When all you fools are racing through the air I’ll enjoy having the freeway to myself.
mmm
Who says they have to fly high? One that gets a foot off of the ground would be very useful. No bumps, easier to pass people on a soft shoulder, ect . .
Harder to stop, harder to turn, ect. Flying a foot off the ground would be worse than driving on ice with 4 bald tires.
We already have small flying vehicles that carry a few people. They are called airplanes and helicopters. They are regulated as aircraft.
We might someday have more/cheaper/more efficient airplanes and helicopters. They will be regulated as aircraft.
I doubt very seriously that we will ever have thick air traffic above populated areas like you sometimes see in movies. Because that would be incredibly dangerous. Ground-based transportation can crash, but the vast majority of mechanical problems with cars do not lead to crashes. They lead to cars stopped on the side of the road. Aircraft that have similar mechanical problems often lead to crashes. You don’t want that happening in a densely populated area.
If we were to have vehicles capable of flight up to a few thousand feet, a few simple rules could probably handle a ton of the details.
GPS type systems could have coordinates and altitudes for preferred geofenced “lanes” for travel. and autopilot systems would follow such lanes just like GPS routes on city streets. Doing so puts you in a corridor of other flying traffic moving at similar speeds in a similar direction, reducing the need to be worried about collisions from cross traffic.
Once you get to within a short distance to your destination you depart the lane and fly a little more flexibly to come in for a landing at your destination.
Police would monitor these lanes much like they do now watching for those flying in an irresponsible or erratic way with regard to traffic lanes and dealing with them accordingly.
you could also establish lanes at different altitudes for Local traffic vs. long distance and or higher speed traffic.
Example:
traffic at 500m is restricted to 100kph
traffic at 1000m is restricted to 200kph
traffic at 2000m its restricted to 500kph.
so when you are flying to the next city, you get up to higher altitude higher speed lanes and get there quickly. Dropping to lower speed lower altitude lanes as you get closer.
Granted, I know at these speeds 500-1000m of altitude is not much of a cushion. I would assume by the time we get to this level of tech, GPS and or autopilot type tech will be similarly better equipped to manage with smaller margins of safety needed.
I imagine they would operate like helicopters, and would likely be controlled by computer, which could operate lanes, etc, for vehicles that can fly as precisely as helicopters.
This.
In fiction, it’s obviously much more interesting to have the hero manually pilot all vehicles and then have an inevitable chase sequence.
In reality, the whole “flying car” concept (that is, a flying vehicle that can take the role of the family car and be used for shopping trips, commutes etc.) requires as a prerequisite that AI pilots the things.
Otherwise they would be far too dangerous and/or too few people would be able to get a license to fly one. The concept would never … get ready to laugh … get off the ground.
Woof, all the bad things about ground transportation, with none of the benefits, and all the bad things about air transportation, with none of the benefits.
Seriously, the ground is an awesome thing to have for transportation, it’s hard, you don’t fall through it, you can push against it to propel the vehicle, it sucks because it’s 2D and you have to maintain the travel path. Floating a foot above it keeps you in 2D and you still have to maintain the path.
Air travel is good because you can travel ‘as the crow flies’, it’s 3D and featureless, so you have 500x the space to travel (vs road space) once you get above buildings and can multiply that for each layer of travel you can organize. It sucks because you have to constantly expend energy to stay in the air, and the air is a much less useful thing to push against to propel the vehicle. Floating just above the ground fails to give you the big benefits, but sticks you with the downsides.
By the time we hit this non-existent future with flying cars, we will have fully automated piloting and automated ATC staying in constant communication with each vehicle to handle the traffic safely. If ATC goes down, the vehicles themselves would have robust auto pilot to avoid collisions, even if the overall speeds would have to decrease to ensure safety.
I occasionally gaze at the tangle of wires criss-crossing the New Jersey streets and consider how far away we are from flying to work like George Jetson.
I believe Europeans enjoy their infrastructure tastefully hidden belowdecks, so that might be where proper flying cars get a toehold.
We’re working on it; please ignore the fat black cables. They’re, uh, for when we hang up the Christmas decorations. Yeah, that’s it.
But workable for altitude separation.
When I flew out of Chicago’s Palwaukee/Executive airport the separation between my Sundowner (rather like a Piper low-wing) and O’Hare’s airliner traffic was about that, and that was without GPS (at least on my side). A pilot is required to hold altitude within 50 feet of a designated altitude (About 16 meters for you metric folks) to get a private pilot’s license, higher ratings require even more precision. Separation of east-west and visual/instrument flight rules traffic is around 170 meters and has been since at least the early 1950’s. The main reason they aren’t squeezed even closer are 1) allowing a generous margin for error and 2) much closer and there are issues with things like wake turbulence.
However, your speeds are MUCH too low - even a lot of the one and two seat airplanes I’ve flown, the slow end of aviation, barely stay in the air at 100 kph. Airliners can’t fly that slow, it’s just not possible to reduce speed that much and stay in the air.
This. Even the emergency response vehicles won’t be truly manually controlled. It’ll just be an X-Box controller that the “driver” uses to tell the on board flight control system that they want to turn right at the next intersection. Then the FCS talks to all the other vehicles in the local mesh network and they negotiate making it happen.
There are good reasons why all of those are pictured hovering over water.
Maybe you could replace the gondolas in Venice with them. Or maybe not.
For sake of argument I am assuming a “flying car/quadrotor” type scenario as opposed to a true fixed wing aircraft. I am assuming it would be less than optimal having folks skimming residential rooftops at 500kph.
But there’d be no problems landing on a building in NYC.
As I think someone mentioned, in The Fifth Element, Star Wars films and other sci fi series, flying car traffic tends to be portrayed as altitude separated “highways in the sky”. Often paralleling ground traffic. Really not that much different from how actual air traffic control operations are handled IRL, except that your Star Wars speeder or Blade Runner spinner hovers, so they can be packed in more tightly than aircraft.
“Traffic” isn’t much of an engineering mystery to me. I could easily envision bands of flying cars flying along I-95 or the LIE, flown by an AI guided by GPS, radar, visual sensors or whatever.
And in reality, there is no reason that a network of AI controlled cars would need to follow visible designated flight plans. The AI could just control them like a swarm of bees, taking the most direct route to wherever they are going.
Where I think the main problem would be is with parking and transitioning from air to ground transport. If all of a sudden, ten times the number of vehicles come flying into Manhattan each morning for work, where do they land and park? There are only so many rooftops to land on and each roof might have thousands of commuters working under it.