NASA "Puffin"

[Tink1717 2]

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No - yet hundreds of millions people drive without killing themselves all that often.

The term "all that often." is the operative word(s) here. The public will never tolerate the kind of standards need to make millions of low altitude - high speed aircraft a plausible scenario.

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You could say the same about driving (and some really believe this.) As a technological problem, it is solvable.

Yes and as a 26 year veteran of the Fire Dept, I know more than most that there are WAY many more people on the road who are unqualified than who are qualified. I mean really, take a look at what people drive on the road. The rigged up junk that somehow rolls down the way is just jaw dropping. Think of that kind of stupidity in the air (remember Truman from Fandango? Imagine that for real.) This should be rejected out of hand. technology or not.

Skydivers don't knock on Death's door. They ring the bell and runaway... It really pisses him off.
-The World Famous Tink. (I never heard of you either!!)
AA #2069 ASA#33 POPS#8808 Swooo 1717

[billvon 3,116]

>Flying is at least an order of magnitude more dangerous simply because
>when the engine fails cars usually don't crash.

When an Otter engine fails, the airplane usually doesn't crash.

>When cars do crash, it usually doesn't rain aluminum.

No, it rains steel, which is no less deadly. The biggest difference is not the destructive potential, it is merely the surprise factor.

Indeed, cars have pretty horrendous stats for killing non-drivers. In the US, cars kill about 5000 bystanders a year, and in 2008 there were 18,000 "roadway departure accidents" where cars leave the roadway and end up in trees, lakes, houses and playgrounds. This is several orders of magnitude higher than any such stats for aircraft even when you factor in major disasters like 9/11.

>I think the only way it's solvable is to completely remove the human pilot
>from the equation. You enter the vehicle, tell it where you want to go and
>some magical infrastructure that currently doesn't exist coordinates
>everything from power up to navigation to landing and all without any
>further interaction from the human inside.

I don't think that's any more necessary for flying than it is for driving.

The two extremes in driving might be a 1910 roadster with cable operated brakes, wooden spoke wheels, manual mixture controls vs a "smart highway" autonomously driven car. Most cars nowadays are somewhere in between. Heck, my current car is gas and brake by wire, has half a dozen airbags, a navigation system, a completely automated powertrain (two controls) an incident recorder, XM weather receiver, ABS and traction control. All of which makes driving a bit easier compared to that 1910 roadster.

Likewise, take an aircraft with fly-by-wire and envelope limiting (i.e. no stalls, no banks past 60 or pitch past 30) FADEC, highway-in-the-sky navigation, TCAS III plus ADS-B and XM weather, and you get an aircraft that's easier to fly. Add a BRS and you get one that's safer overall as well. Require LSA restrictions and you get an aircraft that will cause less damage when it crashes and one that's less likely to get into trouble to begin with.

Does that mean that just anyone can fly? No, no more than anyone can drive a car, and there will always be that third axis to deal with. But you could certainly support a lot more air traffic than we do now, especially if airports stop being the choke points for access.

[billvon 3,116]

>The public will never tolerate the kind of standards need to make
>millions of low altitude - high speed aircraft a plausible scenario.

Of course they will - if they are convenienced by such things. We put up with tens of thousands of deaths a year due to automobiles, and still the most common complaint to state politicians is "we want more roads!"

>I know more than most that there are WAY many more people on
>the road who are unqualified than who are qualified.

Agreed there!

>Think of that kind of stupidity in the air (remember Truman from
>Fandango? Imagine that for real.) This should be rejected out of hand.
>technology or not.

We shouldn't have that stupidity in the air; standards for pilots should always be higher than standards for drivers. But we are also going to see changes that allow more people to fly with the same level of safety that we see now.

Sign of the times - the new Cessna trainer is both an LSA and has a full EFIS cockpit. And that's a completely conventional aircraft.

[DrewEckhardt 0]

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it looks fucking stupid.

all these people that think personal air going vehicles are the way forward are frankly, nuts.

i mean, can you actually imagine thousands of these things flying around a city? nonononono! only if the piloting was totally remotely controlled by satellite could it ever ever work.

Assuming a price tag comparable to other certified light sport aircraft I'd expect a price tag around $100,000. On that alone I doubt we'll see too many.

The costs of annual + 100 hour inspections and life limited components will farther limit ownership.

Something like the Zip Car scheme could be interesting on both counts.

Under current rules you'd also need at least a regular private pilots license to operate it (because of the variable pitch prop) and perhaps a rotorcraft/helicopter license.

[mdrejhon 8]

I reall reading some 19th century horseless carriage maker (i.e. early car) saying that only a very few people in the world can learn to drive a car. Even earlier, some experimental steam tractors of the 18t and 19th century, did not have brakes and required boiler throttle down that had a long lag. Some of them crashed.

There is room for a massive density upgrade (orders of magnitude) in the air system with new computerized infrastructure that safely allows tight horizontal/vertical spacing and multilayering, which may, increasingly support personal aviation as a method of commuting, especially in robotically controlled aerial vehicles, at least in some contexts such as routes that would take more than two hours by car. But that will be slow to happen, and ground based vehicles will still be more popular.

But far more realistically and sooner than that (and within a few decades) are robotically driven cars. Those that you can sleep in or read a newspaper in (or legally use a laptop or texting on a phone) while the car's autonomously diving you from point A to B. Or even delivering itself driverlessly back home to your better half who needs it for the rest of the day. I'd bet city orinances would pop up, to ban that to prevent clogging roads, though!

[riddler 0]

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The general public is too stupid to handle this.

I'm not convinced the average small aircraft pilot is all that smarter than the average driver. The training and the test is harder, sure. They have more money, no doubt. The only reason there aren't more accidents in the sky is because there are far, far fewer aircraft than automobiles, and they have a lot more space to work with.

Hopefully, this time around, the technology will significantly reduce the human error from the equation.

Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

[Beerlight 0]

For some of the NASA history buffs. A nice site to check out the old days of manned spacecraft.

Look at photos, stories and videos.

http://home.comcast.net/~cmptj/LRD/