Introducing Uber Flying Cars!-Heir to drones?

[We Talk UAV]

We saw it coming years ago, but very few have had the resources or the initiative to step up with this kind of project. From a logical perspective, personal aerial transportation was the natural evolution of general aviation and short-haul flights. Nevertheless, aircraft design has barely changed in the last 50 years due to the slow process of testing and certification.

On the other side, the rapidly growing industry of commercial drones has created the perfect time for testing new systems and the urge to approach low level flight operations. Uber already stated that in the first stages these aircrafts will fly with a pilot only for situational awareness, making them autonomous in the future. Given that they will possibly share part of the airspace with commercial UAVs, this means that all flight systems, communications, operations and the needed infrastructure will very likely be similar for both cases.

 

[RaptorMan]

The Moller Air Car has been in the works for a couple decades but has thus far not gone anywhere. VTOL is expensive when talking about carrying things like people and in the case of the Air Car required eight engines of 180hp each so the fuel economy is pathetic. Just what we need -- a fuel hungry polluter that has yet to fly.

I'm sure there are others with a better idea that won't need over 1400hp to get 5 people from point A to point B, but a VTOL aircraft capable of carrying 5 people several hundred miles is going to eat gas like it's going out of style. And, if it's eating a crap ton of gas you can bet it will emit a crap ton of pollution. Yeah, no!


Brian