Yes, the tiny detail of lift. 
I’ve posted this before (Code looks good on my computer; may not on others):
I’ll reiterate: In 1982, a minimum-wage worker would have to work a bit over 10,000 (before deductions) to buy a new Skyhawk. Today, someone making more than twice the highest minimum wage would have to work over 15,300 hours to buy a new Skyhawk.
I have a hypothesis: The corporate owners of the small-plane manufacturers would rather sell expensive corporate aircraft than middle-class pleasure aircraft. The more piston-engine singles they sell, the more low-hour pilots will fly them. The more low-hour pilots who are flying, the greater the number of crashes. Crashes open companies up to lawsuits. So by concentrating production on aircraft that require a large number of hours and training to operate, and by discouraging Jimmy Weekender from buying his own airplane by pricing it out of his range, the companies reduce their liability exposure. (Where future pilots will come from to fly their expensive machines as older pilots retire… Well, they can burn that bridge when they come to it.)
Based on that hypothesis, I think that flying-car makers will realise that they can be ruined by a single lawsuit. Insurance companies will charge premiums that require supplemental oxygen. Prices for the machines will remain too high for all but the very few. If tried-and-true airplanes are scarce (relatively speaking) in our country, flying cars will be scarcer.
Once we have self-driving cars, I presume we’ll have a system of self-flying cars not long after. I’d give it 20-50 years, assuming we get self-driving cars in 10-20.
It’s not as if the safety issue wasn’t a problem back in the 50s when hypothetical flying cars were all the rage. It’s just an engineering and cost problem.
The real issue is that once you solve the safety issue, you’ve made flying cars obsolete, because your theoretical “crash-proof” flying car is, almost by necessity, 100% computer controlled. Your car takes off, flies, and lands while navigating its own course and communicating in the air with ground control towers and directly with other cars.
This model is obsolete because once you have 100% automated vehicles, you can make ground versions that are much more efficient. A.I. (the Will Smith movie) got it mostly right – a network of cars zipping along by themselves at high speeds. Where they got it wrong was when the intrepid hero was able to take control of the vehicle again.
Google already has a fleet of self-driving cars, and it’s only a matter of 50 years or so before human-driven cars are banned from the roads for safety reasons. Furthermore, in 50 years time, the internet and advanced human interface devices (see Oculus Rift, google glass, microsoft kinect) will continue to make vehicle travel seem less important. Many young people are already foregoing their driving licenses. If you don’t even drive your own vehicle, personally-owned self-driving cars will become obsolete as well. You’ll use the 2065 equivalent of Uber to hail a self-driving pod to your door which will quickly and safely take you to your destination. Whether you fly there or drive there won’t even be an issue on peoples’ minds.
There are already a handful of flying cars out right now. The reason they’re not in every garage is obvious to pilots. First you have to BE a pilot to fly it. It’s too much bother and expense for most people. And they’re all historically poor performers for the money. You can buy a better airplane and rent cars for the money spent. Airplanes require a tremendous amount of maintenance and the mechanisms required for transition from car to plane is that much more to deal with in yearly annual inspections.
There are already planes that fold up and can be trailered to the airport which allows a savings in hanger fees. These are much more practical than a driver around vehicle.
People can’t drive in two dimensions, God forbid we should add another one! :eek:
Pilot and flight instructor here.
My first reaction to that remark was to say I can’t imagine how the FAA regulations could me made more restrictive or complex. But on second thought, that’s not true. We actually have a lot of freedom in general aviation compared to other countries despite the complexity of the rules.
That being said, I’m unable to imagine how we could integrate a multitude of new flying cars, piloted by new “pilots” into our existing system. Hypothetically, it could be done tomorrow within the current rules - it would just be very crowded and probably considered unsafe. But that assumes that all those people would be getting pilot’s licenses and probably instrument ratings. That’s a lot of hoop jumping and it wouldn’t happen overnight. Or even anytime soon.
No, we would need an entirely new system. I would think it would require the vehicles to be almost fully automated. Even with “full” automation the pilot would need to know what to do if things failed, in which case we’re back to everybody getting pilot’s licenses as we now define them.
I think it would require a paradigm changing breakthrough in aircraft propulsion and navigation that would permit completely changing our flight rules and methods of air traffic control. Something like the cars in Back to the Future which could fly, hover, travel in all weather (or have the weather be controlled), do it all autonomously and don’t rely on currently known power systems.
And what, exactly, is the difference between a “flying car” and a small private airplane as we now know them? I think this was only touched on tangentially so far in this thread.
Cars drive. Planes fly, and “drive” a limited amount on the ground at airports or air parks.
The concept of a flying car is that it’s amphibious: It’s both a flying plane and a driving car. You drive it out of your garage and down the steet to the corner market or post office. Or, if you want to go a longer distance, you just shift into “flying” gear and somehow get airbound. And when you get near where you’re going, you just land and drive “the last mile”.
Can you do this out of your own driveway? Or on your quiet residential side-street? Do you drive to an airport to take off? And land at another airport, to drive that last mile? (I imagine this airport-to-airport scenario is the most nearly realistic.)
But cars and planes have different requirements, and it can’t be very well efficient to build a vehicle that does both well, and do so economically. (Example: In the early days of laser printers in the 1980’s, this was an issue: There were two divergent technologies, one best optimized for laser printers, and the other best optimized for copier machines, and early attempts to build a combined copier/printer were not very satisfactory.) This is the technological challenge that must still be met. Given the lack of serious enthusiasm for flying cars (for all the other reasons discussed in this thread), one can see why it hasn’t really “gotten off the ground” :rolleyes: yet.
Pilot in training.
We never filed plans. He let me go wherever I wanted on some days.
However, if you enter restricted airspace (near big airport, or military base, etc) you had to turn on transponder and have radio on a specific frequency. I never entered those areas, so I will defer to a real pilot as to whether a plan is req’d first.
Also, regarding the other post about planes dropping out of the sky when power is lost, - planes have a “glide ratio”. Even big jumbo jets, loaded with passengers.
Remember the Eastern Air Jumbo L1011, that lost all 3 jet engines after departing Miami, over the ocean? It was able to use its glide ratio to glide for 28 minutes and land back at Miami.
Airliner jets have a small fan, that looks like a desk fan, that they can extend from the side of the jet with a button from the cockpit. Its an emergency electric generator, to keep the electric controls powered after jet engines die, using forward speed into air resistance.
Same for jet fighters. there is a great video of an F-16 that lost power, and the pilot glided into Chicago.
However, a similar incident occurred in Indy, an Air Force fighter jet was given the OK to glide to Indy, but the pilot lost control due to no hydraulics. It augered into a hotel on I-465 in the morning during check out time, and burned lots of hotel guests to death. The pilot ejected safely.
I have flown a sim for a KC-10 (a military refuel version of the DC-10 / MD-11) and I could not slow it down (after a perfect take-off and short flight) to land it. I was many miles away from the airport, but I was too high and fast. I removed power as far as possible, and started gliding for miles, but as I nosed down, the speed ramped up…quickly. Nothing like the C-172 I trained in, that you could stop on a dime (but also has a glide ratio).
I was only allowed one shot, and I destroyed it by landing at around 300 mph. It was a very realistic sim, with a real cockpit, that moved in all axis with hydraulics, with very realistic computer images in surround screen. Sweating bullets and nearly wet my pants.
also, one of my Cessna 172 required lessons, was stall recovery at idle.
we stalled the plane, which was in fact very hard to do - I idled back on power and slowly pulled the controls back, and it took forever to get to stall speed. Then the controls went soft and you sensed it dropping.
a student has to overcome the initial reaction to pull up on the control (nose up) as if you had power, to climb (and stop falling). But w/o power, that induces a grave yard spin, that very few ever recover from.
You have to aim the nose down, and regain lift, and glide to a suitable safe spot. This is very hard to do, because as you nose down, you fall even faster, and those tiny cows get bigger real fast. The instructor will re-apply power before you get below a certain level.
IIRC, amazingly, the Eastern Air L1011 that lost power over the ocean and glided 28 minutes back to Miami - when it got there, it was going too fast too land!
Jets/propellers are far less efficient than wheels for fundamental physics reasons. Aircraft engines leave a trail of quickly moving air, which represents wasted energy. Wheels propel the Earth in the opposite direction by a very slight amount, but because momentum scales linearly with speed while energy scales with speed squared, it ends up being far more efficient to push on a heavy thing (like the Earth) than a light thing (like air).
OK, here’s “Flight Plans 101”.
When flying under visual rules, flight plans are usually not required. The exceptions are in special airspace such as the Washington DC area, anywhere else there are temporary flight restrictions, or if you’re crossing an international border. This is what I meant in my earlier post when I said we in the United States have a lot of freedom in general aviation.
Flight plans are required for flying under instrument flight rules, but even then it can sometimes be fudged. I won’t go into detail about local or “pop-up” instrument clearances, but basically you can sometimes get permission to execute an instrument approach without having filed a flight plan in advance.
You’ll also hear about “flight following”, which is not the same as a flight plan. If I’m flying under visual rules, with or without a flight plan, I can request air traffic control to monitor me and stay in contact as I fly. They’ll usually do this, but they can say no if they’re too busy, so there’s no guarantee. They can also do it for a while, then drop you due to workload or lack of radar coverage. During an instrument rules flight you are normally in contact with ATC at all times.
So… how is this relevant to the flying car scenario?
As I said, I’m unable to imagine the relative complexity of these rules being applied to the masses of people flying their new and wonderful cars around. Even qualified pilots need to get a fair bit of experience to fully understand the system and its nuances. We’ll need something entirely different for the flying cars when they get here. I’m not holding my breath.
Can you imagine what the insurance premiums would be for a flying car?
one possible advantage: the carplane could go directly from point A to point B, since no flight plans = no way points.
hypotenuses vs right angles
also, no idling in traffic jams & lights
further to the post about planes dropping w/o power, here is the exciting cockpit video of the
F-16 that lost power 7 miles out at 9000 ft - and was able to glide to airport
If you watch closely his instruments show air speed climbing as he tries to reduce altitude.
So a carplane would be safer than you might think.
Then again, this might / will happen:
a DC9 airliner impacted a small Piper flying in restricted airspace In California.
All dead, both planes, plus some on ground. The Piper was under the DC9 - in its blind spot.
Try to imagine a world where we (by which I mean U.S.) don’t have flying cars.
Someone in the Philippians or Indonesia is going to look at their life of driving to the dock, catching a boat to the next island, find a ride while there, then reverse the process to get back home, and they are going to get sick of waiting for us to come through with the flying cars and decide to make them for themselves.
If they bring about flying cars and we don’t, we’re going to look like a bunch of backwoods yokels with slow internet and an aversion to teaching evolution.
If we get them, I see it as something more of a service rather than something that you own.
They’ll have to be fully automated of course. But instead of owning one of these cars you would pay a monthly service fee much like you do for cable or phone.
Whenever you need to go somewhere, you just retrieve one off of your smartphone app. A few minutes later a transport shows up at your house. You then hop in and tell the thing where you want to go.
As with cell phones, the only people who will be able to afford them at first, will be rich folks. But once the infrastructure becomes more established, more and more people will be able to afford this monthly “transport” fee.
Are we talking about a flying car that can glide (has fixed wings) or not (rotary wing/ducted fans)? Cause, while I can imagine something with wings gliding some distance to find a place to make a deadstick landing, I can’t see a hover craft doing that. They’d have to come up with some version of autorotation, wouldn’t they?
Another reason why I wouldn’t want to see flying cars become as ubiquitous as ground cars, but rather something only a minority drive, say 10% of the population who are especially reliable and skilled.
Because if it becomes seen as something everyone has to do, like ground driving, then there will be enormous pressure on governments to subsidize flying car insurance to make it affordable.