Posted on 02/16/2006 10:45:11 PM PST by Westlander
BOSTON -- An MIT student has won a prize for his "flying car" invention.
Carl Dietrich can now take a major step in getting his drawings off the ground with the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for Inventiveness.
The annual award encourages engineering creativity in the name of Jerome Lemelson, a prolific inventor.
Dietrich worked with a team of two other MIT students that included his fiancee. Their idea is to alleviate motor vehicle congestion and utilize small, underused public airports in one swoop.
The team designed what they call the Transition, a car-plane hybrid about the size of a Cadillac Escalade.
Fueled by premium unleaded gasoline, it would have a 27-foot wingspan that could be folded for driving or storage in a garage.
Can it be called an "invention" when Popular Science and Popular Mechanics featured such cars on their covers forty years ago?
The idea is to have a computer drive a car. And "computers crash all the time!" jokes notwithstanding, a computer can do a flying job easily - much more so than land driving. When we need computers to be failsafe, they are. Just look at the Mars Rovers, operating semi-autonomously, millions of miles away.
I want a flying Harley.
The ONLY alleviation of traffic that works is to eliminate destinations as desired places to visit.
This will undoubtably make things worse.
They were being used 50 years ago.
I heard it took that guy Moller about a million bucks (probably a lot more) to make his prototype of a flying car, which does not even have enough control to fly untethered. What is this guy supposed to do with $30,000? That barely buys a good land car.
I remember an old news reel of the same thing in the forties or fifties.
Nothin' new under the sun.
They were not only featured in magazines, they were actually built and available to the public.
Great, flying SUV's.
I think they need make a contest for these scientist to make something hover/levitate. Kind of like the skate board in the movie back to the future. even if a cord had to be hooked to the machine or box that they got to hover it would be a start.
When I was in FD, about 20 years ago hovercraft were the "next thing." Austin got one for water rescue. It ended up with the nickname "Joke 1". It was difficult to control, and sounded like three riding mowers without mufflers running over a chain link fence.
We'll also need to invent a whole new subset of Ted Kennedy jokes.
Love That Bob
GREAT article from the AP. So much information; I can hardly process it all...
(not)
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