But there are uses for which a flying car would be superior to anything we have today. A helicopter needs a much larger area to land in than a flying car would, so for things like police cars and ambulances, they’d be the logical choice. Provided they didn’t drink gas like there’s no tomorrow, of course.
Well, that of course depends on the size of the helicopter. I’ve seen some small enough to fit on my desk (little useless for carrying anything or anyone though). And of course, there ARE helicopters used by police, paramedics, and even firefighters, so this still works for being a flying car.
And yeah, as the above poster said, a big reason not to have flying cars is that most people wouldn’t be able to use them. You’d pretty much have to be able to fly a plane before you’d be allowed to fly your flying car, if just for legal reasons, which brings us back to why not everyone has their own submacoptomobiles.
But paramedic helicopters are limited as to where they can land. You can’t set one down on a lot of city streets because of the power lines. A flying car (like the one Edward James Olmos drives in Blade Runner) would be able to touch down in a lot more areas than a helicopter could. As traffic congestion in cities increases, its possible that you could see something like a flying car used by police and paramedics, so that they can get to and from an emergency quickly. I’d say that a flying car ambulance would probably be the first thing to appear, since the quicker you can get a seriously injured person to a trauma center, the better the chance of them surviving.
I know in Iraq, they say that they have a “Golden Hour” in which if they can get a wounded soldier to a CASH (the 21st century version of a MASH), they have a better than 90% chance of surviving, no matter how serious their wounds are. As medical technology improves, you’ll see time frames wherein if a seriously injured patient reaches medical personnel within that time, they’ll have a nearly full recovery. A vehicle which can plunk down almost anywhere, scoop up the injured and get them to a full facility, will be hugely valuable in terms of saving lives.
This reminds me about something I’ve been wondering about: I’ve read that many accidents involving careflight choppers happens due to the rough terrain or bad weather that they often have to deal with just due to the nature of the cases they handle (hikers don’t usually fall and break their leg in remote mountain shopping mall parking lots, after all).
How much more difficult would it be for the chopper to hover at a safe minimum altitude and just lower a recovery basket and a paramedic or two? I’m guessing that there is at least the problem of training the guy who has to go down and up the pulley cable, but how much more training are we talking about? Just how dangerous IS this activity that it is seemingly only carried out by specially trained military personnel?
They do use recovery baskets (especially when they have to fish someone out of the ocean), but you have to remember that windy conditions mean that the basket will get blown all over the place. That can cause stability problems for the chopper, not to mention ruin everyone’s day if the basket gets tangled up in trees.
