Safety in the air: why reliable flying cars are still a matter of distant future?
In recent years, several innovators have attempted to turn flying cars into a reality. Uber has claimed that it will deploy flying cars in several major U.S. cities by 2023. Meanwhile in Dubai, law enforcement officers have begun to train on flying motorcycles, with plans to enter these units into service by in 2020.
Anyone who’s ever watched Back to the Future II can agree that flying cars are awesome. But despite these technological advances, flying cars are likely to mostly remain in the realm of science fiction for the foreseeable future.
Here are five reasons why we’re probably not going to be zipping around like Marty McFly any time soon:
1. Flying cars pose serious safety issues.
A car that malfunctions in the middle of the road can be very dangerous to passengers, pedestrians, and other drivers. For a vehicle that malfunctions fifty feet up in the sky, that danger is magnified many times over.
Creating a flying vehicle that’s safe for users poses numerous engineering challenges. And even if we could get something that works for drivers, there’s the still problem of everyone else. What happens if a flying car malfunctions in the middle of a busy city and falls down on a crowd of people?
Before we can deploy flying vehicles on a large scale, this issue must be fully addressed.
2. Building functional flying cars will require the development of entirely new technologies, including software that can pilot the cars automatically.
The fundamental engineering challenge of flying cars is this: We can’t really use existing aviation technologies to create flying vehicles. To do this effectively, we’ll need entirely new methods of propulsion and flight control. Our existing technologies are geared towards large aircraft — not the kinds of smaller vehicles flying car enthusiasts envision.
In some ways, this represents an exciting opportunity for the development of aviation. But technological development of this magnitude takes time, making it unlikely that our skies will be full of flying cars soon.
One of the biggest challenges will be creating software that can safely pilot a flying vehicle. Since there is already a shortage of commercial pilots, it’s likely that most flying cars of the future will be operated by computers. But, as with autonomous cars, developing this software will be complicated. It’s difficult to program a computer to exercise the same kind of judgment and discretion that human pilots utilize.
3. Helicopters offer more safety and greater functionality.
The fact is, we already have flying vehicles that can quickly transport people short distances when necessary. Right now, it’s not clear what functional advantages flying cars might offer over helicopters, especially when it comes to emergency transportation services.
Without clear advantages over existing technologies, it’s unlikely that most municipal governments will invest heavily in flying cars.
4. We don’t have the infrastructure or regulations to accommodate flying cars.
Deploying large fleets of large flying cars will require the development of new infrastructure. For example, will flying cars require launching pads? Where will they land? Where do we put those launching pads? If locating flying cars in urban areas — which seems best for practical reasons — then how will we deal with the noise produced by the vehicles? (Currently, noise from aircraft is heavily regulated. That’s one reason why airports tend to be on the outskirts of cities rather than right in the middle of them.)
It’s also not clear what a transportation system powered by flying cars will look like. Will vehicles be privately owned, part of a public transportation system, or an on-demand mobility service comparable to Uber and Lyft?
Deploying large fleets of large flying cars will require the development of new infrastructure.
Regardless of what the system looks like, we’ll need to devise a new set of legal regulations to ensure that the flying cars are safe for passengers and everyone else — just like current laws regulate driving automobiles.
5. Flying cars (and other vehicles) are too expensive right now relative to the value they provide. They’re also likely to contribute to energy inefficiency.
The flying motorcycles used by police officers in Dubai cost $150,000 each. (Any consumer who wants to purchase a hoverbike will pay the same price.) That’s a pretty hefty investment for any vehicle. The high price gets even harder to justify when we consider the hoverbikes’ functional limitations.
First, the hoverbikes can only fly up to sixteen feet in the air. But even more importantly, they can only operate for 10–25 minutes with a pilot and 40 minutes in drone mode. So even though the hoverbikes have a maximum speed of 60 mph, they can’t take passengers very far.
On a macro scale, flying vehicles pose an energy challenge. Most designs use electric batteries. But as the hoverbike example illustrates, the batteries are limited in terms of charging times and battery life. So flying vehicles will consume a lot of energy without measurably reducing the need for ground transportation. Instead of helping us move towards a more energy-efficient future, flying vehicles may very well exacerbate the problem.
Can these problems be addressed through future technological developments? Sure — but the timeline for these developments will be quite long. In the meantime, most of us will be driving on the ground.
