It now takes 16 hours 53 minutes to drive to Orlando Florida from New York NY. A grand total of 1,081 miles, and this is if you were driving around 65 miles per hour. Now imagine a time not too far in the future when you are driving a flying car. The one below is an example of a flying car, but there are many models being worked on and I believe that one day there will be flying cars. Some of the challenges that have to be taken into account are what happens if your engine dies. Do you and the car fall out of the air? Are you high enough that you can parachute and even will a parachute work?
These are some of the dilemmas facing flying car builders. There is a flying car that I believe has the right stuff and it is the one above. It is called the Cartercopter and it is seen here as a technology demonstration vehicle.
This vehicle has the ability to take off and land vertically like a helicopter and then cruse like a plane at speeds up to 500 mph. Just think in just over two hours you could be in Orlando Florida. If the engine dies the top rotor continues to rotate and produce enough lift that you slowly fall out of the sky and you can easily have a controlled landing. This might also be augmented by, and this is my idea, a backup emergency engine that could power the craft from loss of the main engine till the emergency landing is over. People have emergency electric start kits for cars, that jump start a stranded car, why not a back up engine? This takes the problem of a need for parachutes out of the equation.
NASA has also been working on some computer navigation technology that would allow a person that does not have an airplane pilot's license to fly an imaginary highway in the sky and drive like a car on this road in the air.
Right now Carter Aviation Technology has no plans on building more of these aircrafts but may lease the patents to an airplane company to build.
I believe this is the future of travel. You get out of your home, go down the block to a takeoff zone, take off, fly to a landing zone, near your job, land and drive the rest of the way to your work parking lot.
It has everything a flying car we have been promised for years has. It takes off like a helicopter and flies at fast speeds like a plane. I believe eventually this technology will take off. Instead of building another highway we will fly in multiple imaginary highways in the sky. The sky is huge! We could build thousands of highways in the sky and like Back to the Future 2 we will have the mobility we always wanted without the traffic mess. It will give new meanings to suburbia. In this scenario you could live in Washington, DC or Boston, Mass, and work in New York City. How? Each is around 220 miles from NYC. If this Cartercopter can go 500 miles an hour that means in a half hour you can go 250 miles well within the 220 mile radius out to Boston or Washington from NYC.
It doesn't get better than this: No traffic, thousands of miles of air highways, no more need for eminent domain for building a highway through a neighborhood, but here is the down side. It may mean the end of airplane airlines as more people take to the skies in their own flying car, but we are always seeing these airlines going out of business even now without this possibility. Still the future may take some time to get here but when it does it won't be your old parent's car anymore `and going for a joy ride may mean more than it ever has before.
wwwchallis-heli-plane.com