I’ve had two airplanes so far, both single engine. A Piper Cherokee (fixed gear, fixed pitch), and a Piper Arrow (retractable gear, adjustable pitch). Both got around 14-15 mpg on long trips. The latter just went a little faster. We covered fewer miles than a car on long trips, but the fuel mileage worked out about the same as if I’d driven my pickup truck.
I insured my teenage son in the Arrow. It was only a fraction of what it cost to insure him in his Corolla. IIRC, his Toyota cost me around 120 per month. The airplane was only 600 per year. According to the insurance agent, the difference was that my airplane never spent any time at the local high school. Apparently HS parking lots aren’t safe places for teen’s cars.
Terrifugia (the MA company making the flying car) have released a new design for VTOL version! they oughtta interview the Marine Corps. (owners of the “Osprey” VTOL tran enemy!)sport-it has killed more marines than any
Solving that one for road vehicles makes flying vehicles slightly less attractive - if your car knows where it’s going, and also knows where all the other cars are (and are going), traffic routing can be optimised, vehicle speeds and densities can be increased - and as a consequence, journey times made shorter and more predictable.
Lift is a pretty big factor to wave away like that. To put it in perspective, the next time you’re at the supermarket and you’ve got a shopping cart full of groceries, pick up the cart and carry it for a couple of aisles.
It concerns me enough, sharing the road with other motorists. I’m not-at-all looking forward to people being “pilots”.
But if we’re entertaining this idea, I assume such a car would likely be automated (as many planes are), so there’s that.
We burn most of the fuel we do, because internal combustion engines aren’t the most efficient. Road friction isn’t so bad, especially with most street tires on asphalt, as you can even push a car to get it going; accelerating it takes more effort, but that touches on other factors, one of which is air resistance…which matters that much more for anything actually flying.
But beyond that, MPG doesn’t directly translate to planes, so it will be a chore trying to come up with a conversion system, much less selling it to any general public. We already have this challenge with electric cars.
People would have to start thinking in gallons per hour or pounds per hour. Then they’d have to understand the difference between airspeed and groundspeed, and that a headwind makes you slower for a longer period than a tailwind makes you faster for a given trip.
FWIW, a Cessna 172 Skyhawk (a common ‘four-passenger’ aircraft – ‘four passengers’ if everyone weighs 170 pounds or less, or if you don’t mind leaving some gas in the fuel pit) flying in still air gets about 14 to 15 mpg at max cruise.
Energy costs seem to me to be the largest impediment. We’ve only got a few more years left of driving ourselves (should we choose not to), I assume automated navigational control systems will be even more applicable to personal aircraft and significantly reduce the chaos and the carnage.
Indeed, I think improved control systems will make ground traffic so much more efficient that it will inhibit the development of “flying cars.” Caveat – successful development of fusion power changes everything.
I question the premise. I seem to recall a Popular Science cover or two featuring the Moller Flying Car, which was never much more than a scam. Other than that, I don’t think the number of magazine covers ran anywhere near the hundreds.
I think the meme probably has more to do with the Jetsons than anything else.
I don’t disagree with many of your points, but since SDMB is about correcting misinformation it should be noted that planes don’t just fall out of the sky if their engines quit. The fatality rate for forced off-airport landings is “only” 10%. Not my idea of a good time, but not a “guaranteed” death. If you add in all the planes that lost engines within gliding distance of an airport your chance of walking away from a forced landing are even better.
And if the proposed flying car used some sort of non-fixed wing system (like a helicopter or auto-gyro) then it could simply auto-rotate down. I’m fairly sure that any sort of mass production flying car type thingy would have such a system. It would also have to be highly automated, and we’d have to massively expand our air control infrastructure.
None of this is a show stopper, however. What IS, IMHO, is the cost. It’s not technology that stops stuff like this, it’s the cost of putting everything in place you’d need to do something like this rationally and safely. Since only the very rich could afford something like this, there isn’t enough of a market to really make it worth while to build out that infrastructure or to produce the vehicles, so most companies only look into it and maybe do some exploratory engineering before dropping it. Some true believer types take it further, but in the end it’s just not worth the cost.
