Aircar
Well-Known Member
As suggested this thread will be about Assisted Take Off and Landing (ATOL) and try to defend the thesis that this is the ONLY way presently known to get to a world where flying vehicles can be ubiquitous and become cheap and easily used by 'everyman' or at least the kind of average guy typified by George Jetson .
There is much more than just the physical nuts and bolts of some paraphenalia to get a vehicle into and out of the air involved -- the level of skill and tolerance of misjudgement or inclement weather,failure modes of the sub systems and all the opportunities for things going wrong have to be taken into account and come out not being any more difficult than the task already being accomplished of driving and parking a car .
VTOL is put up as a solution to the 'everyman's airplane' or flying car of the Jetson's future but in practice even the most benign kind in the helicopter demand a higher degree of specialized training and co ordination than existing fixed wing aircraft and are much more expensive to buy and operate --the 'anti gravity' mode depicted in the Jetsons cartoon is certainly not something easier to attain by aerodynamic means at the present state of the art . I will concede that the difficulty of landing and taking off COULD be offloaded to a fully automated system just as quadrotor model drones are at present but the noise and turmoil caused by the inevitable downwash still counts against the dream of helicoptering out of your driveway let alone some high disc loading VTOL like say a Moller Skycar .
For the time being then put aside the VTOL option (and this can be treated in another thread --it is contentious whether VTOL and roadability are acheiveable without turbine power even )
The runway based option -CTOL or Conventional Take Off and Landing -or sometimes HTOL Horizontal ToL - is that which is usually seen as the only other alternative and the problem is that established cities simply don't feature large open expanses suitable for new runways or whole airports to be built and the value of real estate together with the wholesale demolition of many homes that would be required is not acceptable (even a new underground road in Melbourne is creating enormous backlash for just the few homes eaten up by the tunnel entrance ) -the time when new airports might have been built in large cities is past . Population to airport ratios are in the hundreds of thousands to one so "every-man' could not possibly fly from his home or to work using airfields -- it looks like the flying car must remain an oddity or never happen on this basis; certainly it cannot proliferate or gain a mass market to give low cost if dependent on airports . As Sir Charles Kingsford Smith put it -"the only thing hard about flying is the ground " - a further drwaback of conventional airport landings.
this sets the scene for WHY we need ATOL as the 'way out" of the bottleneck holding back everyday aviation by flying car.
out of time .
There is much more than just the physical nuts and bolts of some paraphenalia to get a vehicle into and out of the air involved -- the level of skill and tolerance of misjudgement or inclement weather,failure modes of the sub systems and all the opportunities for things going wrong have to be taken into account and come out not being any more difficult than the task already being accomplished of driving and parking a car .
VTOL is put up as a solution to the 'everyman's airplane' or flying car of the Jetson's future but in practice even the most benign kind in the helicopter demand a higher degree of specialized training and co ordination than existing fixed wing aircraft and are much more expensive to buy and operate --the 'anti gravity' mode depicted in the Jetsons cartoon is certainly not something easier to attain by aerodynamic means at the present state of the art . I will concede that the difficulty of landing and taking off COULD be offloaded to a fully automated system just as quadrotor model drones are at present but the noise and turmoil caused by the inevitable downwash still counts against the dream of helicoptering out of your driveway let alone some high disc loading VTOL like say a Moller Skycar .
For the time being then put aside the VTOL option (and this can be treated in another thread --it is contentious whether VTOL and roadability are acheiveable without turbine power even )
The runway based option -CTOL or Conventional Take Off and Landing -or sometimes HTOL Horizontal ToL - is that which is usually seen as the only other alternative and the problem is that established cities simply don't feature large open expanses suitable for new runways or whole airports to be built and the value of real estate together with the wholesale demolition of many homes that would be required is not acceptable (even a new underground road in Melbourne is creating enormous backlash for just the few homes eaten up by the tunnel entrance ) -the time when new airports might have been built in large cities is past . Population to airport ratios are in the hundreds of thousands to one so "every-man' could not possibly fly from his home or to work using airfields -- it looks like the flying car must remain an oddity or never happen on this basis; certainly it cannot proliferate or gain a mass market to give low cost if dependent on airports . As Sir Charles Kingsford Smith put it -"the only thing hard about flying is the ground " - a further drwaback of conventional airport landings.
this sets the scene for WHY we need ATOL as the 'way out" of the bottleneck holding back everyday aviation by flying car.
out of time .
