quote:We're excited by the reality of what we're doing here, but this is not the start of the flying car," company CEO Carl Dietrich told Wired.com. "This is a light sport plane that can be driven home after a day of flying and parked in the garage. It's designed for pilots. That's our target market.
Now all they have to do is reduce the price by a factor of at least 5, and make it hold at least 4 people.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Moller Aviation has had a working prototype of something similar for more than 10 years. The problem is, as noted, the expense (although Moller, iirc, claims to be able to mass produce for around 80 to 100K per unit), and the fact that if you carry more than a single passenger you need a pilot's license.
Under a certain weight (both cargo and gross), and with only a single passenger, I believe you can be classified as an 'ultralight' and you do not need a pilot's license. Again, this is all off the top of my head. I may not be entirely accurate.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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The reason it disturbs me? It only takes 20 hours to get a sports pilot license. It takes longer for a driver's license. I think of all the accidents on the road and I'm grateful they can't crash through my bedroom window. Planes? I don't have that security. Posts: 1831 | Registered: Jan 2003
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I am terrified of people flying through the air texting on their phones while drunk. They are going to have to design some sort of roofing system that bounces drunk flyers off my house instead of them plowing into it.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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In PA (I know other states are different) no formal hours of instruction are required at all. I don't see why the sudden paranoia.
Posts: 399 | Registered: Dec 2008
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This plane gets about 30 mpg in the air. (!!!)
This could be a viable way to commute, except for the red tape of taking off from and landing at airports.
I think we should start planning how to handle thousands of commuter runways across the nation and how to handle tens of thousands of small commuter aircraft in the air at any given time. The passenger throughput capacity of the air, compared to highways, should be ENORMOUS.
My commute could be cut in half!
OK, let's figure out light rail infrastructure for every metropolitan area of size first. Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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I'm going to wait for a hybrid flying car. Or a pure electrical one. I mean, the technology for electric cars exists, so why not use that instead of gas?
Scifibum, the problem is that with roads, the edges are demarcated sharply. In the air, they aren't. And can you imagine teenagers drag-racing in the sky?
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Scifibum, the problem is that with roads, the edges are demarcated sharply. In the air, they aren't. And can you imagine teenagers drag-racing in the sky?
I know it would be a bad idea to just turn them all loose without solving those problems, that's why I said "start planning". We will need more automatic pilot control and automatic collision avoidance. There's no technical barrier there that will be particularly hard to overcome in the next few decades.
Anyway even at 30 MPG, or using stored electrical energy instead of internal combustion, one- or two-passenger planes will probably never be a very efficient mode of travel compared to light rail or even buses, so we'll need to make enough headway in energy abundance that we can afford to ignore that...probably safe to say not in the next couple of decades.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:Originally posted by scifibum: This could be a viable way to commute, except for the red tape of taking off from and landing at airports.
I think we should start planning how to handle thousands of commuter runways across the nation and how to handle tens of thousands of small commuter aircraft in the air at any given time.
Ultralight planes are not required to file flight plans or to take off and land from airports. This is why everyone designing flying cars is designing them to those specs.
And the FAA has been planning how to handle this for at least 15 years.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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