What would be required for a flying car to be a “Practical Flying Car for the Masses?”
A minimum wage of about $100 per hour.
Flying cars require more sophisticated control and safety systems. If the engine conks out on your ground based car, you just stop. On a flying car, you plummet to your death. They have only recently figured out control strategies for quad copters that allow them to fly on three rotors, so something like that could be used for a flying car. But however you do it, a flying car is going to be much more expensive to build than a regular ground based car.
Flying cars also require energy to stay aloft. So not only is there a huge up-front cost when buying the vehicle, there’s also a significantly larger fuel cost to operate it. Since it’s more complicated, there’s greater maintenance costs also.
With modern computer controls you could almost make the thing fly itself, so I don’t see the main hurdles being engineering related at this point. The main hurdles now are mostly financial.
About a 99% reduction in the number of people driving around.
I seriously doubt the “masses” could pass the requirements for all the licenses that would be required. Drivers license, pilots license, including applicable ratings, medical certifications, etc.
Well first off people would have to be a whole lot more anal about routine maintenance. Ever see a car that looked like it was on it’s last legs? Muffler falling off? Engine running rough? Stalling? Barely running at a stoplight? Strange squeaks, bangs and rattles as it drove?
Now picture that shitbox flying over your head. :eek:
anti-grav tech.
You can fly an I-TEC Maverick flying car on a sport pilot license. It costs $92K and requires a driver’s license (in place of a medical) and 20 hrs of training.
Since it uses a para-sail there’s not much “training” involved.
I realize that you qualified your question quite well when you stipulate “Practical Flying Car for the Masses?”. The answer to that is nothing because it won’t happen. It isn’t because such a thing is technically impossible. It is because the whole concept isn’t practical at all. Cars make terrible planes and vice-versa but that hasn’t ever stopped people from trying to invent a mutant hybrid that serves both roles to the satisfaction of basically no one.
Flying cars have existed since the 1940’s yet no one really wanted them so they withered away. There is yet another attempted revival now with the Terrafugia based near me. I admire their engineering smarts and innovation but that thing has a potential market of less than 1000 people worldwide. There is simply no market for it even if it can be built.
The fact of the matter is that you will always have something like cars, planes and helicopters but they serve very different roles and are not on track to be hybridized in any real way. The general public will not own any flying vehicles on par with cars until they are almost fully autonomous and self-guiding (and by that I mean many decades away to never). The safety aspect of letting people learn to navigate in 3D as opposed to 2D space over populated areas is simply too much to overcome.
Until then, there are some really cool light sport planes that you can buy and fly that serve most of the general purpose. They aren’t cheap in the usual sense of the word (at least 100k+ at minimum) but they can be had by upper-middle class people that make such a thing a priority and have the property for landing strips.
The Question was…
“What is required to become a ‘Practical Flying Car for the Masses?’”
Not “What is the problem with today’s flying car technology?”
The answer…
Seven things;
- It must be 100% absolutely safe, no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it.
- It must fly and drive itself.
- It must be able to Take Off and Land Vertically without blowing air everywhere. (VTOL)
- it must be weatherproof.
- It must be affordable in order to be “Practical for the Masses.”
- It must be unobtrusive.
- It must be regulated by governments for the creation of flight lanes, and electronic borders and boundaries.
Next Question,
What is the first problem to solve when trying to create a “Practical Flying Car for the Masses?”
Hint…It not a car, it’s a hybrid Land/Air vehicle.
Not into hints. Where are you ultimately going with this?
“You’d be interested in getting rich, wouldn’t you? Of course you would! Well what if I told you that with just a small investment…”
Flying cars have been around for decades. They are called “airplanes”. What, too expensive? Yeah, they are.
Moderator Note
Welcome to the SDMB, Donsairo.
Your asking of a question and then posting what you believe to be the “correct” answer makes me think that you are promoting a specific agenda rather than opening a topic for discussion. If that is the case, please note the following from the SDMB registration agreement:
Please keep this in mind with further posts on this topic.
Sorry, I am new to forums.
I will try again,
I mean sincerely to cause thought and discussion into questions concerning flying car technology.
Flying car is not a good term, a hybrid land/air vehicle is more precise.
I have studied the subject and was researching what peoples opinions are as to what would be a “Practical Flying Car for the Masses.”
Pretty much what I have always heard, nothing new.
The answers I posted I gleamed over time from research articles on the subject.
I did add two of my own.
I set out to invent a “Practical Flying car for the Masses,” and have discovered some solutions.
I am curious to see if I can stimulate ideas from others into a new line of thought in the design of a hybrid land/air vehicle.
To think outside the box or “flying car with wings idea” and if those new ideas could follow my line of reasoning.
I began my discoveries by asking “What is the problem?”
The answer I came up with was, “The way lift is created for current flying car technology.”
So then I asked myself, “How is lift produced?”
That is when I had my first “Eureka” moment.
So My next question would be…
“How many way’s can lift be produced?”
Why not just lay out your ideas and we can discuss them.
Making us tease them out of you is going to become tedious very quickly.
Maybe your right, but then I would only be professing.
I have come up with a new line of thought for the technology, and I will share the discoveries I have made very soon. (I am shooting for "New Year’s Day, 2015)
But I would like to help people make some of the discoveries on their own, it would be fun.
Sincerely,
Don
We don’t seem to be getting the same amount of fun out of this as you are.
Assuming you’re going to be trying to sell this idea at some point, you’ll want to work on your presentation. You want to intrigue your audience not annoy them.
This is true but not enlightening. This “hybrid land/air vehicle” idea is precisely what every “flying car” concept has been since the concept was first created decades ago. Being punctilious about using the new terminology doesn’t change our conception of the problem one whit.
That’s one problem, but not the most interesting. A more interesting problem is, “When the machinery fails because most people are crap at maintaining what they own, how do I survive the resulting crash?”
Nobody’s come up with a good answer to that one yet.
Either moving wind beneath something fast enough to generate enough lift for a heavier-than-air vehicle, or making your vehicle overall lighter-than-air.
Heavier-than-air vehicles neatly separate into rotorcraft (helicopters), fixed-wing (airplanes), and weird experimental designs (autogyros, possibly from Prussia to Siam). Rotorcraft are impossible to fly; some people don’t know that, and so we have helicopter pilots in the world. Fixed-wing craft are possible to fly but very difficult, even if they’re inherently stable, and the other designs are no better.
Lighter-than-air craft are great until someone ruptures a bag. They’re also at the mercy of the winds and I doubt any blimp or dirigible design is especially fast compared to a car on the highway. Also, we have two gases to make them lighter-than-air with, helium and hydrogen: The first is in short supply and the second is only safe when compared with gasoline, which is a chemical designed to explode under fairly ordinary conditions.
Am I missing anything?
I went googling to see what people have actually built lately.
The first thing I found was this:
Interesting, but it looks like it flies a lot like a conventional plane, so not really for the masses, I think.
The next thing I found was wikipedia, which has a list of several modern flying cars.
The cars they list are here:
All of these still have a ways to go before they reach the level of the common man’s car that the OP envisions, but it is interesting to see where we are currently. Ducted fans and letting computers figure out the hard stuff seem to be a common theme.
I also found this article interesting. It discusses a lot of the challenges involved:
WHY do internet cranks always, always do this? If you have something new to say, just effing SAY IT. I have seen this “teasing” approach, where the magical new information is always just around the corner, time after time after time. Inevitably, if the crank ever manages to actually spit it out, it turns out to be something ludicrously idiotic.
Donsario: I am willing to bet that whatever your fantastic new discovery is, it is either:
-already known
-impractical for very good reasons
and/or
-batshit insane
Feel free to prove me wrong. I won’t hold my breath.