Terrafugia's flying car model has been approved for tests in US airspace

http://www.sciencealert.com/terrafugia-s-flying-car-has-just-been-given-approval-to-run-in-air-tests

by prostoalex • 11 years ago

37 28 11 years ago

sciencealert.com

thingsgoby• 11 years ago

Will never happen

xgbi• 11 years ago

1MW for take-off? Lol?

MrBuddyCasino• 11 years ago

I'm confused, are they powered by batteries or what?

markbnj2• 11 years ago

After watching the video on the linked page it seems to be a hybrid gasoline-electric system. But you can be forgiven your confusion, since the video apparently could get some of the other details straight. Moments after show the prop blades extending they described the power head as a "ducted fan," and then a few seconds later showed it scooting through the air with the blades folded.

matheweis2• 11 years ago

It appears to me that the "power head" / vtol portion is electric, and that there is a separate - presumably gasoline - "ducted fan" in the rear of the vehicle.

That would eliminate a substantial number of drivetrain complexities for the vtol / early forward portion of flight.

Kurtz79• 11 years ago

"Now, before you get too excited, the model they’ll be testing in US airspace is not only unmanned - it's a mere tenth of the size of their actual flying car prototype."

HN submissions should come color-coded according to link-baitness level.

lukev• 11 years ago

I'm not an aeronautical engineer, but the fuselage/wing size ratio on that is way bigger than anything I've seen that actually flies.

Is something that looks like that even a little bit possible?

jacquesm3• 11 years ago

There is such a thing as a lifting body but this at first glance does not seem to be one of those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_body

A scale model can easily be over-powered to the point that it will fly (anything can fly if you strap a large enough engine to it and you can vector thrust), but to make this work for a life-sized design the amount of power required to make it fly would likely cause the vehicle to be so in-efficient it would not be economical to use.

Someone• 11 years ago

Given enough power, a brick can 'fly'.

This more likely is a flying body (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_body) or a blended wing body (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_wing_body), as 'give it an enormous engine' hurts economical feasibility.

But yes, it looks as if those wings are there only to have something to hang the engines from.

jobu2• 11 years ago

Not the most successful comparison, but it looks proportionally similar to the V-22 Osprey (also a VTOL aircraft).

jacquesm3• 11 years ago

Not really, the Osprey has much more horizontal wing surface relative to its size and it has a tail surface and double stabilizer as well. That's a completely different geometry much closer to a conventional aircraft than the subject of this thread. This new vehicle also has a ducted fan for more forward thrust (I suspect this is because mounting larger tilt rotors was impossible given the constraints on height of the vehicle).

It'll be a close race between this one and the Moller sky car which one will hit the dealerships first.

/sarcasm.

geff82• 11 years ago

"Flying Car" seems so cool, but really think about it. Would you drive your car-airplane around on the ground all the time? An airplane already costs lots of money to maintain when it is only flying and sitting at the airport. Now you also have to pay even more for it for the wear of driving on the streets. I mean, this is really only an option to drive from your home to the airport from time to time (not for every flight). And in those cases, you might be able to find some kind of stowable airplane where you can remove the wings from, store them on a trailer and just get that thing home safe.

Honestly, I hope we one day have a solution for some Quadcopter-style of private transportation (best: electric). That would make completely new styles of cities possible as streets would be only used to walk around. Endless nature, no streets in it... just houses with Quadcopters on their roofs, ready to fly away... (still hope they have some kind of crash avoidance system, so flying to the next big time baseball match doesn't result in many deaths each time).

jobu2• 11 years ago

Their promotional video shows this vehicle as a VTOL aircraft, so theoretically you could drive to a parking lot and go : https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=188&v=wHJTZ7k0BX...

However, even if they do get the VTOL working successfully (many others have failed) there will likely be some regulatory hurdles for flying out of a neighborhood. That isn't unheard of though. There are suburban communities built around small airports with direct access to the runways (similar to golf course communities).

Xophmeister• 11 years ago

Why would anyone realistically -- i.e., outside the realm of pure fantasy -- want a flying car? People can barely handle one-and-a-bit dimensions at 70mph (i.e., a road with discrete lanes), how well do you think the general population would cope with this? Maybe autonomous flying vehicles would be more practical, but that still leaves the other two main problems wide open:

1. The energy required to keep the vehicle in the air.

2. The boarding-and-alighting (i.e., landing) bottleneck.

balabaster2• 11 years ago

People can barely handle one-and-a-bit dimensions at 70mph

+1 just for this statement alone.

So far, statistics say that flying is safer by orders of magnitude than driving your car... that statistic will likely plummet to many orders of magnitude in the opposite direction if flying cars become a thing.

If we do end up with flying cars being the norm, I would hope they will be autonomous and not have people manually flying them without a full pilots license being required.

jacquesm3• 11 years ago

Correction: statistics say that commercial air travel is safer by orders of magnitude than driving your car.

General aviation is already a lot worse than that today, and even pilot certification does not preclude accidents in general aviation. It is the whole process around safety put into practice at commercial airlines and numerous design details present in commercial aircraft that make flying with a commercial carrier as safe as it is.

mtgx• 11 years ago

Which is why even before the whole "self-driving" car madness started, I was thinking flying cars will never work unless they are fully automated.

A flying car should only be required the destination as input.

toyg• 11 years ago

There is a chance to do with flying cars what we couldn't do with regular cars: force them to be fully autonomous by default. No safe automation, no permit. This would likely mean forcing them to use some sort of target "airparks" for takeoff and landing, at least initially, but it would drastically reduce the chance of accidents.

fit2rule• 11 years ago

I once drove a very nice car from Essen, Germany, to Cambridge, UK. On the way I had to take a ferry from the Netherlands .. I would have been much happier not having had to take that ferry. I think a flying-car would be the perfect application in that scenario ..

blktiger• 11 years ago

It looks like the TF-X is planned to be an autonomous flying vehicle. The user basically just has to tell it 3 landing areas, then the car handles takeoff and landing and calculates whether it has enough fuel/energy to get there. That said, I think we are decades away from making a system like that work. This thing looks like a seriously complicated machine since it's autonomous, has twin helicopter blades for takeoff/landing, a primary engine for cruise, and can drive on the ground. Even if they get all that to work, the maintenance on it is going to be insane.

MichaelGG• 11 years ago

Didn't they already do a test flight of their first model, the one they took reservations on? The Transition?

billbail• 11 years ago

They claim "1 MW" of power is supplied to the motors with batteries and a 300bhp engine but since 1 bhp =(roughly) 0.75 KW the batteries would need to supply 775KW the power and the combustion engine would not be able to keep the batteries charged sufficiently.

I'm not an expert on car power systems but this doesn't appear to be feasible.

dogma1138• 11 years ago

It's a 1 to 10 scaled model basically a custom themed drone. It will be using batteries rather than the proposed final powerplant and will be most likely crafted out of different materials.

Size doesn't scale, even if the thrust to weight ration will be similar there would be probably 1000 of other differences that will not translate in any meaningful manner to a final full sized model.

Also why do they need permission at all? this is a drone flown in closed private airspace. This is pretty much stretching it as far as veil press releases go.

matheweis2• 11 years ago

Also why do they need permission at all?

Because in the last few years as the FAA has gone on their power trip to gain control of small unmanned aircraft, they have deemed any and all commercial activity involving model aircraft illegal unless there is an exception in place.

this is a drone flown in closed private airspace.

According to the FAA, there is no such thing as "closed private airspace" unless you are flying indoors or at least some kind of enclosure.

daveguy• 11 years ago

flying cars will never be a thing because the efficiency of getting an object into the air and keeping it in the air is always going to be more inefficient than rolling it along the ground with wheels. Ok, never is a long time, but not until we have "mr fusions" and more cheap safe power than we know what to do with. We will get automated cars before this (as people have pointed out automation would be required for flight). When automated cars are ubiquitous the efficiency and speed of ground transport will be that much higher and personal flight will be even less attractive.

Terrafugia's flying car model has been approved for tests in US airspace

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