Inspired by this thread. It’s pretty much a dramatic convention that in any fictional portrayal of the future people will have flying cars and talk to eachother on videophones. Even Just Imagine did it. Sure in the 30s the “cars” were personal airplanes, but same difference. Will either ever be popular?
Videophones have been available for years, but are still rare. If videophones do become the norm then people will have to make themselves almost as presentable as in a face to face scenario. You can still smell, but can’t answer the phone with getting at least have dressed, fixing your hair, cleaning your face, etc. Sure you can turn off the camera, but then the other person would wonder why. On the other hand webcams will get better & better and visual comunication becoming popular for businesses and familymembers that are far apart.
Flying cars? Never. Especially after 9/11. Think of all the safety issues.
I think flying cars could have caught on…if the basic technology had been in place by about the 20s. (And by “basic technology” I mean “like a VTOL Model-T, at least.”)
Nowadays…hell, personally, I think if they’d just invented NORMAL cars within the last decade or so, there’d be too much legal hassle to let them become widespread. (“What, you want to let regular people just careen around at sixty miles per hour in rolling metal boxes? On roads the taxpayers have to pay to pave, without even a barrier between the two lanes of traffic? That’s insane! Can you imagine how many people will die? Someone think of the CHILDREN!”)
You’ll never see masses of flying cars. Aside from all the reasons having to do with energy efficiency, safety, and reliability, the fact is that the sky over a city simply cannot handle even 1/10 as much traffic as we can tolerate on the ground on roads. You can’t make an airplane that can stay on a tiny allocated space like a car on a freeway can. That’s why we separate them by 1000’ vertically. If you give each flying car a 1000 foot ‘box’ to fly in, and you’ve got 10,000 ft worth of space above you to work with, that’s 10 vehicles per 1000 square feet of ground. Do the math.
And of course, people don’t evenly disperse through the city. They all head into dense inner cores. Imagine being stacked up and being #972 to land at your office building. We can file 500 cars into an office building parkade in a half hour. How long do you think it would take to land and move 500 airplanes?
And then think how fun it will be when the weather socks in and everyone is stuck at work because their airplanes are grounded. An entire city paralyzed every time there’s a thunderstorm or heavy fog.
Sam Stone gives all of the reasons in the world why cars will never fly with traffic as it now is. The only way flying cars could catch on is if long-distance travel becomes rare to the point that it’s no longer worth maintaining large roads or rail systems, computers become good enough to fly small craft in at least somewhat adverse conditions, and there is a fuel better than petroleum.
I’m envisioning a system where ground transportation infrastructure (road, light rail) only runs within cities and between central urban areas and immediately outlying suburban and semi-rural districts. Every city is largely self-sufficient, and communications technology makes most long commutes obsolete. People in this scenario are not likely to leave their homes, to the point where it is not feasible to run airlines as we know them.
The automobile reshaped our society in fundamental ways since its introduction. Its successor will do no less.
I totally agree with the OP about the drawbacks of a videophone. You would have to make yourself look presentable before calling or answering (or at least many people will feel the need to do it). If you turn the screen off then the caller will wonder why.
Or imagine that you think you’ve turned off the picture and answer the phone wearing Og knows what and it’s your mom or boss calling.
Another strike against personal aircraft: what happens if you have a mechanical failure? In a car, you pull over to the side of the road and call a tow truck. In a plane, you plunge thousands of feet to your inevitable death. And what about the residents of that apartment building that you’re plunging towards?
Don’t be ridiculous! You can’t have videophones and flying cars! The signals from the videophone will mess up the flight electronics and send you plunging to your doom. I think I saw it on Mythbusters.
The door bell on my front door has the same limitation: I can’t/shouldn’t answer it unless I’m “presentable”. That hasn’t affected the popularity of door bells.
Having “pulled over to the side of the road” so to speak while flying a small airplane I have to disagree. Mechanical failure is NOT “inevitable death”. I’ve had things malfunction and still made a safe landing more than once. Basically, if the wings and tail are still attached and you can steer you’ve got a reasonable chance to make the landing. Mind you, I don’t recommend the experience,
The time I was most scared behind the stick wasn’t due to mechanical problems, it was the weather forcing me down into a field. Came out of that one OK, too.
Just to be contrary because I still have the dream of having my own flying saucer that folds into a briefcase ala the Jetsons (like this I offer the following. (And note: I do not really think we will see the public commuting to work for a LONG time, if ever especially after 9/11, but you never know).
This thing has been around awhile. Note the stats on the [Moller M400 Skycar](M400 Skycar).
VTOL so no need for runways. Needs a 35’ diameter landing area.
20 MPG using ethanol so as good or better than most SUVs today and not petroleum based fuel.
Has a parachute so should something go terribly wrong you float back to earth.
As for needing 1000’ minimum technology already exists that improves on this. Called the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS). “< 3 meters: This is the figure currently being given for WAAS accuracy in the vertical plane. WAAS accuracy in the horizontal plane is less than 2 meters. WAAS is capable of achieving Category I precision approach accuracy of 16 m laterally and 4 m vertically.”
Add to that a Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) and you get zero visibility landing ability. “< 1 meter: Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS). As of 2001, LAAS was capable of achieving a Category I ILS accuracy of 16 m laterally and 4 m vertically. The goal of the LAAS program is to provide Category III ILS capability. This allows aircraft to land with zero visibility utilizing ‘autoland’ systems and indicates a very high accuracy of < 1 m.”
With multiple flight corridors stacked one atop the other and side by side you might pull this off. Since landing areas would have to be specified (probably) people wouldn’t use this for a jaunt to the store but a commute of 50 miles to downtown would be doable. This would free up road traffic too and might be better all around. People could live farther from major cities if they had this available. You could live in St. Louis and commute to Chicago in an hour which is about how long a standard rush hour commute of 25 miles takes in Chicago.
So, I think all we need is some sort of automated flight control system that literally takes flying out of the hands of the individual. I doubt you could trust most people to fly in congested conditions…or fly at all for that matter. But put them in and let automated systems do all the work and it might be feasible. Not something we will see soon but it is conceivable.
The main problem with the videophone has been obvious ever since the first AT&T experiments in the late 1920s. Seeing someone while they’re talking to you on the telephone adds very little utility to most phone calls, especially when you consider the expense involved even recently in adding the bandwidth and hardware.
Ironically, just as in the '20s, the current technology wouldn’t allow much more than head and shoulder shots anyway. In ancient times it was because of the crudity of TV scanning methods. Now it’s because of miniaturization.
In the '90s some tried to go a different way. Satellites made it feasible to do teleconferencing in educational settings — sending actual two-way interactive classes to various remote points in largely rural states, with PowerPoint and all. And nobody even really wanted that.
I was waiting for someone to mention the Moller Skycar. It’s been ready to fly in a few months’ for about 20 years now. The thing is totally impractical, unsafe, and his numbers for it are completely bogus. It’s a running joke in the aviation community.
VTOL because it’s got four engines driving 8 fans. Do you have any idea how loud that would be? Or what would happen if one of the fans sucks in some FOD while you’re in a hover 20 feet off the ground?
Absolute nonsense. He makes that claim based on unrealistic fuel flows through his engines, and an outrageously high estimate for top speed. More likely, this thing will suck about 30 GPH and go maybe 200 MPH, giving it less than 7 MPG.
Because I want 3000 lb airplanes dropping from the sky over city, hanging up on powerlines, getting stuck on radio towers, and careening through windy downtown corridors.
And a parachute is useless for this thing anyway, because the way he claims it will be used means you’ll rarely fly high enough for the chute to deploy. And most accidents will happen on takeoff and landing anyway.
It’s not the accuracy of navigation that matters, it’s the fact that you’re flying througha roiling, moving air mass. You pack airplanes within 100 feet of each other, and every time there’s windshear or a microburst it’ll be raining metal.
Aside from morning fog, most 0 visibility conditions come in the form of really bad weather. Thunderstorms, sleet, hail, etc.
Speaking of which - how’s that Skycar going to perform with a nice layer of ice on its wings and fans? Most small airplanes that are technically capable of IFR in Canada never fly IFR because most IFR conditions come with icing.
You will never, ever be able to fly your airplane en masse into a heavily populated urban area and land on rooftops and such. So you’re stuck with having to fly from airport to airport, then commute.
Well guess what? You can do that today. It’s not hard. Go get a pilot’s license, and for 1/50 of the cost of a Skycar (if it ever flies), you can get a perfectly good airplane that is safer, more reliable, and which really does get 20 mpg. But very few people do this. Why? For the reasons I mentioned. Flight by light aircraft is not reliable. You are at the mercy of the elements. And you have to fly in and out of airports, which seriously lowers the utility of commuting. There’s nothing about a Skycar that changes any of that.
Sure. It makes for great science fiction. And I’d love to have one of those Skycars if he could make it work, just for the fun of it. But it’ll never become part of our mass transportation system, or even make a tiny dent in the number of ground vehicles we use. The rich might toodle around in them for fun, and the occasional businessman might fly one between offices. But that’s what they do with light airplanes today.
Incidentally, that Skycar will be millions of dollars. It’s hellishly complex. It took Porsche tens of millions of dollars to certify an airplane engine that was only slightly different than current existing engines. The LEAST radical part of Moller’s Skycar is that it uses multiple Wankel rotary engines pushing a new design of ducted fan. If he had that thing flying today, it would still take a decade just to get the engines and fans certified, let alone the airframe and avionics.
Well, most cell phones seem to have a camera that, at least in my circle of friends, people rarely use - and it would seem to be something you might want to use - “look at this, honey…should I buy it?” So I doubt people will be in a rush to look at mom in curlers and dad in his undershorts on the sofa watching the game.
There could be other fun uses, but now that the White House has decided it is ok to track phone calls…but that is a Pit topic.
As far as flying cars…my vision is flying cars that have that little “anti-gravity” feature that will allow you to be stuck in traffic 5,000 feet up there, while waiting to pull into the garage on the 100th floor. Just hovering in peace and quiet and looking around while you microwave lunch in the glove box. These cars never crash as they have powerful anti-crash magnets that bounce you away from on-coming vehicles. They run on six drops of ocean water per 100 miles and the cars cost about $1000 each. Then, I think they might catch on.
