Over the past century dreamers have invested in their vision of a flying car. There’s a good catalog of them in a recent New York Time article, “Why We’re Not Driving the Friendly Skies.”
Expanding on the article’s headline, the author, Stuart F. Brown, steps through the engineering challenges of melding the particular demands of aerial and terrestrial transportation in a single vehicle. Then there are the FAA type and production certification requirements and the federal highway safety requirements.
Then there’s pilot certification, and the reality that flying cars will transition from earth to sky not from roads but at airports. “A final impediment to swarms of flying cars filling the skies is the existing air traffic control system, which isn’t set up to keep track of low-flying aircraft that don’t have a flight plan and may impulsively change course.”
And here the author falls victim to the variable few flying car dreamers seem to consider: demand. Are there really enough rich people willing to invest mid-six-figures in a VFR vehicle of middling aerial performance? And will they invest the time and money to earn the pilot certification needed to operate it?
The answers to these questions can be derived from the decades long decline in student pilot starts and the car selling points ads touting new cars have focused on for the past few years. In short, not only are people not interested in learning to fly, they are growing too busy to drive.
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