I've followed and thought about this space for long. It might turn out that humans are the last things to fly on autonomous vehicles.
Quadcopter drones are already used routinely for information gathering purposes. We might get autonomous small aircraft that do van sized cargo delivery quite soon. Those and other similar systems then get enough repetition and practicalities sorted out that eventually humans can be transported.
One thing that my child mind never accounted for was what happens if my flying car breaks down? In a normal vehicle, it cruises to a stop and gravity keeps it on the ground. That same principle becomes sheer terror when applied to a flying car model.
This problem is mostly fixed in general aviation, and fix is so successful, planes magnitudes safer than ground vehicles (statistics said, probability of accident on road is about 0.1% but on planes it is 0.0001%).
On first page of google search: probability of accident on road
"for every 1000 miles driven, your chances of getting into a crash are 1 in 366. Insurance companies report that customers file a claim once every 17.9 years"
For planes:
"about .01 deaths per 100,000 departures from 225 accidents between 2013 and 2021"
“The industry 2022 fatality risk of 0.11 means that on average, a person would need to take a flight every day for 25,214 years to experience a 100% fatal accident,” stated the I.A.T.A.
https://www.nbc.com/nbc-insider/how-common-are-commercial-pl...
To achieve reliability mostly used two approaches - more strict regulations on design and production (one cannot sale unsafe plane), and same with maintenance.
Some countries going even farther then others, for example, all Soviet helicopters required to have at least two engines and to make safe landing on only one.
Also, for aviation regulators typical to sacrifice modern hype technologies and be extremely conservative on electronics and software, so planes still achievable but reliable (yes, I don't like npm, I think planes will be hundreds times more dangerous if use npm).
You mean commercial air transport, not general aviation [1].
Private, personal aircraft usage by licensed operators, like how cars are owned and used, generally falls into the general aviation bucket. At 1.5 fatalities per 100,000 flight hours [2] that is less safe than cars per distance unless the average flight speed is ~1000 mph, or around mach 1.3 (it is not, it is probably 1/3-1/5 that). That is despite the vastly greater training required for a pilot’s license.
> like how cars are owned and used, generally falls into the general aviation bucket
You confusing typical humble car owner with certified plane owner.
Automobiles could for years don't see any care, even could be used without insurance, but still considered in statistics.
Planes of general aviation, are closer to city buses, which are under constant care and have very good support.
And yes, exist planes without rules, but this is difference, nobody care about non-certified automobile on private land, but you will lost pilot license if you'll get caught flying on non-certified plane, except very few special cases.
Also you should be careful, when compare statistics of US and EU, they have significant differences.
No, you were arguing that general aviation is multiple orders of magnitude safer than ground vehicles. As noted in my citations it is, in fact, 3-5x more dangerous than ground vehicles per distance (the comparison metric most favorable to flying). Only commercial air transport, which is what all of your citations are about, are multiple orders of magnitude safer.
As you note, car owners are vastly less careful than certified plane owners and pilots, and yet the basically untrained car owners are 3-5x safer driving. As this thread was about enabling private flight vehicles for "everybody", it is clear that private flight vehicles are nowhere near safe enough for "everybody" if even the comparatively highly-trained certified plane owner is much less safe than a basically untrained car owner since private flight vehicles for "everybody" would undoubtedly be operated by basically untrained flying car owners making the danger even more pronounced than a mere 3-5x.
> As noted in my citations it is, in fact, 3-5x more dangerous than ground vehicles per distance
I EXACTLY stated: IN USA, aviation safety few times worse than in EU. But when you consider pure numbers, you should understand, that in EU totally different distribution of planes sizes and of airfield sizes. Sure, Frankfurt is safer than ground field somewhere in Austrian Alps, and number of small airfields in USA far exceed any other country.
Yes and no. Most dangerous part of flight is landing, when plane is under mile mark, and don't have much safety margins.
For example, I know few people, crashed when engine broken at about 200m (300feet). Fortunately all alive, but rehabilitation to state when we could drink beer, takes almost half year.
I mean, there are ways to still mitigate most of the risk.
Obviously probably an oversimplification, but I could imagine one or more of the following:
- reliable ejection + personal parachute
- gliding mechanism
- parachute for the vehicle itself
The latter two assume the vehicle is fairly small and/or lightweight.
Of course, similar to airplanes, multiple redundancies would also mitigate risk.
A number of mitigations could help reduce risk below that of driving cars (which can be quite risky in some areas/situations, but we take the risk anyway).
“Ejection” means a rocket motor under the seat and a 50% chance of spinal damage. Not sustainable for consumers and no one in GA use them outside fighter jets.
You sure that's what 'ejection' means in this context?
I was under the impression that the reason ejection from a jet fighter is so strenuous is because the ejector seat needs to eject fast enough to clear the tail of the jet which may be travelling at several hundred miles an hour.
What else would ejection mean? By definition it's an active source of thrust that is powerful enough to push the pilot clear of the cockpit before they rag doll against the rest of the airplane. Regardless of geometry it has to be powerful enough to overcome the thrust of the airplane and air resistance all within a split second. You can try some sort of mechanical jack in the box mechanism but it's going to have a terrible thrust/mass ratio if it works at all.
The vast majority of planes focus on #2, the gliding mechanism, which gives pilots the time to bail out out from a side door and allows for much more forgiving aerodynamics (thrust is up, pilot falls down).
For a consumer flying car you're really going to want zero-zero ejection seats that can survive engine failure during takeoff. That's the most dangerous phase of flight and the seat has to be extra powerful (to get the user high enough for the parachute to work).
I’m more worried about people on the ground being safe. There’s not a lot of safe places to crash over a dense urban environment. Any plan that involves 10,000x more aircraft flying over cities is inherently flawed.
eVTOL over rivers, lakes, or designated ‘flyways’ could work but such limitations would make flying cars far less useful, unless they can also operate as cars.
They would reduce traffic the same way subways do that: by getting people who might otherwise travel by personal auto off of the street entirely, and into another channel with a separate (though still finite) capacity.
There are reasons that air travel won't do too much in this regard in the foreseeable future -- mostly around cost and the fact that ATC-managed airspace actually has quite a low capacity. Those are practical issues, not fundamentals.
Airspace is fundamentally low capacity because there is still congestion to get back on the ground. Worse airplanes must move at all times, you can't stop to avoid disaster, you must have room in all directions to maneuver around whatever is happening. Getting a few people in the air can help everyone if you can pull it off, but you can't get a lot in the air as airplanes need too much space.
You can extend 2d space with bridges and tunnels a lot easier, but it isn't cheap. Which is why cities need metro systems - it is the only way to get masses of people into a dense area.
My sense (somewhat out of date) is that most flying car people consider VTOL and hovering to be fundamental requirements of the format. Helicopters (and other aircraft capable of VTOL and hovering) substantially mitigate both of these issues.
If we're talking about fixed-wing, runway takeoff aircraft, then I absolutely agree with you. If we're not, I'm somewhat (but not highly) confident that coordinating these vehicles will be the long pole re: capacity. That's mostly because it's a really long pole. We haven't developed distributed actor algorithms for this the way we have for cars, it's unclear if this is actually possible, and there's no way the current way of doing ATC can handle the load that even 1% of upper middle class commuters could create.
In the same place where a car would be parked. Parking and traffic are both problems with cars, but they are not the same problem with cars. You can mitigate one without mitigating the other.
Safely and not unacceptably noisily - and the same applies en-route, as well.
There are other scenarios where small, autonomous VTOL aircraft would be very useful, and in such cases, the question of whether such vehicles could reasonably be called flying cars becomes mainly a lexical/usage one.
> If we are unable to make full self drive work for cars
Believe me, air have so much more volume, autopilots for planes are simpler than for cars.
Definitively, air transport is more dangerous physically than land transport, but with stricter regulations on build planes and on maintenance/using them, we now have magnitudes (about 100-1000 times) better safety at air than on land.
Well,
are here? No. They can start to spread in few years? Yes.
Where: NOT for urban mobility despite the claims. Instead they match PERFECTLY the substantial green new deal, or the large sprawl of single family homes and small buildings because no one want flying things in a dense are, take off and landing are nightmarish etc while in a moderately spread area they are the perfect match: you have nature, space to evolve, and anything is still nearby because 60km is just 10' flight.
How? Well, at first I think not eVTOL but some VTOL with various tech, simply because the battery is too heavy to be efficient in such form, we can make eSTOL that for not-so-short range flight are nearly efficient as cars, but they can be used in a mid-dense scenario, so they are possible and practically useless.
A small note: https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... EU/McKinsey focused NOT on the possibility of flying stuff but on public acceptance of them. Take a serious note on that. Some small planes are already as efficient as car for many kind of flights and they do not demand the road infra from any point A and B of a flight, of course there are various constraints, but roads have others constraints as well. The reality is that we have roads because we can naturally work, ride animals who walk etc, modern era means also modern means.
America will go to any length to avoid undoing an export far more damaging than any of its nuclear bombs: its 1960s city planning
Even if it means crippling its own economy and the economies of its allies
Think of the trillions of dollars lost per year globally because some seppo modernist urban planners were arrogant enough to think they’d uncovered the ultimate solution to designing cities regardless of the nuances or context
Want to begin repairing Pax Americana? Get private interests out of your public infrastructure operations. Be a role model for other countries within the American Empire to emulate
New York actually had Air Taxis (passenger van helicopters) that shuttled people around the city until 1979 when a horrible crash ended the company forever.
In the sense that the current driving population will pilot around a "flying car", no, that will never happen. A. aviation is expensive so the general populace will never afford it and B. imagine the idiots in cars now except in the air.
One. And the question is are they here. There have been flying car attempts for many years that have resulted in working prototypes. They aren’t here. They’re just over the horizon along with self-driving cars, cold fusion and commercial airships.
Forget flying cars -- a 50's consumerist fantasy. I'm begging for basics like safe bike lanes, fast public transit and cheap high speed rail.
> It’s often remarked upon, in boosterish circles, that American society allows about forty thousand road fatalities a year but refuses to tolerate even one aviation death.
You can demand perfection in planes. That will likely raise their price and operating costs. in which case more people will drive causing more, not less deaths.
That isn't to say we shouldn't always try to make them safer. But if you put every passenger in a pod like the president in "Escape from New York" you'll make planes safer and still cause more death
Planes have spent nearly 100 years moving from the "cowboy" era with brave "men" risking their lives to the modern era where planes are one of the safest ways to get around. They did they by analyzing every accident and near miss and figuring out how to ensure that doesn't happen again. Car owners resit the idea that they are not perfect even while they do things like use the phone while driving, drink alcohol just before driving tailgate, speed, stop in the crosswalk, and so on. Those are the things that either have been taught in driving ed for decades, or have had large media pushes to raise awareness. Don't get me started counterintuitive on things like the zipper merge which most people think I'm the bad driver for doing. I'll admit that the above is a list of things I know about and attempt to do - I have no idea what else I might be missing.
We now have the technology to have very realistic driving simulators. (I've seen what they give snow plow drivers) We should require drivers spend several days per year in a simulator to make sure that they can do things right in the weird situations. Pilots rarely fly in the worst weather (they will fly above, around or stay on the ground - though they will fly through what looks like bad but isn't - I don't know how to tell the difference), but they get lots of simulator time in the worst case situations.
There are significantly more drivers than pilots and are much less regulated - i.e. capability. More interactions in driving then airplanes - more traffic. Much higher probability of collision or issues. Flying has more complexity for the most part but also has a high degree of automation.
At the same time we can also admit that a number of factors could use a huge amount of improvement in the United States. We have long list of inexpensive low hanging fruit.
- Licensing and renewal requirements are extremely lax
- Many states have extremely lenient DUI punishments
- Road conditions and design are often extremely lacking (e.g., stroads with high speed and high conflict points make up an outsized proportion of fatalities, there could be more emphasis on traffic calming than traffic flow and high average speed).
- Lack of safer alternatives (e.g. public transit) despite generally having the population numbers and density to support robust public transit.
- Too many safety loopholes for popular passenger trucks where the differences in regulations were intended to accommodate commercial activity with professional drivers, but the market has shifted to regular consumers driving large heavy vehicles with poor pedestrian safety like full size pickup trucks.
I want flying emergency services, but that's purely driven by how the random sirens at all hours of the day and night mean that can't concentrate or get good sleep in my current apartment on the corner of a major junction of a busy road with regular long queues.
(It was fine when I moved in… all the roads were empty due to the pandemic).
I really, really want flying cars tho. However, lame rebranding of helicopters and planes doesn't qualify. Until we got some scifi antigravity levitation stuff, let's do the solar punk aesthetics and not waste energy punching air.
Flying cars rely on technical innovation to happen. The other things you mentioned are possible now but rely on social support and political change to happen. I bet we see flying cars before any of those things (in the usa at least).
Bikes: a desperate demand for society to subsidize the hobby of high-status individuals.
Why should we allocate scarce infrastructure land for marginal increases in bike-lanes (that are chronically under-used), for perhaps uniquely the worst form of transit?
If someone told you that they wanted you to provision funding/space for a new form of transit that was:
* Slow/short range
* Impractical in all but basically nice weather
* Requires parking
* Not family-friendly
* Not friendly for the elderly or anyone who is disabled to almost any definition of "disabled"
* Unsafe
* Has low to no cargo capacity
You'd call them crazy. But somehow we've got the meme that bikes are good.
Bikes and cars can coexist. It's not one or the other.
Just visited philadelphia. Used to be clogged with cars. Now it's still clogged with cars. But also has great new bike infrastructure with lots of bikers (that weren't there 15 years ago)
The city is better for it, more mobility options, less noisy, less degraded. So awesome!
These flying cars are essentially just snazzy helicopters for wealthy people and enthusiasts. They can 'never' scale to be a mass-market, rush-hour queuing solution and holiday mass-exodus.
Well 'never' is a long time, but at least quite a long way away before the AI, technology and materials can support a lot of traffic, mid-air fender benders, breakdowns etc.
A helicopter can't go from flying to transport you in a highway. When people talk about flying cars they imagine that. Something that can fly and go around roads as a _car_ would normally do.
I think this is ahistorical. Flying cars were always point to point "Jetson's" style vehicles, where you didn't HAVE a highway, because everyone just traveled as the crow flies.
It's only when this was obviously impossible that futurists pushed the "mostly a car but can also fly sometimes" angle.
> A helicopter can't go from flying to transport you in a highway
Yes and no. In some EU countries, helicopters accepted to land near highway, and pick up (or disembark) passengers just like ordinary taxi.
Also there very typical case, helicopter landed near Gas station to refuel.
Generally, strict restrictions exists on flights over large cities, but over rural area and over big water, regulations easier.
Even so, if in large city exists big river, aviation could flighting over it with very easy restrictions.
People's imagination is dumb. They picture cars ,the annoyance of being stuck in traffic, see all the empty sky and think, hmm, you know what would fix this, flying cars. But imagine that world, with millions of flying cars, and it'd be 10 times as awful.
What they fail to realize is how bad air congestion would be. Airplanes landing need a lot more separation than cars. Parking lots that now have 4 entrances/exists will need to share 1 with 10 neighbors.
Robot flying cars would still be awful. The car noise and pollution is already insufferable, now bring it overhead. And the fallout of an accident are already grotesque, now multiply this by 9,81.
Flying cars are a fetish: because they are futuristic technology, therefore they are desirable. That is the motive force behind them.
Yeah, something like the (even more) heavily modified DeLorean Doc Brown returned with from 2015. Key technologies still missing would be (a) the energy source (a "Mr. Fusion" which can generate energy from random garbage you throw into it) and (b) some kind of levitation not based on rotors, rockets or jet engines (anti-gravity?), apparently also used in the hoverboards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shlZySkGq6g
https://img.tecnomagazine.net/2017/07/Moller-Skycar-popular-...
Quadcopter drones are already used routinely for information gathering purposes. We might get autonomous small aircraft that do van sized cargo delivery quite soon. Those and other similar systems then get enough repetition and practicalities sorted out that eventually humans can be transported.
On first page of google search: probability of accident on road "for every 1000 miles driven, your chances of getting into a crash are 1 in 366. Insurance companies report that customers file a claim once every 17.9 years"
"Approximately 1.19 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes." "Between 20 and 50 million more people suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability" https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...
For planes: "about .01 deaths per 100,000 departures from 225 accidents between 2013 and 2021" “The industry 2022 fatality risk of 0.11 means that on average, a person would need to take a flight every day for 25,214 years to experience a 100% fatal accident,” stated the I.A.T.A. https://www.nbc.com/nbc-insider/how-common-are-commercial-pl...
To achieve reliability mostly used two approaches - more strict regulations on design and production (one cannot sale unsafe plane), and same with maintenance.
Some countries going even farther then others, for example, all Soviet helicopters required to have at least two engines and to make safe landing on only one.
Also, for aviation regulators typical to sacrifice modern hype technologies and be extremely conservative on electronics and software, so planes still achievable but reliable (yes, I don't like npm, I think planes will be hundreds times more dangerous if use npm).
Private, personal aircraft usage by licensed operators, like how cars are owned and used, generally falls into the general aviation bucket. At 1.5 fatalities per 100,000 flight hours [2] that is less safe than cars per distance unless the average flight speed is ~1000 mph, or around mach 1.3 (it is not, it is probably 1/3-1/5 that). That is despite the vastly greater training required for a pilot’s license.
[1] https://www.iaopa.eu/what-is-general-aviation
[2] https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20211117.as...
You confusing typical humble car owner with certified plane owner.
Automobiles could for years don't see any care, even could be used without insurance, but still considered in statistics.
Planes of general aviation, are closer to city buses, which are under constant care and have very good support.
And yes, exist planes without rules, but this is difference, nobody care about non-certified automobile on private land, but you will lost pilot license if you'll get caught flying on non-certified plane, except very few special cases.
Also you should be careful, when compare statistics of US and EU, they have significant differences.
As you note, car owners are vastly less careful than certified plane owners and pilots, and yet the basically untrained car owners are 3-5x safer driving. As this thread was about enabling private flight vehicles for "everybody", it is clear that private flight vehicles are nowhere near safe enough for "everybody" if even the comparatively highly-trained certified plane owner is much less safe than a basically untrained car owner since private flight vehicles for "everybody" would undoubtedly be operated by basically untrained flying car owners making the danger even more pronounced than a mere 3-5x.
I EXACTLY stated: IN USA, aviation safety few times worse than in EU. But when you consider pure numbers, you should understand, that in EU totally different distribution of planes sizes and of airfield sizes. Sure, Frankfurt is safer than ground field somewhere in Austrian Alps, and number of small airfields in USA far exceed any other country.
For example, I know few people, crashed when engine broken at about 200m (300feet). Fortunately all alive, but rehabilitation to state when we could drink beer, takes almost half year.
Obviously probably an oversimplification, but I could imagine one or more of the following:
- reliable ejection + personal parachute
- gliding mechanism
- parachute for the vehicle itself
The latter two assume the vehicle is fairly small and/or lightweight.
Of course, similar to airplanes, multiple redundancies would also mitigate risk.
A number of mitigations could help reduce risk below that of driving cars (which can be quite risky in some areas/situations, but we take the risk anyway).
Meanwhile your 3 ton vehicle plummets onto the people below. I guess that's their own fault for living at street level.
“Ejection” means a rocket motor under the seat and a 50% chance of spinal damage. Not sustainable for consumers and no one in GA use them outside fighter jets.
I was under the impression that the reason ejection from a jet fighter is so strenuous is because the ejector seat needs to eject fast enough to clear the tail of the jet which may be travelling at several hundred miles an hour.
The vast majority of planes focus on #2, the gliding mechanism, which gives pilots the time to bail out out from a side door and allows for much more forgiving aerodynamics (thrust is up, pilot falls down).
For a consumer flying car you're really going to want zero-zero ejection seats that can survive engine failure during takeoff. That's the most dangerous phase of flight and the seat has to be extra powerful (to get the user high enough for the parachute to work).
The dream of flying cars is to reduce City traffic, and until we can take off and land safely in a city there is no point.
eVTOL over rivers, lakes, or designated ‘flyways’ could work but such limitations would make flying cars far less useful, unless they can also operate as cars.
You know what does reduce city traffic? People travelling by foot, subways and bikes.
There are reasons that air travel won't do too much in this regard in the foreseeable future -- mostly around cost and the fact that ATC-managed airspace actually has quite a low capacity. Those are practical issues, not fundamentals.
You can extend 2d space with bridges and tunnels a lot easier, but it isn't cheap. Which is why cities need metro systems - it is the only way to get masses of people into a dense area.
If we're talking about fixed-wing, runway takeoff aircraft, then I absolutely agree with you. If we're not, I'm somewhat (but not highly) confident that coordinating these vehicles will be the long pole re: capacity. That's mostly because it's a really long pole. We haven't developed distributed actor algorithms for this the way we have for cars, it's unclear if this is actually possible, and there's no way the current way of doing ATC can handle the load that even 1% of upper middle class commuters could create.
as you say we also don't have traffit control that works.
There are other scenarios where small, autonomous VTOL aircraft would be very useful, and in such cases, the question of whether such vehicles could reasonably be called flying cars becomes mainly a lexical/usage one.
Believe me, air have so much more volume, autopilots for planes are simpler than for cars.
Definitively, air transport is more dangerous physically than land transport, but with stricter regulations on build planes and on maintenance/using them, we now have magnitudes (about 100-1000 times) better safety at air than on land.
Where: NOT for urban mobility despite the claims. Instead they match PERFECTLY the substantial green new deal, or the large sprawl of single family homes and small buildings because no one want flying things in a dense are, take off and landing are nightmarish etc while in a moderately spread area they are the perfect match: you have nature, space to evolve, and anything is still nearby because 60km is just 10' flight.
How? Well, at first I think not eVTOL but some VTOL with various tech, simply because the battery is too heavy to be efficient in such form, we can make eSTOL that for not-so-short range flight are nearly efficient as cars, but they can be used in a mid-dense scenario, so they are possible and practically useless.
A small note: https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... EU/McKinsey focused NOT on the possibility of flying stuff but on public acceptance of them. Take a serious note on that. Some small planes are already as efficient as car for many kind of flights and they do not demand the road infra from any point A and B of a flight, of course there are various constraints, but roads have others constraints as well. The reality is that we have roads because we can naturally work, ride animals who walk etc, modern era means also modern means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKGK_8gmNQ4
Even if it means crippling its own economy and the economies of its allies
Think of the trillions of dollars lost per year globally because some seppo modernist urban planners were arrogant enough to think they’d uncovered the ultimate solution to designing cities regardless of the nuances or context
Want to begin repairing Pax Americana? Get private interests out of your public infrastructure operations. Be a role model for other countries within the American Empire to emulate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Airways
https://innovationorigins.com/en/dutch-flying-car-soars-with...
> It’s often remarked upon, in boosterish circles, that American society allows about forty thousand road fatalities a year but refuses to tolerate even one aviation death.
We shouldn't tolerate that either!
But, people don’t care so much about a “small” car or even a “small” plane crash. Even if they add up to an insane number as high as 40k per year!
That isn't to say we shouldn't always try to make them safer. But if you put every passenger in a pod like the president in "Escape from New York" you'll make planes safer and still cause more death
We now have the technology to have very realistic driving simulators. (I've seen what they give snow plow drivers) We should require drivers spend several days per year in a simulator to make sure that they can do things right in the weird situations. Pilots rarely fly in the worst weather (they will fly above, around or stay on the ground - though they will fly through what looks like bad but isn't - I don't know how to tell the difference), but they get lots of simulator time in the worst case situations.
I think we can demand the same from cars, or at least something better than 30,000 deaths per year.
- Licensing and renewal requirements are extremely lax
- Many states have extremely lenient DUI punishments
- Road conditions and design are often extremely lacking (e.g., stroads with high speed and high conflict points make up an outsized proportion of fatalities, there could be more emphasis on traffic calming than traffic flow and high average speed).
- Lack of safer alternatives (e.g. public transit) despite generally having the population numbers and density to support robust public transit.
- Too many safety loopholes for popular passenger trucks where the differences in regulations were intended to accommodate commercial activity with professional drivers, but the market has shifted to regular consumers driving large heavy vehicles with poor pedestrian safety like full size pickup trucks.
(It was fine when I moved in… all the roads were empty due to the pandemic).
Why should we allocate scarce infrastructure land for marginal increases in bike-lanes (that are chronically under-used), for perhaps uniquely the worst form of transit?
If someone told you that they wanted you to provision funding/space for a new form of transit that was:
* Slow/short range
* Impractical in all but basically nice weather
* Requires parking
* Not family-friendly
* Not friendly for the elderly or anyone who is disabled to almost any definition of "disabled"
* Unsafe
* Has low to no cargo capacity
You'd call them crazy. But somehow we've got the meme that bikes are good.
Just visited philadelphia. Used to be clogged with cars. Now it's still clogged with cars. But also has great new bike infrastructure with lots of bikers (that weren't there 15 years ago)
The city is better for it, more mobility options, less noisy, less degraded. So awesome!
Well 'never' is a long time, but at least quite a long way away before the AI, technology and materials can support a lot of traffic, mid-air fender benders, breakdowns etc.
It's only when this was obviously impossible that futurists pushed the "mostly a car but can also fly sometimes" angle.
Yes and no. In some EU countries, helicopters accepted to land near highway, and pick up (or disembark) passengers just like ordinary taxi. Also there very typical case, helicopter landed near Gas station to refuel.
Generally, strict restrictions exists on flights over large cities, but over rural area and over big water, regulations easier. Even so, if in large city exists big river, aviation could flighting over it with very easy restrictions.
Flying cars are a fetish: because they are futuristic technology, therefore they are desirable. That is the motive force behind them.