| Monday, September 27, 2004 |
15:30 - What would you do for the Flying Car?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/magazine/26FLYING.html?pagewanted=all&position=
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Egad. Sounds like some people are really getting aggressive about this.
''You can say our goal is to make the second car in every driveway a personal air vehicle,'' says Andrew Hahn, an analyst at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. Hahn's engineers are already committed to a 15-year time line for three successive generations of flying cars. The first will resemble a compact Cessna with folding wings that converts to road use; it should be available as a graduation gift when this year's freshman class leaves high school. The second, with a rollout planned for 2015, is a two-person pod with small wings and a rear-mounted propeller. The third will rise straight up like a mini-Harrier jet and should be on the market by the time your newborn has a learner's permit. The first of the three vehicles shouldn't cost more than a Mercedes.
An affordable flying car within five years is a dizzyingly fast evolution -- for everyone except Yoeli and other do-it-yourself auto pilots. They've been preparing for this future for decades, and unlike NASA, they can't afford to wait much longer.
There are some interesting packaging and marketing problems associated with bridging between cars and planes, as the article goes on to explain. Pilots who have inculcated themselves with the mentality that couches itself in fail-safes and redundancy and ever lower-tech and higher-reliability backup systems will recoil in horror at the idea of flying "smart cars" with GPS-guided automated landing scripts and collision detection systems, but a $1000 accreditation is hard to turn away from.
Does this mean we'll see flying cars within our lifetimes after all? To a Jetsons kid, they're way overdue; but to the cynical and desensitized post-space-race generation, this stuff seems as remote and fanciful as shrink rays and eye lasers and movies that aren't mere parodies of older, more sincere works of art.
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Brian Tiemann
