My Other Car Is a Podcopter

Bumper sticker in the year 2015? 2025? Ever?

  • By Mark Gatlin
  • Air & Space magazine, January 2008
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A NASA program that ended in 2005 generated little more than this artists conception of the perfect easy-to-fly personal air car. A NASA program that ended in 2005 generated little more than this artist's conception of the perfect easy-to-fly personal air car.

NASA Langley

(Page 3 of 3)

A smart vehicle’s intelligence is determined by more than onboard technology. Someone or something has to keep vehicles from colliding. In airspace with many small personal air vehicles zipping around, a workable system may well require a totally automatic, redundant navigation and air traffic control system. Bushnell points to progress with some of the flight software the military has designed for unmanned aerial operations. Building on these advances, he says, a robust, automated civilian system could be established within a decade.

Others are not so quick to abandon the human element. “Fully automated air traffic management is still many years off—perhaps more than 50,” says NASA’s Mark Ballin, a Langley researcher of aviation operations and a member of an interagency team tasked with designing the country’s Next Generation Air Transportation System, commonly called NextGen.

The team is seeking to upgrade the air traffic control system to handle the two- to three-fold increase in flights and passengers expected by 2025. But NextGen will still need human controllers, and some within the team say that will never change.

The most important question of human involvement revolves around consumer preference and manufacturer courage. “From the manufacturers’ standpoint, aircraft are low-volume and high-liability, which quite frankly scares them to death,” notes Hahn. “From the average person’s viewpoint, they are unobtainable, dangerous, hard-to-use toys that are really annoying. As long as both parties believe this, the answer [to when personal air vehicles will fly] will be ‘never.’ ”

FAA spokesman Les Dorr says that technology development “will be driven by market forces and the ability to comply with FAA safety regulations. You might ask yourself ‘Am I ready to buy a ticket on a pilotless aircraft?’ ”

When the Langley team disbanded in 2005, NASA’s direct personal air vehicle research ended, but the dream continues. The space agency, working through the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency Foundation, in August awarded $250,000 in prize money for its PAV Challenge for the design of a two- or three-seat vehicle with an 800-mile range and ability to use a short runway.

The victor was Vance Turner, owner of a short-wing Pipistrel Virus, a lightweight sport aircraft built in Slovenia. The craft can go 170 mph and gets 50 miles to the gallon.

The challenge is the first of five annual competitions being held through 2011. When and if consumers ever trust flying cars enough to want to buy one, the dreamers want to be ready.

You head out the door and down to the street to catch your ride to work. The aircraft is waiting. The only sound is the low hum of ducted fans at the rear.

Where you’d once expected a pilot, there is instead a panel of blinking lights. To the left and right, more vehicles drop out of the morning sky to pick up your neighbors. You wave a card that opens the door, enters your destination into the flight planner, and debits your account, then spend the quiet, 20-minute commute reading, dozing, or sharing a laugh with your seatmate. The scene sounds like a fantasy because, despite great interest and the effects of “The Jetsons” cartoon on a generation of youth, the promise of affordable, automated flying commuter craft remains unfulfilled.

True, there are a plethora of small flying craft around—light sport and ultralights—but there is still no aircraft that, compared to a car, is as easy to operate. Designs for flying cars have been with us for decades, but no drive-fly vehicle designs have ever been submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration for certification.

In recent years, however, U.S. government agencies and private enterprises around the world have been developing the seed technologies that may finally give rise to this new form of aviation. The scenario of replacing cars, buses, and trucks with flying vehicles will be preceded by the introduction of propulsion systems and other technologies involving automated flight.

In the United States, the gurus of flying cars are researchers at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia who have recently completed a four-year study of the possibilities of personal air vehicles. While NASA’s research funding of such craft is ending, veterans of the program say that much of the technology that is needed to launch the industry is either available in the private sector or achievable in the near term.

According to Dennis Bushnell, a NASA chief scientist and member of the Langley team, the first step toward a flying car is to take some of the burden of flying that traditionally fell on pilots and pass it on to computers. Bushnell says the ability to create an autonomous robotic vehicle will be possible “very soon.” He observes that the growing use of unmanned aerial vehicles by the U.S. government—including all branches of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—is providing the technological breakthroughs necessary for personal air vehicles. “The initial personal air vehicle probably won’t be inhabited,” Bushnell says. “It will be a civilian version of a military UAV to do robotic package delivery.”

What would follow fast on the tail of an unmanned pizza delivery pod would be a commuter version: “Think of unmanned aerial vehicles with humans as cargo,” Bushnell says. He envisions an air vehicle that can also drive on the ground, yet still costs less than $50,000. “It will not fly high and not very fast—say, 120 knots [138 mph]—and feature a two-passenger climate-controlled cockpit,” Bushnell predicts.

The engineer says that at least initially the vehicles will employ super-short takeoff and landing. “You need something that will take off on the 50 to 70 feet of street in front of your house,” says Bushnell. The vehicles will have to be affordable and safe. That may rule out rotorcraft, including tilt-rotor designs, Bushnell acknowledges: “They cost much more to own and operate and are inherently less safe.”

Even in sparsely populated areas, the vehicles will also have to be quiet. Many personal air vehicle proponents see ducted fans as the solution, since they are quieter and lighter than either propellers or rotors. The progress is quantifiable: In late May the FAA issued an experimental airworthiness certificate for the first vertical-takeoff, hover-capable aircraft with ducted fans.

The 65-inch GoldenEye 50 is a winged design that uses a propeller enclosed within a cylindrical body to hover. It was designed by Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation of Manassas, Virginia, under a Department of Defense contract as a platform to carry battlefield sensors. It’s just a matter of time, the company is gambling, before there will be a need for larger aircraft using the same technology. The GoldenEye 50 was designed as a technology development platform for the GoldenEye 80, a 150-pound ducted-fan aircraft.

Several private ventures are developing ducted-fan vehicles capable of vertical flight, but few are as far along as Israel’s Urban Aeronautics. The company’s X-Hawk, inspired by the Piasecki Flying Jeep of the 1950s and ’60s, uses a U.S.-patented control system. The airflow created by the ducted-fan engine is directed by two arrays of thin-blade vanes; one array at the inlet, the other at the outlet of the duct.

While the first X-Hawks will be military and rescue versions, Urban Aero’s marketing director, Janina Frankel-Yoeli, says that future models “will fulfill the role of a communal aerial vehicle, such as a schoolbus or commuter shuttle.” Company officials say the first full-scale prototype may make its first test flights in two and a half years.

Clearing the engineering hurdles is just the first step in creating a flying car. That car needs a person on board who acts more like a passenger than a pilot. That means pairing everyday folks with trustworthy onboard computers.

The NASA team at Langley developed two systems intended to develop sentient vehicles that could offer, according to a NASA report, “fully autonomous flight” for a lone pilot in nearly all weather “with confidence and relative ease.”

In the report, the pilot-craft relationship is compared to more familiar partnerships: “The pilot guides the personal air vehicle with the control stick and the [onboard programming, reacting to the pilot’s actions] negotiates turbulent air as best it can, just as a rider guides through the reins and the horse negotiates rough terrain.” If the pilot is distracted or makes a mistake, the computer vibrates the stick to alert him. If there is still no response, the system will divert the craft to the nearest airfield.

Andrew Hahn, an aerospace engineer at Langley who researched personal air vehicles, is hopeful but guarded about automated systems. “The automation will undoubtedly get better,” he says. “When the automation gets really good, we may allow the automation to fly without people, over lightly populated areas, but I don’t see high-energy UAVs flying fully autonomously in heavy traffic and over cities for a long, long time.”

A smart vehicle’s intelligence is determined by more than onboard technology. Someone or something has to keep vehicles from colliding. In airspace with many small personal air vehicles zipping around, a workable system may well require a totally automatic, redundant navigation and air traffic control system. Bushnell points to progress with some of the flight software the military has designed for unmanned aerial operations. Building on these advances, he says, a robust, automated civilian system could be established within a decade.

Others are not so quick to abandon the human element. “Fully automated air traffic management is still many years off—perhaps more than 50,” says NASA’s Mark Ballin, a Langley researcher of aviation operations and a member of an interagency team tasked with designing the country’s Next Generation Air Transportation System, commonly called NextGen.

The team is seeking to upgrade the air traffic control system to handle the two- to three-fold increase in flights and passengers expected by 2025. But NextGen will still need human controllers, and some within the team say that will never change.

The most important question of human involvement revolves around consumer preference and manufacturer courage. “From the manufacturers’ standpoint, aircraft are low-volume and high-liability, which quite frankly scares them to death,” notes Hahn. “From the average person’s viewpoint, they are unobtainable, dangerous, hard-to-use toys that are really annoying. As long as both parties believe this, the answer [to when personal air vehicles will fly] will be ‘never.’ ”

FAA spokesman Les Dorr says that technology development “will be driven by market forces and the ability to comply with FAA safety regulations. You might ask yourself ‘Am I ready to buy a ticket on a pilotless aircraft?’ ”

When the Langley team disbanded in 2005, NASA’s direct personal air vehicle research ended, but the dream continues. The space agency, working through the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency Foundation, in August awarded $250,000 in prize money for its PAV Challenge for the design of a two- or three-seat vehicle with an 800-mile range and ability to use a short runway.

The victor was Vance Turner, owner of a short-wing Pipistrel Virus, a lightweight sport aircraft built in Slovenia. The craft can go 170 mph and gets 50 miles to the gallon.

The challenge is the first of five annual competitions being held through 2011. When and if consumers ever trust flying cars enough to want to buy one, the dreamers want to be ready.


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Comments (13)

hi my name is jon, and tomorrow april 23rd i will be 34 years old. ever since i was a little boy i heard about flying cars, will i be a old man before this dream becomes a reality or can i count on someone finally making this dream come true in my golden years. maybe i should build a flying car myself, everyone else is.

Posted by jon on April 22,2008 | 08:56 AM

Well John,

As an Ait Traffic Controller I have only one thing to say..

"Check wheels down. Cleared for crash and burn."

Until the ATC system is ready, the dream of the flying car is nothing but a dream. Additionally, the public will have a hard time getting into a flying machine without a human pilot. I know I wouldn't. Computers fail, they (at this time) can not make the "judgement decisions" about flying an aircraft in an emergency situation. There are too many variables.

Should the computer pilot make the decision to crash landed the craft in an open area to save people on the ground, even though it may kill the occupant? Or save the occupant and kill people on the ground...

Posted by Bob on May 15,2008 | 12:32 PM

Flying car??? I'm still waiting for my jetpack!!!

Posted by Steve on June 22,2008 | 10:41 AM

Sounds like a nice convenient way to deliver 200 - 300 lbs of high explosive to a target destination. Do people forget what day & age we live in?

sigh...

Posted by Steve on June 22,2008 | 10:49 AM

Jon
I admire you for your dream but if youve ever observed those around you on a daily urban commute you've seen the weakest link in the key to realization of this fairy tail. Most folks dont have the ability or attention span to operate an automobile, much less something that flies. Having a computer do it is just as crazy.
That being said, if the technology ever reached the point that it could economically (another hurdle, think you'd like to own one..?? It will be around a quarter mill or more)support the idea the FAA would regulate it to a point of nullifying any advantage and the airlines, which 'own' the FAA would have you regulated out of any employment areas withing 25-30 miles of the airport. Fagetaboutit.

Posted by Curt on June 26,2008 | 11:22 AM

Jon,
it WILL happern -maybe not in our lifetime - but it will be done.There will always be doom and gloom naysayers -it will never work,etc.-but dont let it discourage you.SOMEONE WILL build one sooner or later.........and the dream will be real.

Jackjet

Posted by Jackjet on July 1,2008 | 07:37 PM

It will happen, but it will take those few people rich, bored and bold enough to work the bugs out of the system. before too long, just like the cell phone, the car, the computer, the benefits will trump the risks and using flight will be more commonplace than it is now. It has alot of hurdles - communities have to be able to accommodate landing areas, traffic patterns, security, that whole $4/gal gas thing, all the other hurdles mentioned in the other comments, but nothing that make it impossible. After package delivery I could see mass transit being the next step.

Posted by Duane on July 16,2008 | 10:39 AM

RRRighhhhht.....
I am a pilot, an engineer, and an observer of humans.
Sorry, but it ain't gonna happen. Maybe the odd few here and there, but people are incapable in general of piloting vehicles and computers are too unreliable. An intelligent person with redundant computer control, maybe, but that rules out the large herd of cows, uh, I mean general public.
You might as well put a cow in a leather helmet with goggles for any ads that come out for flying cars, because that is just about who would be flying it. So I guess if you could put a cow in it, and go from point a to point b safely, it coulddd.. happen.
I would not hold my breath though.
-Christian

Posted by Christian von Delius on July 22,2008 | 11:39 PM

I believe we will have some type of aircraft or flying car in the future but what about TELEPORTING FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER.AND WHAT ABOUT A TIME MACHINE? Are these also not in the future? People that have been involeved in "crogenics"could be awakened in the future when a cure for their disease has been discovered. Wouldn't this be a form of a future time machine?

Posted by carlos on November 14,2008 | 05:17 PM

when will they invent jetpacks? i almost want those more than flying cars. i emailed this link to my friends, and we think it is weird.

Posted by mazz on November 22,2008 | 07:37 PM

The article seems to have totally overlooked Moller. They already have a prototyped flying car and are actively working with the FAA for certification, which is expected around 2012.

Posted by Steve on December 5,2008 | 12:09 PM

I'm with Bob. As former US Navy pilot, commercial-rated pilot, and now recreational pilot I have over 1,500 of multi-engine fixed-wing time. It takes years of training to get to a level of proficiency that enables a pilot to be safe and effective and handle emergencies accurately. The idea of airborne mass transit or high occupancy vehicles (such as buses, etc) makes more sense for large city or town-to-town commutes. But to think "everyone" will someday fly to the grocery store, work, etc in their private flying cars is preposterous.

Posted by JT DeBolt on January 9,2009 | 04:40 PM

http://www.skycarexpedition.com/index.php

Posted by Aldo Hanson on January 12,2009 | 05:58 AM

How can you say "It will never happen" in light of the past? They said the horseless carriage was a joke, that even if it was invented, it would be too expensive for everyday people to own, and too complicated for everyday people to operate. Yeah, that prediction sure worked out well. Good thing Orville and Wilbur gave up on that silly dream of human flight, because as we all know, it was impossible for humans to fly, ever...period. Oh wait...nevermind, I guess that prediction was wrong too. Well at least nobody ever broke the sound barrier, or landed on the Moon. Damn it...wait. Grr. Jet-Packs, flying cars and teleportation is impossible. There. Oh wait...there are jet-packs, just not available to the public, nor developed enough for sustained flight. Well good thing it's 'impossible' for anyone to continue to work on it. Flying Cars, not possible because the multitude of geniuses that patrol the web say so. Good enough for me. Teleportation? Maybe someone should check out "quantum cloning with quantum teleportation" in which scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart.

Posted by Jim on February 19,2009 | 10:20 AM

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