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Even self-piloting flying cars would be a disaster. They'd be limited in speed, and the traffic collision avoidance systems would eat up too much time due to th
by kunai 13y ago
Even self-piloting flying cars would be a disaster. They'd be limited in speed, and the traffic collision avoidance systems would eat up too much time due to the constant slowdowns and changes in direction. Not to mention that it's impossible to simply stop in the air.
I doubt flying cars will ever be a reality. What will be reality are sustainable, electric, self-driving vehicles.
Not the pipe dream of 20th-century futurists.
- ericd 13y agoWhere would these slowdowns be coming from? The only part I can think of would be landing zones, otherwise you have so much more space to fly in than you do with roads that it's inconceivable that there would be jams, unless you artificially limited flight paths to very narrow "roads" in the sky. And it's trivial to widen those in the case of congestion, in any case.
- alberich 13y ago>> Not to mention that it's impossible to simply stop in the air. What if they invent one that flies like helicopters? Who knows what will come in the future...
- sp332 13y agoIf you cut the power in a car suddenly, you can probably avoid serious damage or killing anyone on your way to a stop. Not so much in a helicopter.
- alberich 13y agoHm. I thought the post was referring the troubles of maneauviring during a slowdown, as airplanes can only go forward. If falling of the sky is the trouble, you can still use parachutes as a safety measure. Like this one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Recovery_Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Recovery_Systems). Anyways, I don't think flying cars are impossible. We just don't have enough technology yet to make it viable.
- gduffy 13y agoHelicopters can be landed softly without power, via autorotation. It's not hard to imagine an autonomous helicopter that can manage autorotations. Some drones already do. But for people-carrying operations, it would need to have an extremely fine-grained terrain database (better than we probably have today) to pick suitable landing spots and avoid low-level obstacles.
- ajuc 13y agoMost helicopters can autogyro - that means they can land without working engine, using air flow to speed up the rotor, and then using the rotor to slow down the fall to relatively gentle landing. More or less like the seeds of some trees fly. Same goes for gyrocopters, which are sth in between regular plane and helicopter (they have powered propeler to gain horizontal speed, and unpowered rotor that is speed up by autogyro effect that replaces the need for wings). Of course in dense 3d traffic you may collide with sth before you can slow down the fall, so there will be a need for some system that sygnalizes everybody below you to quickly get out of way.