Journalists revisit old “flying car” dreams

A question is emerging implicitly in the media: Is the “flying car” concept still comically unrealistic?

The concept had already drawn decades of smirks and skepticism before 1971, when the Washington Post‘s Jim Hoagland won his first of two Pulitzer Prizes. Yet his op-ed last week was about “visions of a world remade” by a “fourth industrial revolution.” The article’s opening highlighted “Uber helicopters or even planes to fly their owners across mushrooming urban areas.”

Hoagland omitted the increasingly misleading term “flying car,” though a few innovators do still envision aircraft that can somehow also travel on roads.

Uber, the international ride-hailing behemoth, isn’t one of them. Nor does it actually envision futuristic helicopter fleets. Instead, it’s planning battery-powered air taxis that take off and land vertically from “vertiports” and “vertistops,” yet differ distinctly from helicopters. USA Today says Uber envisions deployment over Dallas and Los Angeles by 2020, with “heavy use” by the time of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Enthusiasm has been growing worldwide for roughly a dozen comparable ventures. Well-funded strivers are exploiting advances in lightweight materials and electric aeropropulsion. They’re cheering continuing incremental advances in battery technology.

They’re adapting automobile-industry innovations for semi-autonomous and fully autonomous vehicle control. They’ve begun considering radically new information-age air-traffic systems.

A compelling incentive motivates them: the sky. They see it as an ultra-low-cost three-dimensional personal-mobility infrastructure. They see it profitably relieving pressure on the expensive, hopelessly congested two-dimensional infrastructure of urban roads and bridges.

The New York Times predicts that these strivers will “rock your world.” They include big names:

• Aviation Week recently reported a Boeing competition to develop a “personal air vehicle.”
• USA Today said that the Toyota-backed startup Cartivator hopes to “whisk a driver through the air to light the Olympic torch in Tokyo in summer 2020.”
• The Financial Times outlined how the Chinese automaker and Volvo owner Geely has bought the US company Terrafugia to join other companies in China “vying to launch aerial vehicles.”
• Bloomberg Businessweek reported last year that Google cofounder Larry Page “secretly” founded Silicon Valley startups Zee Aero and Kitty Hawk—the latter led by Sebastian Thrun, “godfather of Google’s self-driving car program.”
• The Times told of Airbus’s development of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) concepts.

The Times‘s headline, “No longer a dream,” offered an answer to the media’s emerging implicit question. But that confidence isn’t universal.

Skepticism and terminology confusion

The Times article quoted MIT engineer John Leonard. Calling gravity a “formidable adversary,” he cautioned that smart people “don’t always get the laws of physics.” USA Today has noted skepticism from techno-innovator Elon Musk. The Atlantic predicted that “flying cars” will only become status symbols for the wealthiest.

At IEEE Spectrum, Philip E. Ross predicted that “autonomous air taxis will take off” but “won’t go far.” Later he wondered what might really explain all the serious money. “Sheer personal enthusiasm”? A way to “master robotics, sensor fusion, and other skills” for self-driving cars and “super-automated jetliners”? Simply the “cool factor,” because such “quests for miracles” attract the best engineers?

Assuming continued steady progress elsewhere on battery techology, engineers and empirical experience will eventually show whether flying cars can rise or are merely risible. But a better name for them could facilitate things.

Like others, Ross continually uses the term flying car. With an implied smirk, he quips that it’s just “a plane that can kinda, sorta move down a road without knocking off the heads of parking meters.”

But Juraj Vaculik, chief executive of Slovakian startup AeroMobil, told the Financial Times that about 90% of flying-car prototypes really aren’t cars. Autoweek quotes Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Pat Anderson: “What everybody is calling a flying car in the media does not go down the road and has no wheels.” At the Verge, Andrew J. Hawkins published the commentary “Stop calling them flying cars.”

What’s a better name? Journalists have tried sky taxi, personal aircraft, aerial auto, street-legal plane, and VTOL, pronounced vee-toll. In Germany, is E-volo’s 18-rotor VTOL an octodecacopter ? In Silicon Valley, Airbus’s Project Vahana envisions personal aerial vehicles (PAVs), a version of the NASA term personal air vehicle that BBC has used .

Another possibility is aerocar, used in decades past but drafted in 2014 for non-roadable concepts too. Virginia science writer Tamara Dietrich drafted it for a profile of engineer Mark D. Moore, then at Hampton’s NASA Langley Research Center. Bloomberg says Moore’s research inspired Page to start Zee Aero and Kitty Hawk.

Hawkins asked Moore about the term flying car. He answered, “I hate it.” But he loves the effort to revolutionize personal air mobility. Dietrich quoted his excitement about new technologies enabling not just incremental progress, but “big, big changes.”

Distributed electric propulsion

Earlier this year, Moore sacrificed some federal retirement advantages to leave NASA for Uber. He had led development of distributed electric propulsion (DEP), which underlies Uber’s, Vahana’s, and other aerocar visions.

For visualizing some of what Moore and colleagues explained last year in a technical paper about DEP, it’s useful to consult the image above, from Airbus’s Project Vahana, together with a corresponding 2-minute video . DEP “uses multiple propulsors driven by electric motors distributed about the airframe,” Moore wrote. The motors are “more compact, lighter, quieter, and more reliable” than conventional engines. The Vahana materials show an aerocar with two wings, each with four propulsors. The wings tilt from vertical for takeoff to horizontal for forward flight.

A DEP approach for aerocars generally, Moore explained, is the placing of small propellers along a wing’s leading edge. The accelerated airflow at low speeds allows a reduction in wing area, yielding a drag benefit at cruising speed. These smaller units can be combined with “larger cruise propellers co-located with each wingtip for primary propulsive power.” These interact with the vortex there to boost efficiency.

Continued advances in battery technology constitute the most obvious desideratum for realizing an aerocar revolution. But Uber has publicly analyzed other needs, such as a fitting vehicle-certification process, a suitable air-traffic system, affordability, noise control, and safety.

Aerocars—or whatever they should be called—will be plenty hard to realize at any level that widely improves personal mobility. But are they still comically unrealistic?

Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.