Your Flying Car? Delayed again, but you WILL get it, says Terrafugia

Why couldn't we just have a short take off and landing taxi service with just regular fixed wing aircraft? Someone design a simple, cheap plane with fully automated flying capability, build a few airstrips in each city. Bobs your uncle.

Hmm, I like the cheek in saying it's "physically possible with today's technology". There are a lot of things that are physically possible with present technology but are punitively expensive, alarmingly fragile and just not worth it he time and effort involved in practice.

NASA PAV engines

Gas Turbines, a flat twelve of some description (everyone loves a flat twelve, and anyone who doesn't is a TRAITOR), and, quite specifically given the design of the intake plenum chambers, an LSx Corvette engine.

I do hope that's what they wanted, rather than it being the only model they could find in Autodesk.

Steven R

Hmmm, most people drive pretty poorly to start with, and are REALLY out of their depth (so to speak) when trying to do something like sail a boat. I have had 40' sailboats slam into my boat while at anchor in broad daylight in open water. Given how many poor sailors there are in the water, I cringe at the thought of people with the same training (or lack thereof) taking to the skies - things get very, very messy when there are no marked roadways or lines, and you have to rely upon personal judgement and spacial awareness - many people seem to lack one or the other.

On another note, will these things have Breathalyzer interlocks to prevent drunken flying? I can't see a patrolman stopping a pilot in mid-air, and given that you can land a Transition nearly anywhere they will be hard to audit. But how long will it be before the first drunken Transition pilot slams into a housing development, or a skyscraper even?

Better batteries

In making claims of the vertical take-off vehicle, they're probably assuming better batteries in the next 8-10 years, with a significantly higher capacity per kg.

Don't worry, the great unwashed will never buy these puppies and invade "your" airspace en masse. Beyond the issue of plunking down $200K to buy one, most of us probably won't be able to afford the gas to run it either.

Autogyros?

Autogyros is where cheap, mass-market aviation is heading. Besides being inherently safe and easy to fly, they can do VSTOL or even VTOL. The fact that they don't have wings makes it much easier to take them on the road. The rotor on the Artur Trendak Zen (formerly Celier Xenon) assembles/disassembles in 20 minutes. Of course, would be nice if it just folded, which isn't far fetched.

Of course, the Zen can't directly drive its tiny wheels for moving on the highway, but if making a roadable aircaft or flying car, I'd surely go this route.

Hybrid vs bigger engine

I still have no idea why battery - motor - generator / IC engine hybrid vehicles are seriously proposed, except to get the hybrid buzzword into investment proposals.

A bigger generator, high power electronic control circuitry, motors, heavy duty wiring, battery weight, all add up to a huge weight addition in comparison to adding a couple of extra cylinders to an IC engine, or a slightly larger gas turbine.

Gas turbines are not fuel efficient, in fact they are the opposite, but they weigh so little compared to their power output, that they are popular on aircraft.

Robotic flying cars considered unlikely

``Highly reliable robotic takeoff, landing, cruise flight and traffic control certainly isn't a dream - the problems are actually easier than robotic ground cars, and they have pretty much been solved already.''

Sure, for objects separated by miles horizontally and thousands of feet vertically.

But that's not the situation for a genuine flying car. Take the road populace of New York City, elevate it all to a variety of altitudes, and watch your autopilots have nervous breakdowns. A population of flying cars in numbers comparable to what we have on the ground is such a difference in degree as to become a difference in kind. Ask any programmer scaling up a program from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of instances.

Forget about the vertical take-off/landing nonsense - it is not necessary as well as technologically impractical and hideously expensive.

There are small personal flying machines that can take off and land in as little as 6 metres - as small as your average lounge room, have a useful ceiling for commuters and good rate of climb: powered paragliders. And there are even electric-powered paragliders, which are reasonably quiet.

As a paraglider pilot, it is possible to fly these low-speed machines in reasonably tight gaggles and formations which suggest some sort of airborne analogy of "thoroughfares" and "traffic rules" might work. Even better, these things glide reasonably well and are even able to survive (continue flying) and land safely in very small spaces with some pretty serious malfunctions in the "airframe (canopy). Their low flying speed implies a collision with the ground is usually survivable and the pilot is even equipped with a reserve parachute, for emergencies - more than can be said for most light aircraft.

That the use of powered ultra-lights, hang-gliders and paragliders is forbidden over large urban areas should give you landlubbers a clue: large numbers of flying machines over urban areas is a really, really bad idea.

Flying car

The trouble is that flying and driving are just too different. Any car capable of flying is likely to both an awful car and a terrible aircraft.

Perhaps the best "flying car" would be a light aircraft somehow capable of carrying a small car. ie. Thunderbird 2