Just what we need. When there's an accident, the damn things will fall out of the sky.

Posted January 31, 2007 5:26 PM by CJColucci

Just what we need. When there's an accident, the damn things will fall out of the sky.

Posted January 31, 2007 5:41 PM by Dan Blum

I outed myself as a geek at a team lunch the other week.

The topic of aircars came up, and I flamed them bad:

"You know how stupid teens play 'mailbox baseball' with bats? Imagine that happening to your chimeny. You know those big rocks some people put along their curbs and on either side of their driveway to keep slobs in pickups from mucking up their lawns? Can you imagine the aircar version of those? We're talking fifty foot tall reinforced concrete pillars all around your house to keep idiots from slamming into it. . . ."

ad nauseum.

Posted January 31, 2007 5:43 PM by Stefan Jones

Woohoo! I've been wanting a jetpack since 1959! It's about time!

Posted January 31, 2007 6:24 PM by Kiwi C.

Friends of mine who have been in flying cars don't want to do it again.

Posted January 31, 2007 6:35 PM by Rob Rusick

Of course, there was the Flying Pinto, which did not work out too well.

Posted January 31, 2007 7:09 PM by Claude Muncey

#6: Claude, your middle link points to something I wrote for the Doomed Engineers page a decade ago. Cool.

Since 1996 I have administered a mailing list for the discussion of roadable aircraft, flying cars, etc. (To the robot at majordomo@mystery.com,
send the message "SUBSCRIBE FLYING-CAR" --subject line doesn't matter.)

There's a small gang of people who meet every year at Oshkosh to exchange news about flying car projects. Cling to hope.

Posted January 31, 2007 7:38 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

If anyone is going to make a viable flying car, my money would be on Carl Deitrich and his crew at Terrafugia.

I've been at MIT for over 2 decades (first as a student and then as a staff researcher / instructor), and I can think of one or two students I've seen of his caliber.

This doesn't mean that it will work, but knowing some of the people behind it, I think they have at least a fair chance of making the flying car a viable product.

Posted January 31, 2007 11:16 PM by Jim Bales

Giving the idiots two dimensions is bad enough without granting them access to a third one.

Posted February 1, 2007 1:09 AM by Serge

Bill Higgins @ 7 --

My pleasure.

Posted February 1, 2007 1:42 AM by Claude Muncey

Bill Higgins @ 7... There's a small gang of people who meet every year at Oshkosh to exchange news about flying car projects. Cling to hope.

When the MythBusters tried building a flying backpack, I think they also went to someone who has a collection of various flying cars. There even was a flying rocket belt, which Jamie was allowed to try on, and he was acting like a kid trying not to show how excited he was.

Posted February 1, 2007 1:50 AM by Serge

An interesting and little-known fact is this: the superior safety record of aviation (fatalities per passenger-mile) is entirely due to commercial air travel. If you only look at the pool of light planes, the safety record is just about the same as automobiles.

Fuel economy is a figure that doesn't get mentioned much in these stories. I remember the Moeller flying-car prototype, which was powered with eight Mazda RX-7 motors, a car that got about 17mpg. Those eight motors were never going to be idling, but rather operating at 50-75% of full throttle the entire time. The thing was never going to be able to lift enough fuel off the ground to give itself a useable range.

Posted February 1, 2007 12:09 PM by BigHank53

All I can say is:
"Can you name the truck with four wheel drive,
smells like a steak and seats thirty-five..
Urbanaero! Urbanaero!"

Posted February 1, 2007 6:00 PM by Malthus

BigHank53: before anyone says that your figures this prove widespread personal flight is plausible, they should think about how much safer driving would be if getting a driver's license required as much practice and study time as getting a private pilot's license. (I figure a minimum of 90 hours combining flight time, ground prep, and classes, and that's for an intense school; 1.5-2x that is probably more typical.)

You can't pull a plane over on the shoulder if something starts to go wonky with the plane, you, or the weather; perfectly ordinary boundary-pushers -- not nearly stupid enough to be called fools -- get killed every year in light planes (JFK Jr is the obvious example). Usually they only kill their own passengers, but I wouldn't expect that to be true if there were a major increase in traffic.

wrt economy: When I did a college paper, seat-mile gas consumption was similar in light planes, big jets, and cars -- but that applied only to true airplanes, not hybrids. The plane I learned in was licensed for 1600 pounds gross weight, including fuel and two passengers, despite stretching ~20 feet side-to-side and front-to-back; you wouldn't want to drive something that fragile on a highway.

Posted February 2, 2007 5:14 PM by CHip

...putting on lipstick while balancing a paperback on the steering column...
...talking on the cell phone while three kids run amok in the backseat (unbuckled!) of the new Cadillac Escallade Infinity and Beyond!
...all while navigating in 3 dimensions.
My car insurance is already ridiculous as a single white male.

Posted February 3, 2007 2:08 AM by JKRichard

On the way to work yesterday, the driver in the car in front of me was SHAVING HIS HEAD WITH AN ELECTRIC RAZOR as he was driving.

Posted February 3, 2007 1:08 PM by Stefan Jones