Posted on 06/06/2018 10:47:16 AM PDT by Red Badger
It's as easy to use as playing Minecraft," Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun said as we watched my colleague Rachel Crane pull on a motorcycle helmet.
Rachel and I had just flown into Las Vegas for an exclusive first look at the Silicon Valley single-seat flying machine, Flyer.
Kitty Hawk, funded by Google cofounder Larry Page and led by Thrun, a self-driving car pioneer, attracted nationwide attention when it teased its Flyer prototype last year.
But now Rachel was suiting up to become the first reporter to take flight in a new, sleeker model -- no pilot license required. Expectedly, she was nervous and I was relieved it wasn't me sitting in the pilot's seat. The 250-pound vehicle resembles a cross between a drone and a pontoon plane. Ten propellers twirled around her as I watched from 50 feet away.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
If one of those ten whirling blades hit a bird, what happens then?
...and you can’t drive it on a road.....................
You both end up in the drink.....................
Well, a little smaller than that one but a flying boat none the less.
It’s more like a ‘Flying Canoe’......................
Something like this would be great for accessing remote lakes and other properties for hunting and fishing.
Hopefully the total pay load well be at least 500lbs
As I recall, the Space Shuttle used three identical computers for control. I think each actuator used a "voting" system so that if one computer disagreed with the other two, the actuator would respond as the majority dictated.
This Flyer has ten propellers. The cost of computing power is now so low that I can imagine multiple computers dictating the behavior of the propellers and a similar voting system to allow for multiple point failures.
Many modern jets can fly with an engine out. It wouldn't surprise me if the Flyer can fly with one or two (or perhaps more) propellers out.
I think many communities in the early days of the automobile treated them as experimental and greatly limited their speed. Much progress on flying cars remains to be made. The cost of running out of fuel on a highway is a clogged highway. The cost of running out of fuel in a flying car needs to be addressed.
The question really boils down to whether the flying car solves a significant problem without creating even bigger problems. I would guess that it does and that our grandchildren or great-grandchildren will be using them and wondering how our generation got along without them.
Cut back on the doughnuts???
Deer hunting!......................
LOL...a blast from the past. Coulda been a contenda!
“...what happens then?”
Emergency landing in the city park filled with picnickers and little kids playing. Yuck.
The machine probably has an auto-landing mode such that it’ll touch down before running out of fuel in mid-air.
Yes, this is in the infancy state, no doubt about it. It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves in the next 30 years. My kids will be around to see it.
In some ways, CP/M was more advanced than the Early MS-DOS.
http://www.cpm.z80.de/manuals/cpm3-cmd.pdf
It wasn’t a Delorean?
this is a can of worms. no way the government will allow this. imagine people driving over your property, etc..
I doubt the FAA will certify these things any time soon...................
Forget certification.
This is a good start. This is how it begins.
I applaud this kind of stuff. It’s a good design.
Range will get better.
There are many areas of public land that are land lock by private land.
Their many lakes in Canada that are just a few miles off the road system that one could spend all day fighting the bush and one still would not be there.
So if doughnuts a problem for you one should cut back.
Like they do by private plane or ultra lights now.
OK, so in spite of that, you are going to put people in flying cars.
I presume that you have no problem with putting together 3 or 4+ tons of steel, aluminum & rubber and launching these collections at each other while travelling along a ribbon of concrete or asphalt at closing speeds of 100+ mph "in the hands of the uneducated mass of the public was a good idea"?
“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.” ---Robert A. Heinlein
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