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Helicopters are complex machines that require lots of maintenance and significant training to fly safely. It's hard to see how you would reduce even the mainten

Helicopters are complex machines that require lots of maintenance and significant training to fly safely. It's hard to see how you would reduce even the maintenance costs enough to make them practical for universal use. To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy them for personal use. (I know this anecdotally from a relative involved in sales of Airbus helicopters.) If you addressed the cost and safety issues no doubt more people would buy them.

freehunter 8y ago
>Helicopters are complex machines that require lots of maintenance and significant training to fly safely. So did cars when they were first introduced. Since they solved a need, there was a great incentive to make them easier to use and easier to repair. That incentive doesn't exist for helicopters because most people don't own helicopters. >To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy them for personal use. I'm glad you pointed this out, I didn't make that argument because it would ruin the surprise, but yeah. People do use flying cars, and they're called helicopters. They're just used by very rich people or people with enough training to operate them. But think in cities like NYC, helicopters are used just like cars would be, because using a car can be unpractical. Functionally there is no difference between Michael Bloomberg traveling to Newark via a limo versus via a helicopter: both park at his building and can transport him from his home to his destination. It's a flying car. >If you addressed the cost and safety issues no doubt more people would buy them. The incentive to improve cost and safety only exists if demand exists. Cars only got cheaper and safer when the public began buying them. Flying cars (helicopters) will only become safer and cheaper if people start demanding them as well. The fact that they're not, IMO, proves people don't actually want flying cars.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  There is plenty of incentive to make helicopters cheaper to own and operate, have simpler and less frequent maintenance requirements, to be easier to fly, require less space to take off and land, be quieter and safer. It hasn't happened so far because these are genuinely difficult problems, not because of lack of incentive. No one in NYC, not even Bloomberg, is landing, let alone parking, his helicopter at his office. It is completely impractical in terms of safety, space and noise, even if it were just one person doing it, and absurdly infeasible to think it could be scaled up to, say, just the number of people using the Lincoln tunnel in any given half-hour. There are a few helipads around the edges of the city (a number that is likely to decrease on account of noise), that cater to some of the transportation needs of a number of people that can be counted in the hundreds per day, not hundreds of thousands. The idea that if there is a wish, a solution would have been found by now, does not stand up to the most cursory examination - for one thing, if it were so, not many people would be dying.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    I like your point about the number of people in the Lincoln Tunnel and people dying in crashes. I agree it's a genuinely difficult problem, but we might agree for different reasons. I think it's a genuinely difficult problem because there is no way to make a flying car as safe as a car that is stuck to the ground. There's just not. Normal cars break down, they run out of gas, they stop working all the time. You coast to a stop and call a tow truck. Flying cars break down and you plummet to your death. Normal cars crash into each other in just 2 dimensions. Flying cars crash into each other in three dimensions, and then you plummet to your death. Normal cars get stuck in traffic and sit with their engines at idle, producing small amounts of pollution, noise, wind and heat, yet still contribute substantially to global warming. Flying cars sitting at idle in a traffic jam still have to hover above the ground, which means they're running their engines almost as hard as if they were actually moving, producing tons more waste byproduct than even the most gas-guzzling SUV. Of course, my argument isn't "flying cars are a bad idea", so all of those points might seem offtopic. But it links back to the idea that we already have flying cars and we've already realized that it's a terrible idea. Short of true anti-gravity, a flying car is always going to be less safe, more polluting, more complicated mechanically, and is always a bad idea. If people actually wanted flying cars, we would deal with the downsides long enough for smart people to overcome the reliability and price issues, but overcoming "plummeting to your death" is a genuinely difficult problem that only has one solution: true anti-grav that works even when the power is disconnected. Since that's a far-future sci-fi plot, the closest thing we have to flying cars is a helicopter. It just turns out that using them as reliable daily individual transport is a really bad idea.
    - mannykannot 8y ago
      Flying cars are a bad idea, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people wanting them. The vast majority don't give it any thought beyond 'that would be cool', but a few are putting a lot of time and money into trying to make one. It's my opinion that the hardest of all the hard problems is noise, because there aren't many things that can be changed in how lift is generated, and rotors/propellers are intrinsically noise-generating. I think you may be misinterpreting my last sentence. What I mean is that, just because medical science has not delivered immortality, it doesn't mean that there aren't lots of people who would prefer not to die. You could substitute specific causes of death, such as cancer or alzheimer's, into that argument, if you think that most people have come to terms with their mortality.

freehunter 8y ago

>Helicopters are complex machines that require lots of maintenance and significant training to fly safely. So did cars when they were first introduced. Since they solved a need, there was a great incentive to make them easier to use and easier to repair. That incentive doesn't exist for helicopters because most people don't own helicopters. >To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy them for personal use. I'm glad you pointed this out, I didn't make that argument because it would ruin the surprise, but yeah. People do use flying cars, and they're called helicopters. They're just used by very rich people or people with enough training to operate them. But think in cities like NYC, helicopters are used just like cars would be, because using a car can be unpractical. Functionally there is no difference between Michael Bloomberg traveling to Newark via a limo versus via a helicopter: both park at his building and can transport him from his home to his destination. It's a flying car. >If you addressed the cost and safety issues no doubt more people would buy them. The incentive to improve cost and safety only exists if demand exists. Cars only got cheaper and safer when the public began buying them. Flying cars (helicopters) will only become safer and cheaper if people start demanding them as well. The fact that they're not, IMO, proves people don't actually want flying cars.

mannykannot 8y ago
There is plenty of incentive to make helicopters cheaper to own and operate, have simpler and less frequent maintenance requirements, to be easier to fly, require less space to take off and land, be quieter and safer. It hasn't happened so far because these are genuinely difficult problems, not because of lack of incentive. No one in NYC, not even Bloomberg, is landing, let alone parking, his helicopter at his office. It is completely impractical in terms of safety, space and noise, even if it were just one person doing it, and absurdly infeasible to think it could be scaled up to, say, just the number of people using the Lincoln tunnel in any given half-hour. There are a few helipads around the edges of the city (a number that is likely to decrease on account of noise), that cater to some of the transportation needs of a number of people that can be counted in the hundreds per day, not hundreds of thousands. The idea that if there is a wish, a solution would have been found by now, does not stand up to the most cursory examination - for one thing, if it were so, not many people would be dying.
- freehunter 8y ago
  I like your point about the number of people in the Lincoln Tunnel and people dying in crashes. I agree it's a genuinely difficult problem, but we might agree for different reasons. I think it's a genuinely difficult problem because there is no way to make a flying car as safe as a car that is stuck to the ground. There's just not. Normal cars break down, they run out of gas, they stop working all the time. You coast to a stop and call a tow truck. Flying cars break down and you plummet to your death. Normal cars crash into each other in just 2 dimensions. Flying cars crash into each other in three dimensions, and then you plummet to your death. Normal cars get stuck in traffic and sit with their engines at idle, producing small amounts of pollution, noise, wind and heat, yet still contribute substantially to global warming. Flying cars sitting at idle in a traffic jam still have to hover above the ground, which means they're running their engines almost as hard as if they were actually moving, producing tons more waste byproduct than even the most gas-guzzling SUV. Of course, my argument isn't "flying cars are a bad idea", so all of those points might seem offtopic. But it links back to the idea that we already have flying cars and we've already realized that it's a terrible idea. Short of true anti-gravity, a flying car is always going to be less safe, more polluting, more complicated mechanically, and is always a bad idea. If people actually wanted flying cars, we would deal with the downsides long enough for smart people to overcome the reliability and price issues, but overcoming "plummeting to your death" is a genuinely difficult problem that only has one solution: true anti-grav that works even when the power is disconnected. Since that's a far-future sci-fi plot, the closest thing we have to flying cars is a helicopter. It just turns out that using them as reliable daily individual transport is a really bad idea.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    Flying cars are a bad idea, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people wanting them. The vast majority don't give it any thought beyond 'that would be cool', but a few are putting a lot of time and money into trying to make one. It's my opinion that the hardest of all the hard problems is noise, because there aren't many things that can be changed in how lift is generated, and rotors/propellers are intrinsically noise-generating. I think you may be misinterpreting my last sentence. What I mean is that, just because medical science has not delivered immortality, it doesn't mean that there aren't lots of people who would prefer not to die. You could substitute specific causes of death, such as cancer or alzheimer's, into that argument, if you think that most people have come to terms with their mortality.