There was a TED talk with Paul Moller a while back that I watched. Honestly I expected it to be pretty pathetic as I consider him a charlatan, but I surprisingly found myself accepting the vision that he has for how flying cars will work. I don’t think he’s the man to deliver it, but should we ever get flying cars I think there’s a chance that his vision is how they’ll work.
First, he acknowledged the amount of power it takes to take off in a hover. It’s a ridiculous amount of energy. I think he’s still committed to the hover but the problem is easier solved by using runways.
Second, the Flying Car won’t be used for short trips to the store. His vision is that there will be a series of small air parks that you drive to, take off, land and then drive the remaining distance to your destination. If I recall correctly he claims that the minimum practical distance to fly is about 50 miles.
Third, he claims the cars will be autonomous. This solves the drunk driver problem. Autonomous cars are already being tested and most of us will likely have self driving cars within 20 years. Once we have self driving cars it becomes practical to have a central traffic control system which will vastly improve how traffic flows. By the time flying cars become practical the same type of technology could be applied to them. He acknowledges that pilots hate the idea of not being in control, but it’s impossible to have humans in control in a flying traffic system.
Fourth, he claims that all systems will have triple redundancy. I don’t think I trust him on his system but I believe the idea. While you can’t account for all problems I would suspect that most foreseeable problems that could affect a flying car could be handled gracefully enough to bring the car safely to the ground.
The man can, quite simply, talk money from a Bombay beggar. Unfortunately, he has done little more with the millions he has convinced people to invest than polish his non-working prototypes and insist a few more dollars will make a difference. (Unless it was very recently accomplished, not one of his prototypes has ever actually flown… other than in a circle, at the end of a cable from the 100’ boom crane that looms over his site. Such “flights” are to convince bigger investors that he’s close. His usual explanation for a lack of genuine free flight is that the FAA is somehow blocking him, which would come as a surprise to the many experimental aircraft developers that have flown crazy contraptions with the FAA’s blessing… as long as it was safe for the general public.)
He is utterly sincere. He is also vastly self-deluded.
I agree that he will never build a flying car, but the part of his presentation that I found believable was how he envisioned a traffic system that included flying cars. I sure wouldn’t invest any money with him!
I can envision a world with instant teleportation, too, down to writing homey little details. It’s called “science fiction.” Now that I’ve convinced you I’m a visionary… If you want a functioning teleport unit, I’ve got one almost working and another $10k should see it through…
Even Robert Heinlein wrote a nonfiction article about the future of air traffic control that has some astounding and eventually factual details in it, 20-50 years ahead of reality. It didn’t mean he knew how to build the computer-linked radar systems etc.
Jet engines cost a lot. And to get VTOL, you must have enough engines for a TWR > 1. I did the math once, but you are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in engines at a minimum. And, larger scale production only helps so much : jet engines are extremely complex and require very high quality and expensive metals.
Your fuel efficiency is crap, and you are using some of the most expensive fuel available. Isn’t jet fuel a very refined grade of kerosene that costs $4+ a gallon?
It’s not just the takeoffs : you have to have a shorter wingspan to fit into a tight space with your VTOL car, and carry the extra engine mass in flight. Higher bypass turbofans also give you less thrust, so you might be forced to use less efficient low bypass engines to achieve hover. Either way, it hurts your fuel efficiency in level flight.
Did someone say maintenance costs? Doesn’t the cost of fuel + maintenance for a helicopter come to hundreds of dollars/hour? Unlike a car, if you skip on the scheduled maintenance for your VTOL, you fall out of the sky.
Is there a technology that would make flying cars feasible? Actually, there is. A hypothesized technology called “molecular manufacturing”, also called “nanotechnology”, also known more broadly as “self replicating machinery”. When and if such technology was developed, society would theoretically be rich enough to afford luxuries like a flying car on a large scale. You’d build the high grade parts for one using your molecular fabrication equipment (that can self replicate itself, so the equipment is cheap due to basic economics), you’d make that jet fuel you need from CO2 and water from the atmosphere (and the energy from gigantic solar arrays made dirt cheap via MNT), and of course the cars would be fully automated and every part would self-diagnose it’s own maintenance needs.
Now, this hypothetical technology has a large number of technical obstacles in the way. It might not exist this century due to how difficult the problems are. However, there is nothing fundamental that says it won’t work, and living things provide proof that it is feasible…eventually.
Moller plans to use powerful fan engines. As he has some genuine engineering chops with engine design - he developed the original SuperTrapp muffler and the engines intended for the AirCar are unique in their power/weight ratio - I assume he’s done the math. But four or five or six such engines are not going to be cheap, nor easy to keep in sync, nor easy to balance around a failure.
Not soluble.
Secondary to everything else, but real and very difficult to ameliorate.
The other problems are cargo/passenger/fuel capacity, which has to be strictly limited or scale the other problems even more out of proportion, noise (which I don’t believe is soluble, not with high-speed, high-pressure fan propulsion), and flight safety.
Of all the problems, which have existed since the first fanciful prototype in the late 1960s, only flight safety has been addressed - it is now theoretically possible to put in a fly-by-wire system controllable by a minimally skilled pilot.
There are not even theoretical solutions for fuel efficiency, net payload and noise, and there is no way the concept is ever going to hit an “everyman” price point. At best, it will be a seven-figure toy with all the downside of both helicopters and light planes and none of either’s advantages. To begin with, the glide ratio of current designs is somewhere below “brick.” But at least there will be no fuel left to explode on impact.
Yeah, well the harrier would solve the traffic jam problem.
I mean not on the first day, but like when someone uses the Harrier to escape a traffic jam,
the vehicles left behind will be roasted.
That will reduce traffic quite quickly…
“last one to lift off is a severely roasted rotten egg !”
(ok so its probably not that bad. but it does make a lot of pollution … and other problems. Its not like you can have an airport in your backyard.)
