, you can auto-rotate to the ground. But if an engine quits in the skycar while you’re in hover, you can kiss your ass goodbye. Moller claims that a ballistic parachute will make it safe, but that’s nonsense. When you’re hovering, you’re too low for a parachute to help you if you have a catastrophic failure.

And if you run out of gas, that Skycar will come out of the sky like an aerodynamic brick. And with the fuel consumption it has, it will be out of gas in less than two hours.

To give you an idea of how difficult an engineering problem the Skycar is, consider that Porsche attempted a much smaller task - to take one of their own air-cooled engines and adapt it for aviation use. They spent years and tens of millions of dollars getting that thing certified, and in the end it flopped in the market due to high cost. I believe the engine alone was over $50,000. Toyota has had an aviation engine in development for over a decade, and it’s not on the market yet. And yet Moller’s LEAST radical piece of his aircraft is using multiple wankel rotary engines of his own design.

Then there’s the noise. You haven’t lived until you’ve had some clown fire up eight ducted fans in the yard next to you at 7 AM. That alone will keep those things out of cities forever. And won’t it be nice to have dust and debris blown all over your yard and house?

But here’s the nail in the coffin - you’d think that going 3-D and stacking airplanes in the sky would ease congestion. But it won’t. Roads can handle FAR more traffic than the airspace above them can. That’s because cars are fixed to the road and track it precisely, so they can be packed together like sardines. But airplanes are victim to the movement of the air mass they are flying in. That why we have 1000’ vertical separation between aircraft. And the speed differences can be dramatic - if a Skycar really did got 350 mph, it would still have to share airspace with a Piper Cub tooling along at 85. That’s another reason why we keep huge horizontal distances between aircraft.

Computerized flight controls don’t help at all. You can pack airplanes 100 feet apart, but God help you if the first one in line runs into a downdraft or a sudden headwind like the leading edge of a thunderstorm. Then it’ll be raining metal.

Oh, and if half the city is flying airplanes to work, where do they park? And what happens if a thunderstorm rolls in? Does everyone just camp out at work?

22

So, Sam, do you consider personal air transportation a fundamentally intractable problem? Or is it just that Moller is using the wrong technological approach? Is there some other way it might be achieved?

23

Well, there are regulations and then there are regulations. Every certified aircraft has to be… erm, certified. It’s a whole lot cheaper updating a certified design (like the Cessna 172 or the Piper PA-28) than it is to come up with a brand new design. And yet, new designs are certified. For example, the Cirrus and the Diamond. So I think the cost of certification is what keeps the number of new designs low. (Of course aircraft in the Experimental category do not need certification since they are ‘amateur built’ – but they still need to be inspected so that the FAA is satisified it’s safe [enough].)

I think insurance was the real killer. At the end of the 1970s American airplane manufacturers were building something like 15,000 new airplanes a year. In the 1980s that number dropped, IIRC to under 2,000. Why? If you buy a car, the maker is responsible for its design and construction for a few years. There are occasional recalls of ‘older’ cars to fix serious problems. But with aircraft, the makers were pretty much responsible for every aircraft they’d ever built. Theoretically (I don’t know if it was ever tested in court) a company could be sued because a manufacturer didn’t put a corrosion preventer in the aircraft, even if the product didn’t exist until decades after the aircraft rolled off the line. And I’d venture that most people believe that only rich people fly, and that airplane makers have pockets deeper than the Mariana Trench. Not true. I remember a rash of lawsuits in the early-1980s that resulted in huge settlements.

I recall a $40 million settlement against Cessna. I don’t remember if this was the specific case, but: A married couple, both flight instructors, took off in bad weather. They flew into a thunderstorm and crashed. Their family sued Cessna because the aircraft did not withstand the forces it was never designed to withstand. They sued Lycoming (and IIRC won – even though the NTSB determined that there was nothing wrong with the engine) because the aircraft had a Lycoming engine. And that was just one lawsuit. Plaintiffs’ attorneys liked to make sure there were no pilots on the juries, and IMO people who know nothing about General Aviation are more likely to award stupid settlements. I’ve heard it said that half of the cost of a new aircraft was the insurance premium the companies had to pay.

The upshot was that Cessna stopped making piston-engine airplanes. Piper went through a bankruptcy or three. Used airplanes became very expensive. (Example: My dad bought a six-year-old Cessna 172K in 1976 for $10,200. That same aircraft in the same condition today would fetch around $45,000 – even though it’s three decades older.)

Eventually Congress passed the General Aviation Revitalization Act. This limited manufacturers’ liability to 18 years. (Imagine Ford or Chevy being responsible for their cars for 18 years! ‘My child died because you failed to install airbags as standard equipment in your cars!’ ‘But we didn’t have airbags back then!’ ‘Too bad. Pay up.’) The makers started building airplanes again. Only after the long hiatus, where flying became more expensive, it seems (that is, it seems to me) that fewer people were persuing airmans certificates. I remember reading a long time ago that the number of active pilots was dropping. I think in the U.S. it’s under a million now.

It used to be that one could buy an aircraft for the price of a new car. Not too long ago a new SUV might cost $35,000 and you could get an late-'60s/early-'70s Cessna 172 for $25,000. Nowadays it seems as if SUVs are still around $35,000, but the same – now older aircraft will cost $10,000 or $15,000 more. A new 172 is close to $200,000. There’s still demand for aircraft, but the volume of aircraft being produced is much smaller than it was in 1979. Fewer airplanes + steady demand (which seems to be on the upswing, judging by some of the threads here) = higher prices even for decades-old aircraft.

Helicopters are inherently unstable. But yes, pilots are trained to autorotate. It’s conceivable that the Skycar could be made with systems to recover from a catastrauphic situation, but I agree with you that it probably won’t happen.

24

Mass commuter air travel is a fundamentally intractable problem, yes. You simply can’t pack that many aircraft into the same airspace. It’s too unstable.

The building I work in has several thousand people in it. We have an 11-story parkade for all the cars, plus a large underground parking system. In the morning, cars flow in to that building at a rate of probably ten or so per minute.

Imagine trying to get say 500 aircraft safety landed during the morning rush hour. For ONE building. It simply can’t be done. Even if they were all computer controlled hovering machines. And once they land, what do you do with them? They aren’t cars. So now you need the equivalent of an aircraft carrier’s elevators and loading systems for every building. Not going to happen. Ever.

Then there’s the cost. Not just the cost of the machine, but of fuel. That Skycar, if it worked, would be burning at least 30 gallons per hour. If it took you half an hour to get to work, that’s 15 gallons of gas. My vehicle can make a half-hour trip on half a gallon. It simply takes a lot more energy to lift the mass of an aircraft into the sky and bring it back down again in the manne that the Skycar does it.

Then there’s all the myriad safety issues. I pass broken-down cars every day. If your car breaks down, it stops and you get annoyed and call a tow truck. If your skycar breaks down, you die. And so does anyone underneath the 3000 lbs of metal that’s dropping from the sky.

But personal air transportation as a concept isn’t outrageous - you’ll just never see it for hops within a city. IF Skycars became available, you’d still have to park them at an airport due to noise and safety regs. They’d be so expensive that only a tiny percentage of people will be able to afford them anyway, so congestion won’t be a problem. They’ll be just another cool toy for the very rich.

Here’s the thing: If you want personal aircraft, you can have that NOW. Go get a pilot’s license. You can even get a sport pilot’s license now that requires less training. Then buy yourself a used Cessna or a sporty little Grumman, and fly to your heart’s content. And some people even do use them for practical transportation. I owned a Grumman AA-1 that I rented out to a friend who lived in Edmonton and worked in Ft. MacMurray, and he used it to fly himself up to work every week and come home on weekends. It also only burned 5 GPH, and got better mileage than most cars.

Then there are ultralights, flying parachutes, gyrocopters, homebuilts… Thousands and thousands of people own them and fly them every day.

Personal aircraft are here now. If you’re waiting for skycars or strap-on helicopters, you’re going to miss the boat. Just go flying!

25

RE: The cost of aviation.

It’s not just product liability insurance. It’s not just certification costs. What happened to aviation is that it got into an economic ‘death spiral’. In short, the sales of new machines began to drop. This increased the unit price of each machine, which priced more people out of the market. Which drove the unit price up more, which drove more people out of the market… Eventually, we landed on the tail of the curve where high cost and rich people meet, and there’s your market.

Insurance is only a few thousand dollars per airplane. And if it costs $100 million to certify an airplane, that’s not an outrageous unit cost if you sell 100,000 units. But if you’re only selling a couple hundred aircraft a year, that’s a completely different matter.

One of the key things that happened to the aircraft market is manufacturers began to compete against their own used aircraft. Due to the need for very good maintenance and the simple nature of airplanes, they have a very long lifespan, and older models are just as good as newer ones. It can be almost impossible to tell the difference between a freshly painted 1975 Cessna 172 and a 2006 Cessna 172. They fly the same and look the same. Minor trim differences are about it. Yet the used one can be had for $40,000, and the new one is $200,000 or whatever it is now.

The average age of a road car is about 10 years. And a 10 year old car is generally demonstrably inferior to a newer model. But aircraft have an indefinite lifespan, and remain virtually the same all the way through their useful life.

So here’s part of what happened - in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the personal aircraft industry took off. Tens of thousands per year were made, which drove the unit costs down and made them affordable for average people. Back then, you could buy an aircraft for roughly the cost of a mid-range luxury auto. But over time, an inventory of used aircraft started to build, and just got bigger and bigger over time, because the used ones never leave the market. So fewer people bought new, which drove up unit costs and pushed more people into used aircraft. Then add in new regulations and product liability costs, and the prices went up even more, forcing more people out. Enter the economic death spiral, which continued until most of the manufacturers were bankrupt and the few who were left were selling high-priced machines to the very wealthy.

The rest of us make due with a very large, healthy used market in perfectly good airplanes.

26

Actually, all I really want is a car that never gets stuck in traffic. (Go ahead, spend a quarter million on a Lamborghini or somethin’; when rush hour hits, it might as well be a Yugo.)

27

You haven’t lived until you’ve been stuck in traffic in an airplane. Like being told you’re 10th to land at a busy airport, and the weather is starting to crap out.

If you want to never get stuck in traffic, move to a small city, work from home, negotiate hours that let you come and go outside of rush hour, or ride light-rail transit. That’s about the only way I can think of to avoid it.

28

Actually, bicycles are very nice for not getting stuck in traffic. A bit limited in top speed, and not so good in inclement weather, though.

29

And you wouldn’t want to use one for commuting, unless your workplace has facilities for you to shower and change clothes before work.

30

My initial response to Moller’s claim is something I am not allowed to say outside of the BBQ Pit. Suffice to say, he’s full of it. Yes, his “flying car” is possible from an engineering standpoint but his price, fuel consumption, and safety claims are piles of semi-solid waste from male cattle.

No.

I don’t have to imagine it. You’re talking about the airspace over Chicago or LA on a busy, sunny summer afternoon. Yes, much like freeway rush hour, but at 100-200 mph.

Actually, I don’t. I mean, I don’t have an “air traffic control” problem. The airlines have one, but that’s because they’re stupid enough to schedule 40 take-offs at precisely 12:01 pm from the same airport. They also schedule as if the weather is always perfect. It’s a little unfair to blame the professionals in the towers because the freakin’ airlines don’t know/understand how to take turns with the runway.

Well, yes, a little more complicated than driving, but not as much as most people think, even with such “primative” aircraft as Cessna 172’s and the like.

Yes, this is one of the downsides of flying (although fatality rates from mid-air collisions have been running about 50% the past couple decades, not 100%, which you may or may not find reassuring).

Yes and no - as has been said many times before in Moller Skycar threads, and already mentioned here, we already have flying cars - they’re called “airplanes” and “helicopters”. Protesting that they don’t look like cars is like complaining cars don’t look like horse-and-buggies.

The issue with flying cars is not that they’re impossible to build, or impossible to afford, but because flying small aircraft have inherent limitations. They are limited by weather to a degree ground-based vehicles aren’t, you can’t pack them in as tightly in a given space, and they require a level of competence that, while not beyond the capability of a normal human being, appears to beyond the motivation of a normal human being to learn. I think the biggest obstables are those found between the ears of human beings.

31

You’ve convinced me.

James Fallows made the case in the Atlantic a few years back that the true niche of small planes was in the shorter intercity flights. He was talking about the routes where by the time you get in the car, drive to the airport, check in, wait for your flight, actually fly, then wait for your luggage, pick up your car, and drive to your destination at the other end, you hadn’t saved that much time over driving straight through.

Fallows was pushing someone’s vision of a small plane that would have a working parachute big and strong enough for the whole damn plane, the assumption being that this would lessen the risks both in terms of the insurance problem and the willingness of people to put themselves and their kids in a plane that their spouse is flying.

32

I think that’s the biggest deal-killer at present, but the safety systems are another big issue in my mind.

I can not comprehend how ANY helicopter could be built for $50k with present technolgy.

Yeah, I saw the same cable show, too, with the minimal structure rotorcraft with pontoon gear. I still don’t see how they can produce it for less than $50k.

Will someone please define “extremely easy to learn to fly” a little more precisely for me? I didn’t find our current airplanes to be difficult. C’mon, this is NOT rocket science, people! Granted, I don’t fly rotors, but even though I’m aware they are a bit trickier, I still don’t see where they’re so impossible.

The HARD part of flying is not making it go where you point it. The hard part is navigating, and knowing what to do when something goes wrong. Learning a bunch of regulations is kind of icky, too, but it’s no worse than learning your multiplication tables or any other form of rote memorization.

Um. Having seen, up close, the result of a helicopter autorotation I don’t find that reassuring. Yeah, you might well walk away from the wreck, but it’s still going to be a violent episode. I kinda wonder about this “automatic” rotation feature, and what you do if it malfunctions. And if you ARE autorotating and heading for a tree you’re probably SOL - helicopters don’t glide worth beans, they have controlled falls. Whatever you’re above - that’s pretty much what you’re going to land on. A well trained, skilled helicopter pilot might be able to “glide” sufficiently to avoid a single tree or other obstacle if circumstances permit it, but there are failure modes for rotorcraft which would prohibit that.

Alas, I think you may be right…

As I said before - learning to operate such machinery at such speeds is within the capability of most humans but few are motivated to actually learn to do this properly. And we certainly don’t want airborne bumper cars.

Yep.

We actually already have that. There are designated “traffic lanes” in the sky already, including speed limits. It started with assigned altitudes for certain directions and modes of operation, various "airways’ which are marked on navigational maps, and so on. I could go into detail but I don’t want everyone reading this to fall asleep.

You don’t need towers and we already have satellites in orbit. Originally, it was a matter of watching your altimeter and compass and flying at the proper altitude(s) for your direction of travel. This was further aided by radar and air traffic controllers in heavy traffic areas. Further refinements, such as GPS satellites (remember, I mentioned satellites before…) have increased precision in this area.

No additional cost for the infrastructure - it’s already in place. You just need the proper equipment mounted in your “skycar”. That’s not a limitation in this day and age.

Well, heck, my battery-powered handheld aviation transceiver - about the size of my fist - transmits 20-25 miles with no problem while airborne. TCAS has been installed on airliners for quite some time - it picks up transponder signals from other airplanes, and has probably prevernted a number of accidents.

There actually is a “peer-to-peer” network of sorts in development already. It’s gotten quite popular in Alaska, where formal air traffic control is spotty. Again, we’re already further along in this area than you think.

These issues are not what will keep the Moller Skycrap grounded indefinately.

It’s called “flight training”, after which you are issued a “certificate”. Training specific to they Skycrap would be needed, but that would be no worse than for any other category of aircraft.

Uh… we don’t have these issues now? The Skycrap is just another aircraft, it’s not some special new transportation mode. We have those problems now. Law enforcement have strategies for dealing with this problem now. Heck, people still smuggle drugs in trucks, cars, vans, boats, and in their rectums.

Gimme a C172, Piper Cherokee, or even a J-3 Cub - proven technology, fewer things to go wrong, can be upgraded for modern navigation systems when necessary, and much cheaper to maintain and repair.

I think insurance would be the bigger of the two problems. That, and massive jury awards after the inevitable accidents.

The FAA would be happy to let the “common schmoe” fly one of those things IF the “common schmoe” went and got him/herself a pilot license with requisite add-ons.

Moller is confusing the issue with the recent “Sport Pilot” regulations which, indeed, allow a person to fly utilizing their driver’s license in place of the FAA medical exam AND a “sport pilot” certificate which is, by the way, a real pilot “license” (techincally, they’re all certificates). Smoke and mirrors. An SP still has to complete mandatory training requirements.

In any case - there’s no way in hell the Skycrap will ever qualify as a “sport” aircraft. It’s too heavy, too fast, carries too many people, has too many engines, and probabaly a bunch of other disqualifications. Under current regulations you will need

  1. at least a private pilot’s license
  2. at least a 3rd class FAA medical
  3. high-performance endorsement
  4. complex endorsement
  5. multi-engine rating
    That’s probably $15-20k in training costs. At least. Before you ever take the controls.

By the way - there’s no specific qualfication for “experimental aircraft pilot”. If you want to fly experimental stuff the FAA is happy to allow you to do so, regardless of your training level. There are, of course, rules you have to follow - such as no test-flying over houses, for example - but there is not “test pilot license” or rating.

33

We have those. The Cirrus line of airplanes comes with just such a parachute as standard equipment. They’ve been developed as after-market add-ons for the most common 2 and 4 seat fixed gear airplanes.

I don’t know that it impacts the insurance rates much, if any. I don’t know if it reassures the “nervous spouse”. But then, I don’t have the same perspective as the general population.

34

The thing I’ve never been able to understand- if Moller is concerned about Insurance or the FAA wanting a word with him should he try and test it, why not load the Skycar onto a truck or a container ship and conduct the necessary tests in, say, South America or North Africa? I’m sure there are plenty of governments that would either look the other way or not care if some crazy Yanqui wants to test his “Flying Car” in their country…

35

No need to go to another country. People test experimental aircraft in the U.S. every day. I don’t know all of the rules, but basically I think they are along the following lines: The FAA must inspect the aircraft during construction to ensure construction techniques are suitable. (e.g., critical parts are not merely affixed with duct tape. Or more realistically, that rivets are properly installed, glues are properly cured, welds are properly made, etc.) The builder must furnish proper documentation, such as weight and balance data. The pilot must possess a pilot’s license (if the aircraft is not an ultralight); but ISTR hearing that he doesn’t necessarily need the proper category of license. I could be wrong about this. I heard that one could build a twin engine aircraft and test it even if he’s not rated for twins. I never checked to see if that is true. Anyway… The aircraft must be tested before it is allowed to go very far. IIRC, 25 hours within 25 nm of the airport, and it must avoid congested areas. There are other rules, but I don’t know them. The point is that it’s perfectly acceptable to test experimental aircraft in the U.S. – even if it’s something a bit different like the Skycar.

36

“I’m telling you, just attach a giant parachute to the airplane itself! Is anyone listening to me?”

– Jack Handey

37

Of course there was a flying car a half-century ago. The Molt Taylor Aerocar. Here’s N4994P on the AirVenture Museum site. One simply removed the wings and towed them like a trailer.

Frank Robinson envisioned his R-22 as (relatively inexpensive, compared to other helicopters) as personal transportation. It’s relatively low cost led it to be one of the most popular training helicopters in the world. Now, it is too expensive for most people. But I read an article about a doctor who lived in the country who would use it to visit the various hospitals or patients he needed to, and kept it in a small hangar on his property. It seems to me that he is using it as Frank Robinson intended.

A small helicopter is pretty much a ‘flying car’. Certainly you can’t run down the the nearest 7-11 in one; but given permission, one can land it basically anywhere. There are a lot of Mini-500s out there. I’ve read here that Mini-500s are accidents waiting to happen, but I have not read any actual accident statistics on them I don’t know if crashes are due to the design, or to poor technique on the part of the pilots. And there are other single-seat and two-seat homebuilts out there. The Rotorway series is very popular and there are loads of them flying, with kits costing around $60,000. If one could get permission to operate to a certain place (e.g., if the pilot could convince his employer to allow him to land one on top of the parking structure or on other property) then he could keep a $500 Chevy Sprint there to get around with. Not the flying car ideal, but certainly more practical given that it’s technology we already have.

The biggest problem if everyone had a personal flying machine is, as has been pointed out, traffic. But a small helicopter can operate out of small places, and a dedicated landing/parking area could handle a reasonable number. Properly trained pilots would have no trouble cooperating with one another to maintain separation. Happens all the time at uncontrolled airports across the country. But therein lies the problem: We would need dedicated areas for operation, just as we need dedicated areas for our cars. We have them. They’re called airports and helipads. Only who is going to use valuable land to accommodate the few people who fly? No worries with a flying car, you say? Well, with a flying car we’d still have to have dedicated landing areas. So you may as well get the training and buy a small helicopter. The technology is proven, we already have licensing and regulations, and they’re cheaper than a Skycar – even accounting for a ‘beater’ to keep at your destination for using the roads once you get there.

38

As I understand it, using the parachute on a Cirrus results in a total loss of the airframe. I haven’t looked into it, but ISTR that the straps rip through the skin. Of course most of the components such as the engine, avionics, etc. could be salvaged; but if the airframe is a total loss, that may add to insurance costs. OTOH, it’s probably cheaper for insurance companies to pay for a new airframe than to compensate for the deaths of the occupants.

39

It’s not the “strings” that rip through the airframe - the rocket that launches the 'chute and get it it out into the open blows through a panel in the airplane fuselage. It’s not that alone, though - part of the crash calculation involves the airframe “soaking up” part of the impact, just like crumple zones in a car. In actual fact, there has been at least one Cirrus that had a soft enough landing to be repaired. They do tell you to expect to lose the airframe, though, since that will be the outcome the vast majority of the time you pull the Big Red Handle.

This is a characteristic of airframe 'chutes - from ultralights on up, if you’re in such dire straits as to need the parachtue, expect your airframe to be a total loss. But since you’re not supposed to use them unless under threat of imminent death I, personally, don’t really see this as an issue.

40

Insurance on the loss of the prototype in the event of a crash, not so much the damage it might cause if it hit something when it crashed. Its easy to find a remote area with lots of room to fly, not so easy to replace your one of a kind bazillion dollar plane. Investors want their baby to come home in one piece.