Dream of air motorization
The crash of a flying car prototype piloted by Stefan Klein of the Slovak company AeroMobil, which had been working on this type of design for several years, caused everyone who had already seen hovering cars in everyday use to once again put their vision on hold. For the next one.
Klein, at an altitude of about 300 m, managed to activate an improved parachute system launched from a special container. This saved his life - during the accident he was only slightly injured. However, the company assures that testing of the machine will continue, although it is not known exactly when the next prototypes will be considered ready to fly in normal airspace.
Where are these flying wonders?
In the second part of the popular movie series Back to the Future, set in 2015, we saw cars speeding down an atmospheric highway. Visions of flying machines have been common in other science fiction titles, from The Jetsons to The Fifth Element. They even became one of the most enduring motifs of futurism of the XNUMXth century, reaching into the next century.
And now that the future has arrived, we have the XNUMXth century and many technologies that we did not expect before. So you ask - where are these flying cars ?!
In fact, we have been able to build air cars for a long time. The first prototype of such a vehicle was created in 1947. It was an Airphibian created by inventor Robert Edison Fulton.
air phoebe design
Over the next decades, there was no shortage of various designs and subsequent tests. The Ford concern was working on flying cars, and Chrysler was working on a flying jeep for the army. The Aerocar, built by Moulton Taylor in the 60s, was so popular with Ford that the company almost put it up for sale. However, the first prototypes were simply rebuilt aircraft with passenger modules that could be detached and attached to the fuselage. In recent years, more advanced designs have begun to appear, such as the aforementioned AeroMobil. However, if the problem was with the technical and economic capabilities of the machine itself, then we probably would have had flying motorization for a long time. The snag is in another. Recently, Elon Musk spoke quite directly. Namely, he stated that "it would be nice to have vehicles moving in three-dimensional space", but "the risk of them falling on someone's head is too great."
There is nothing complicated about this - the main obstacle to air motorization is safety considerations. If millions of accidents occur and people die en masse in a normally two-dimensional motion, adding a third dimension seems unreasonable to say the least.
50m is enough for landing
Slovak AeroMobil, one of the most famous flying car projects, has for many years operated mainly in the field of technical curiosities. In 2013, Juraj Vakulik, one of the representatives of the company that designed the car and created its prototypes, said that the first "consumer" version of the car would hit the market in 2016. Unfortunately, after the accident, it will no longer be. while possible, but the project is still at the forefront of possible concepts.
There are many legal hurdles to overcome in terms of air traffic regulations, runways, etc. There are also major technical challenges. On the one hand, the Airmobile must be light so that the structure can easily rise into the air, on the other hand, it must meet the safety requirements for structures moving on the road. And materials that are both strong and lightweight are usually expensive. The price of the market version of the car is estimated at several hundred thousand. Euro.
According to company representatives, AeroMobil can take off and land from the grass strip. It takes about 200m to take off and to land is reportedly even 50m. However, the carbon-fiber "car-plane" would be classified as a small sport aircraft under aviation regulations, meaning that a special license would be required to fly AeroMobile.
VTOL only
As you can see, even from a legal point of view, AeroMobil is considered a type of aircraft with a landing gear capable of moving on public roads, and not a “flying car”. Paul Moller, the creator of the M400 Skycar, believes that as long as we are not dealing with vertical take-off and landing designs, the "air" revolution in personal transport will not happen. The designer himself has been working on such a mechanism based on propellers since the 90s. Recently, he has become interested in drone technology. However, it still struggles with the problem of getting the vertical lift and descent motors to power properly.
More than two years ago, Terrafugia unveiled this type of concept car, which not only will have a modern hybrid drive and semi-automatic steering system, but will also not need a parking hangar. Enough of a regular garage. A few months ago, it was announced that the model car, currently designated TF-X in 1:10 scale, would be tested in A. by the Wright brothers at MIT.
The car, which looks like a four-person car, must take off vertically using electrically powered rotors. On the other hand, a gas turbine engine should serve as a drive for long-range flights. The designers predict that the car can have a cruising range of up to 800 km. The company has already collected hundreds of orders for its flying cars. The sale of the first units was scheduled for 2015-16. However, the entry of vehicles into operation may be delayed for legal reasons, which we wrote about above. Terrafugia set aside eight to twelve years in 2013 for the full development of the project.
Various configurations of Terraf TF-X vehicles
When it comes to flying cars, there is another problem to be solved - whether we want cars that both fly and drive normally on the streets, or only flying cars. Because if it's the latter, then we get rid of a lot of the technical problems that designers struggle with.
Moreover, according to many experts, the combination of flying car technology with dynamically developing autonomous driving systems is quite obvious. Safety is paramount, and experts simply do not believe in the conflict-free movement of thousands of independent "human" drivers in three-dimensional space. However, when we start thinking about computers and solutions like what Google is currently developing for autonomous vehicles, it's a very different story. So it's like flying - yes, but rather without a driver
