Side-Lines

And it's not like nobody saw it coming: Machen, Christianity and Liberalism

Registration is required over at that link (an excellent link), so I will answer here the question of "Where are the Flying Cars": Most people have no business sharing airspace with actual pilots--not if they think of what they are doing as driving "Flying Cars".

Picture in your mind millions of Flying Cars driven by ninety year olds, or teenagers with learners permits, or illegal aliens driving slow in the hope that they won't attract the attention of la policia. Drunks, or distracted moms dealing with their brats, or maintained in the way so many maintain their cars today (like crap).

Sorry, I guess this isn't in the spirit of the post. That Flying Car thing is just one of those things that grinds my nards. Great link, I've bookmarked Crisis Magazine.

Ideally, you don’t want a “flying car”. Instead, you want an H. Beam Piper-style “aircar” — an aircraft (actually, an aerodyne — a vehicle with no fixed lifting surfaces) with the comfort, ease of use, and affordability of an automobile, something like the Spinner vehicle in Blade Runner. Roadability is superfluous when you have a car-size, wingless 6-passenger VTOL that a fifteen-year-old can operate.

And the danger factor people cite as a reason we’ll never have personal aircars is a joke. We lose 45,000 people a year on the roads today and nobody cares.

Besides, a practical aircar will probably be computer-piloted anyway: you hop in, the computer throws a map up on the wraparound glass display canopy, you touch-click the desired destination, then sit back and let the ATC system fly you there. And since the cost of the trip is debited from your account on a pounds-per-mile basis, you don’t even have to buy the car; just whistle one up with your cell phone when you want to make a trip and Hertz Local ATC vectors Unit #2543 to your lat/long. If things go screwy en route, say a loss of ATC link, the onboard computer pilots you to the nearest safe landing site. If you lose lift, the onboard computer pops the top on a canisterized heavy-lift parawing and you float to Earth safely. (If you lose ATC and onboard computer, you can deploy the parawing by pulling a mechanical lanyard.)

The obstacle to creating an aircar (not counting legal, bureaucratic, commercial, and mindset obstacles) is the powerplant. What’s needed is a cheap, modular version of the F-35 lift fan system — one that consumes fuel at a moderate rate and won’t deafen the neighborhood every time it spools up. Once we have that, we just build a lifting-body passenger cabin, suitable controls, and a multi-billion-dollar continental ATC network, and it’s Jetsons time.