48 replies to this topic

[Redezra]

I want a Telsa Roadster. NOW. :<

[Haflinger]

Flying cars would be significantly safer than ground cars. Most car accidents are collisions, and in the air there's a much lower risk of that because there are fewer things to hit.

[Redezra]

Unless.....

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Unless the air were crowded with flying cars.  And given the potential traffic volume, there would need to be controls, flight paths, routes.  It's a logistical nightmare.  Then there is the possibility of drunk flying.  And don't forget, what goes up must come down.  All I can picture is drunken yahoos plummeting out of the sky and into schools for orphaned bunnies.  Do you want that, Haf?  Are even you so heartless?

 

Anyway, I think we're going to see automated cars.  It will start like something like Will Smith had in I, Robot, where the car can still be driven manually.  But it won't take them long to figure out that computer-driven cars are much safer and that traffic flows seamlessly when the computers are driving, so pretty quickly there will be certain places where you will have to be on "autopilot" all the time, like city centers and highways.  Before long the cars will be doing it all, and there won't even be a way to manually override.  You will just get in your car, enter a location, and it takes you there.  You could even program it to go home and come back and pick you up later, so parking would become easier.  Oh, the wonders we shall see, children.

[KiWi]

I'm glad you're also excited about Tesla. Again, if I could have opinions about foreign cars, or fancy exotic, sports cars, I wouldn't mind trying Saab out.

If I wanted to vote Tesla though, would I pick American or other (I can see cases for both).

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Also I agree with Jorost on the automated/flying car aspects. Damn you Jorost. I feel like such a dirty brownnose when you swoop in and say my opinion.

[Haflinger]

Google has plans for automated cars. It's been going around trying to persuade auto manufacturers to sign up. So far, no bites.

 

The air would not be crowded with flying cars. That's the whole point of the air: it's much bigger. At ground level, you only have one level; everyone is on the ground. In the air, one car may fly at 10m, another at 20m. They have no chance of hitting each other.

 

This is actually the main reason why commercial air travel is the safest form of travel, much safer than trains. For the vast majority of the trip, you're in the air, a long way away from anything else you can bump into.

[Redezra]

And then there are the instances of planes that have crashed into eachother mid cruise.

[Haflinger]

Midair collisions that do not involve military aircraft are extremely rare.
 
The most recent one was in 2007. Two news helicopters that were both covering the same car chase collided, in the only recorded case of a midair collision involving news helicopters. In terms of regular civilian airliners colliding with each other, here is the complete list:

April 7, 1922

CGEA Farman F.60 / Daimler Hire Ltd. de Havilland DH.18A

August 24, 1938

Two Japanese aircraft

June 30, 1956

UA Flight 718 / TWA Flight 2

December 16, 1960

UA Flight 826 / TWA Flight 266

December 4, 1965

TWA Flight 42 / Eastern Airlines Flight 853

July 19, 1967

Piedmont Airlines Flight 22 / Lanseair Inc. flight

July 30, 1971

ANA Flight 58 / JASDF flight

March 5, 1973

Spanish Airlines DC9  / Convair 990

September 9, 1976

Aeroflot Flight 31 / Aeroflot Flight 7957

September 10, 1976

BA Flight 476 / Inex-Adria Flight 550

August 11, 1979

Aeroflot 65816 / Aeroflot 65735

November 12, 1996

Saudia Flight 763 / Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907

July 1, 2002

Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 / DHL Flight 611

September 29, 2006

Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907 / ExcelAire flight

So yeah. Fourteen times in the history of aviation (including biplanes!), two civilian passenger planes collided in midair. That's, what, about the same number of collisions as you get each day during rush hour in L.A., right?

 

Air travel is the safest way to get around. You can argue that it's because air pilots are rigorously trained, unlike car drivers who are mostly just given a manual and cut loose, but that doesn't explain away the fact that air travel is much safer than train travel. Train engineers are also rigorously trained.

 

That said, I still prefer trains; planes make my ears hurt like hell, and it's not like stepping onto a train is a death sentence. But those are the facts.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

There are 130,000 commercial airline pilots in the United States; there are 211,000,000 licensed drivers.  So take those numbers and multiply them by 1,600.

[Haflinger]

lol

 

You know it wouldn't work that way, right, Jor? Firstly, flying cars would presumably generally be smaller than Boeing 747s.

 

And secondly, even if it did, there have been 14 midair collisions of civilian passenger planes since 1922. That's an average of one per six and a half years.

 

In the world.

 

In the United States, there have been 4 midair collisions of civilian passenger planes. Multiply that by 1,600 and you get 6,400 accidents in about a century of aviation.

 

Imagine if there were 64 car accidents in the U.S. each year. The legal system would be so different

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

The point is that while flying may be statistically low risk, the potential for carnage is much greater.  I don't want some drunk flyer's plane crashing into my lawn!  Any mass transit system that involved personal flight would need to be computer controlled, i.e. you enter a destination and the computer takes a preset flight path there.  It's perfect because by then marijuana will be legal, so you can toke up on the way to wherever it is you're flying.

[Haflinger]

Well, as you probably realize by now I'm in favour of completing abandoning our system of letting ordinary humans drive around, because most of them suck. But still I don't think flying cars are the reason to go to automation, because odds are they actually wouldn't be as bad as our current system of careening morons at ground level.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Bottom line:  If you're not near a road your chances of being hit by a car are pretty low.  But anyone and everyone can be hit by planes falling out of the sky.  I'll take my chances with the sucky ground-based drivers, thanks!

[Justavictim82]

Flying cars can and should be automated. Hell you can even allow 10 year olds to operate them in full auto if need be. There are already cars with collison sensors so how is it too far fetched that this could not be implemented for flying devices. Those who wish to operate in manual mode would require a license, which would need to be activated somehow to switch modes. For auto mode, punch in destination via GPS.

[Haflinger]

Bottom line:  If you're not near a road your chances of being hit by a car are pretty low.  But anyone and everyone can be hit by planes falling out of the sky.  I'll take my chances with the sucky ground-based drivers, thanks!

Well sure, if you move to northern Alberta up where MvP is you can get away from drivers.

 

But realistically, nearly everyone is near a road all the time. That's not really an argument.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

I'm not likely to be hit by a car in my apartment.  Or at the beach.  Or in the mall.  Or hiking in the woods.  Or any number of other places where I find myself during the course of the day.  In fact, unless I'm on a road or standing next to one, the chances of my being hit by a car are more or less nil.  I could be hit by a plane almost anywhere.

[Haflinger]

You're not likely to be hit by a plane anywhere more than about 100m away from an airport. (Hell, even there it's pretty unlikely, but the odds go way up there because you're close to where planes are landing and taking off, which is when nearly all plane accidents happen.)

You could be hit by a car in your apartment. All it takes is one idiot who thinks he's the second coming of Evel Knievel and it could happen.

 

I'm surprised at you arguing against statistics like this. Usually you're a voice of reason on these things, but you seem to have been taken in by disaster movies.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Lol.  Okay, Haf.  I still don't think letting everybody fly would be a good idea.  And I think you're severely underestimating the effect of 200 million people flying around!   (And why would there still be airports if everyone had flying cars?  )

[Haflinger]

Yeah, I'm not saying that there wouldn't be crashes with flying cars flown by amateurs. That's obvious; I mean, we have plenty of crashes with our non-flying cars driven by amateurs, and even on occasion professional pilots crash into things. But it's also the case that the vast majority of aviation crashes occur during takeoff or landing; the scenario that you and Red painted of flying cars colliding into each other in midair is just really unlikely, it's far more likely that most flying car crashes would be like other aviation crashes and ... occur during takeoff or landing. So they wouldn't be likely to happen on, say, the roof of an apartment building.

 

It's like on road intersections. Most automobile crashes occur at or near intersections, because that's where you get cars really close to each other going different directions. The same principle holds in the air, only even more so: crashes occur where you have vehicles close to each other. With ground traffic, the road itself constrains vehicles, so really nearly all the time an automobile is in motion it is near a number of other automobiles, all in motion. There's no road in the air; if your vehicle can fly, then it can go wherever, which means that since it's not constrained by the road then an awful lot of the time it's not near anything that it's likely to crash into. The exception comes with the airport; suddenly airplanes getting close to the airport are close both to other vehicles and to the ground, and so that's where crashes happen.

 

Now, I still don't think letting everyone fly is a good idea, but I think it's no worse an idea than letting everyone pilot high-speed ground vehicles.

[Redezra]

I would like to point out the complexity involved in organising flight levels for the relatively minor number of planes in any given local airspaces, and how many flight controllers are required.

 

Now I would like to point out the fact that if you add more planes/flying cars to organise to flight levels, you will increase the number of controllers. And at the moment, computers can not do this. At all. For just the planes. This creates a lot of stress on the people controlling, and stressed people make mistakes. There will be a lot more accidents than a simple linear extrapolation would indicate.

 

Now, the other thing I'd like to point out is the immense complexity with flying something like a plane. My younger brother is a pilot, and to fly something as simple as a little cessna is a year long training course, that is extremely difficult, and requires an aptitude test to actually get into, much like any medical profession. Flying the plane, even after this, is still incredibly complex at any given time. There is a reason there are that many switches in a cockpit.

 

So, I'd like to conclude that the vast majority of people are simply incapable of flying, and if we did open up the airspace, the strain on organisation would be so huge that we wouldn't be flying long. Ergo, flying cars are dumb.