Potential of the Moller Skycar

[Johnny_L.A]

@Broomstick

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.

From the Cirrus website:

the embedded CAPS harness straps unzip from both sides of the fuselage.

I know I’ve seen photos of the damaged sections of fuselage after a parachute has been deployed. I’m pretty sure it was on a Cirrus. I haven’t been able to find the photos online though.

[Broomstick]

Huh- in that case “you learn something new every day”. I stand corrected.

(I still don’t think that rocket does the fuse much good, either…)

[Sam_Stone]

Ballistic parachutes are an added safety measure, but you don’t want to rely on them - especially if you pop one over a city. How would you like to come down onto the side of a 20 story high rise? Or into some high voltage lines? Or through the roof of a school?

Uncontrolled parachute descents are risky as hell. And they’re especially useless for ‘commuter’ airplanes, because they spend a small portion of their flight time high enough for the chute to work. Something like a skycar would be most vulnerable to an accident while hovering, and that means it’s too close to the ground for a chute to help anyway.

Johnny L.A.: The Mini-500 has several problems. One is that it uses an air-cooled Rotax engine, running at or above its design limit. This means a high risk of engine failure, and in fact a lot of the many Mini-500 accidents have been engine failure related.

The second problem is that apparently the Mini-500 is a real handful when the engine quits. You can read some of the crash reports Here.

[Johnny_L.A]

@Sam Stone

The second problem is that apparently the Mini-500 is a real handful when the engine quits. You can read some of the crash reports Here.

Thanks for the link. I’ll read it after I wake up a bit.

Without having read the reports yet, I can say that the Mini-500 has a low inertia rotor system – like the Robinson R-22 and the Schweizer 300. In the event of an engine failure it is critical that the pilot lower the collective immediately. There’s just not enough mass to keep them turning otherwise. I’ll read the reports and see what they have to say; but my initial hunch is that it may be a training issue.

Incidentally I’ve seen an Italian homebuilt that uses a turbine from an APU. The military seems to surplus the APUs while there are still hundreds of hours left on the turbines. And the ship itself looks a lot sexier than the bulbous Mini-500.

[Sam_Stone]

@Johnny L.A.

Thanks for the link. I’ll read it after I wake up a bit.

Without having read the reports yet, I can say that the Mini-500 has a low inertia rotor system – like the Robinson R-22 and the Schweizer 300. In the event of an engine failure it is critical that the pilot lower the collective immediately. There’s just not enough mass to keep them turning otherwise. I’ll read the reports and see what they have to say; but my initial hunch is that it may be a training issue.

Incidentally I’ve seen an Italian homebuilt that uses a turbine from an APU. The military seems to surplus the APUs while there are still hundreds of hours left on the turbines. And the ship itself looks a lot sexier than the bulbous Mini-500.

It’s not just a training issue. From what I’ve heard, the Mini-500 needs damned near perfect technique, and still has a pretty big ‘coffin corner’. Couple that with using an engine that was never designed for the role, and using substandard parts in manufacturer, and you have a disaster waiting to happen. Many such disasters, in fact.

According to a message in this thread which has numbers that correspond to what I have heard from other sources, somewhere between 100 and 130 Mini-500’s have flown. Of those, there have been 30 major accidents causing 11 fatalities and six serious injuries. That’s an absolutely horrendous accident rate.

[Magiver]

@Johnny L.A.

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.
.

If you’ve seen 2 of these flying in formation raise your hand

Moller’s concept is completely unrealistic. It will never get down to the price of an SUV so his idea of “quality car” would have to be a Lamborghini. In that price range someone in the market would purchase an Eclipse 500 personal jet and get a 430 mph aircraft with a ceiling of 41,000 ft a range of 1,125 miles. It would have the redundancy of 2 engines, room for golf clubs/ski’s and 4 of your buddies.

At best it would be a toy for aviation buffs who would otherwise buy a P-51 Mustang or a hanger full of Steermans. And given those choices it would still lose.

[Broomstick]

:::Raises hand::: “I’ll take the hangar full of Stearmans behind door #2, please…”

Seriously, if I had a million dollars to spend on aviating machines I’d opt for old biplanes - at least I know I can land one if the power quits.

[BrainGlutton]

Broomstick has a very apt username for this discussion!

[levdrakon]

@Sam Stone

Here’s the thing: If you want personal aircraft, you can have that NOW. Go get a pilot’s license.

I’ve been mulling this over for a few days and decided you’re posing an interesting question.

[Sequent]

I’m generally an optimist when it comes to technology. The temptation is to think that there has to be a happy, cost-effective medium between the Larry Walters Skycar and the hyper-engineered, FAA-certified Moller Commuter Coffin. But Sam Stone has convinced me on this one. Time to save up for a Cessna!

[Airblairxxx]

Sorry to resurrect; I was on vacation last week.

@RTFirefly

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.

Fallows later expanded his Atlantic material into a book, Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel. He devotes a large section of the book to the development of the Cirrus, and why it’s so hard to bring a new plane to market. (Long story short: the insurance issue was a canard, it was generally the economics as cited by Sam Stone that was the problem. Cessna, for one, when downsizing their single-engine business, claimed it was the insurance problem but it was actually their declining profit margins in that market. They’ve since moved on rather nicely into the business jet category.)

@Broomstick

*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.

…

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.*

I don’t know if people aren’t “motivated” to learn to fly; I think it’s more a case that there aren’t that many people who need to. I’d like to get my pilot’s license, but I don’t have the money and I don’t have the need (my commute is 10 minutes). It would just be an expensive hobby, which I can’t afford right now.

I don’t see a new aviation paradigm on the horizon that would compel thousands of people to flock to flight schools. What problem could a Skycar (assuming it works as well as Moller believes it will) or similar invention solve? The only one I can think of is the increasing number of people whose commutes extend for an hour or more one-way. But even if the safety issues are ironed out and even if this hypothetical aircraft can make it to market at an affordable price, there’s still the issues of increasing fuel costs and of developing a usable infrastructure on the ground (akin to heliports at an office park, or starting up buslines between local airports and places of employment).

Fallows was right: the new niche for aircraft to fill is not to serve as a commuter vehicle. It is to fill in the gaps of the current hub-and-spoke aviation model, using the 5,000 or so general aviation fields that are currently underutilized to take the strain off the commercial hubs. If I wanted to go to Los Angeles from the Bay Area and my time was important enough to require that I fly, right now I could show up two hours early at San Jose or San Francisco for an hour-long flight south, then spend another two hours collecting luggage and a rental car and driving to my destination. I’d rather have my wife drop me off at one of the two GA airports within 15 minutes of my house, hop on an air taxi with maybe four passenger seats (one of the new very light jets* soon coming to market will fit the bill nicely), fly into another small airport closest to my destination, and walk with my luggage in hand to a car rental counter.