Future of flying cars and their impact on us.

[Icefather]

Hi all,

Don’t know how much this has all been talked about but am Interested in starting a topic regarding the future self flying cars/drones and they’re affect on us.

Obviously the only way you are going to get these types of aircraft that every one can have they would have to be autonomous else the operators would need licenses?

Surely if you had so many going to so many different directions there would be a need for some sort of path way like an IFR route to certain places .

How would that affect our class G airspace ?
How would it affect our industry

As it is in the future no one knows but interested to get your thoughts ?

[Pitchpull]

[pohm1]

their

[Imout]

Great topic
Just finishing off an article on where I see it going
Will post it here when I finish it
It’s not really that far in the future. We need to be thinking about it now
I would hope it actually saves our industry.

[Icefather]

Great topic
Just finishing off an article on where I see it going
Will post it here when I finish it
It’s not really that far in the future. We need to be thinking about it now
I would hope it actually saves our industry.

Awesome mike look forward to hearing what you have to say .

Interested to know how it would save our industry ??

[Eric Hunt]

Not sure what Mike is drinking, but it must have a bit of a kick.

Self-driving trains, which only work in one dimension (forward or back, go or stop) are barely acceptable in this country.

Self-drive cars, in 2 dimensions (forward, reverse, left or right, go or stop) are not yet accepted around here, but automation is cars is getting that way - my car will steer itself and control its distance behind the one in front, come to a stop if needed, but can't see to the sides. A human is still needed to make decisions, at this stage of an acceptable price for a car.

Self-flying cars, like in the movies, are such a huge leap in faith in automation - and there is still the problem of where these things will take off or land, and how they will move in 3 dimensions, with the added problems of how to get out of the sky when the engines or automation stops.

Doubt that it will happen in the lifetimes of anybody reading this. They won't let Mike fly over them in a national park, or land on a fair-dinkum airfield in Gympie, or hover near the house with the blue roof right on the airfield boundary. Sure as heck won't let one land in the suburbs.

[Mallard]

Interesting topic... as a commercial pilot with a previous career in automation I often think about such.

I suspect we will see a separate class of short range automated craft that operate underneath the current aircraft.

Real time 3-D flight plans lodged on the cloud or in a blockchain.


Automation still has a way to come... you can't "turn it off and on" when it fails... it has to be robust and well engineered with multiple redundancies. Conditions that cause accidents that usually get blamed on pilots will be a challenge for manufacturers...there are clips of drones getting into VRS and out of control have they have no idea why. Automation determining winds around complex objects will be tricky.... and its going to need to when they push the weight limits as humans are prone to do.... it would be nice to have some power margin but we all know how its going to pan out $$$.

It should hopefully shake up the industry... public pressure cutting through red tape etc etc. We might see some "heliports" in cities again...... until one crashes onto a city street and they are all banned again.

We might see a class of electric human controlled vehicles with heavy automation before full pilotless.


Allot of crap put out there is exactly that... crap. Many people are trying to cash in on the "tech boom" with fancy 3D rendered prototypes and quoting impressive numbers that defy physics.... see lilium jet for an example... prototype could not possibly have flown but still hoovered up 90 million euros investment... disgusting.

Interesting times...

[Gonsky]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... n-a-decade

http://europe.autonews.com/article/2018 ... lying-cars

https://newatlas.com/workhorse-passenge ... ces/52815/

http://workhorse.com/surefly

My favorite

https://lilium.com/

And EMS version.

http://www.argodesign.com/work/drone-am ... esign.html

Regards,

[SuperF]

As said above, after they get trains fully autonomous, then cars, and trucks, then aeroplanes, which can fly designated routes from facilities that are already available, and after, google /amazon /fedex whoever it is this month get a few years of safely delivering packages without incident, then I will worry about self flying “almost helicopters” cruising the airspace, going to random uncontrolled landing places.

[The Scarlett Harlot]

I recall digging up some magazines when I was a kid from the garage. In between the reams of girls wearing much less than their mothers would approve of, were articles about flying cars and so on, which would be all the rage by the mid 1980s - the approximate date I was reading them.

Since then, Mark Webber has made the only serious attempts at flying cars that I’m aware of, and even he ended up with a B3 in the end.....

[Gonsky]

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/i ... bility.pdf

Some thoughts from Deloitte.

Regards,

[scaarj]

Not to mention the prohibitive cost of installing that kind of tech into a small, cheap vehicle. Would probably require some serious industry shake ups before it could work

[Gonsky]

Larry Page (google) is making progress as well, has a few startups going one is in NZ.

https://cora.aero/

Regards,

[frisbee]

I love all of the inspirational music they dub over these videos - don't they think the sound of 12 electric fans screaming away is going to sell their product? In fact I don't recall seeing a single video of these things with any form of original audio. If anyone has come across one i'd like to know what they actually sound like.

[Gonsky]

The acoustics are completely different, firstly as you pointed out they use electric brushless engines which have almost zero sound signatures and secondly you have much smaller diameter blades. So if you get rid of the engine sound you only have the main/tail blade signature, a good example is the electric Robinson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-05wY41ht1s, you have only blade noise and it is considerable.

The noise a rotor blade makes varies as an exponent of tip speed. For example, if the tip speed could be reduced by a third, then the amount of noise energy produced can be reduced by as much as 24 times. The other point is the sound pressure from helicopter blades is due to advancing/retreating issues, blade tips on the advancing side move closer to speed of sound and shockwaves start to form also the wake vortex as one blade moves into another’s wake. Add to all this the continually changing AOA of the blades to create even further sound/pressure issues. The bigger issue in helicopter design has always been the harmonics between all rotating components which has always been a huge design issue.

So in the Cora example you see smaller diameter blades 1500mm, that have complex shapes and blade tips that reduce the sound signature. They have slower rpm, slower tip speed and fixed pitch, basically the complete opposite of a conventional helicopter.

So the target for these types of airframes is 60~70db measured from 250 ft, a Robinson for example is 87db. Sound measurement is not linear so the drop from 87 to ~60 is considerable. http://www.industrialnoisecontrol.com/c ... amples.htm

Watch a video of anything with no sound and it is rather boring, they have little sound signature and that is the point.

You can hear the output from the https://lilium.com/ video at around 1.05. Now in that case the engines are basically ducted fans and noise output is shielded from the side, yet it is not much more when directly below due to the small diameter of the fans.

Regards,

[SuperF]

Well the advancing blade hammering that comes from a Huey is awesome. The whine from a 44 tail rotor, not so cool. Now you have 8 or 12 R44 tail rotors screaming away right beside you. Sounds lovely and peaceful!!

[Gonsky]

As above the blades are fixed, varying airfoil profiles along the span, washout and low vortex tips. The sound signature is completely different to that of a contant chord, poor airfoil for the use (NACA 63-415), zero washout, pitch changing R44 rotor.

Again the "pure sound" has nothing to do with it, if it is in the target dB range then that will be all that matters.

Regards,

[frisbee]

That electric R44 video is interesting, I haven't come across that one before. I'm actually pretty surprised by how much of the noise signature remains, it's obviously hard to tell with levelled video audio, but it seems like if it were facing you in the hover there may not be that much of a noticeable difference.

It's a fair point about the design of the blade, and something like a Robinson tail rotor with essentially a fixed cross section coming to an abrupt end is pretty much a worst case scenario as far as noise is concerned, so I don't expect it to be comparable to that. But (and this is getting back to the point of the original post) these vehicles are typically marketed as personal, autonomous flying transport, with the expectation of operating in close proximity to populous areas and presumably (if their marketing department does well) in significant numbers. Can you imagine the NIMBYs jumping up and down when a fleet of these are arriving non stop at an inner city pad for the start of a 9am workday?

As far as their affect on us as pilots, the personal VIP transport sector is a relatively small part of our industry, and I can't see Lindsay Fox lining up to climb in an Lilium Jet and be buzzed around by computer software, and it will likely be a while before they gain enough acceptance to be used in a short distance RPT or scenic flight role, so I'm not too concerned just yet.

Configure one of these things to handle utility work however, and it's and an entirely different story.

[Gonsky]

I think Lindsay will blow out the MTOW

Regards,

[frisbee]

To be fair, some of these prototypes look like a bag of sugar would blow out the MTOW, let alone one (or two) people.