Why your car can't fly

It seems like every year somebody invents a new flying car. Here's the truth nobody wants to hear: Flying cars are a bad idea and nobody really wants one.

Feb 07, 2022

Have you heard the news? A Slovakian company called Klein Vision got approval for the world’s first flying car!

Specifically, the company’s AirCar got legal permission to fly — a Certificate of Airworthiness — inside Slovakia by the Slovak Transport Authority. The company says the certification "opens the door for mass production” and that they could be churning out flying cars off the assembly line in a year. (I'll be back in a year to point out that this prediction didn't even come close to happening.)

With its four car-like tires and gas-powered internal combustion engine, the AirCar looks and works like a car that flies, which is the vision futurists have been predicting for a century.

Along with jet packs and food in pill form, flying cars were a staple of 20th-Century futurism, which envisioned a family flying car in every driveway. Soaring above the roads on the way to work, school and the high-tech shopping center, the flying car was intended to replace regular cars for everyday use.

"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads!" said Doc Brown in “Back to the Future.”

The Klein Vision AirCar is being touted by the gullible and lazy tech press as the “world’s first flying car.”

The world’s first “world’s first flying car” was touted in 1934 — built by Waldo Waterman. And there’s been a whole lot of touting since then.

In 1949, a company built six flying cars called the Taylor Aerocar, which were intended by be the prototypes of a new industry, but which never sold. Other “world’s first flying cars” were touted in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.

In the last 20 years along, dozens of companies and thousands of inventors have created what they called flying cars. The PAL-V, Skycar, AeroMobil 3.0, Maverick LSA, Icon A5, Switchblade, Lilium Jet, Volocopter, Pegase Mk2, Skyrunner, Volante Joby S2 and the Terrafugia TF-X were all billed as the “world’s first flying car.” Where are they now?

The public thinks about flying cars as cars that fly — an inevitable improvement on the cars we all drive. But the aviation industry sees them more accurately as airplanes that can be driven on the same roads as cars. The aviation category is called “roadable aircraft.” And they’ve been around for many decades.

The reason you never see one — the reason you don’t have one — is that a “flying car” is a horrible idea.

When engineers combine cars and planes, you end up with a very bad car and a very bad airplane (unsafe, poor handling and expensive both on roads and in the air).

For the same money as a “flying car,” you can buy a great car and a great airplane, so that’s what people with that money tend to buy.

But it’s not just about the inelegance of the airplane. It’s about flying — piloting an aircraft safely through legal airspace.

Just to fly a safe, normal plane like a Cessna, you have to go through tons of training and practice and pass really hard tests. Then, before each flight, you have to calculate a flight plan based on weight-and-balance, weather, airspace requirements and a hundred other factors.

You can’t just take off in an airplane from a suburban street in a Cessna. And you couldn’t do that in a roadable aircraft, either. If the public were suddenly using “flying cars” as envisioned by futurists, there would be roadable aircraft flying into trees and power lines before dropping as flaming chunks of metal onto children and pets and into the living rooms of neighbors.

Just because you can make a roadable aircraft, doesn’t mean normal aviation factors like training and weather and terrain and navigation suddenly stop existing.

So called flying cars — roadable aircraft — are not new, safe, affordable or in any way appealing for use by the public in the way futurists imagined.

Yes, some quirky rich people with pilots licenses might buy roadable aircraft as an eccentric hobby. But almost no members of the public — hell, almost no members of certified pilots — will ever even sit inside one.

What we will fly in is drone-like autonomous, multi-rotor aircraft from companies like Wisk or Ehang. This class of aircraft will be used almost entirely for shuttling rich people over short distances in controlled airspace — say, from an airport’s private jet lounge to the Tesla-charging wing of the parking garage.

These autonomous passenger drones are not “flying cars” — they don’t replace the minivan for everyday suburban families. And neither will the AirCar.

Share Mike’s List