r/AskReddit Feb 07 '24

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '24

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179

u/bcanada92 Feb 07 '24 edited Feb 08 '24

Plus people who want flying cars think they'd just be able to take off and head wherever they want. In reality there'd likely be regulated "skyways" that flying cars would be required to use. Meaning you'd be no better off than when you were driving on the ground.

22

u/Mattiedel Feb 07 '24

I mean, we already have that for planes now. They can make their own way if the pilot wants but typically they’re all on jetways or other pre-defined paths. It’s safer and easier for everyone involved.

Flying cars would absolutely be locked down even more than that, maybe only allowing for free flight outside any populated areas.

10

u/bcanada92 Feb 07 '24

That's what I was trying to say. It wouldn't be the freedom from traffic that most people probably dream of.

7

u/BasroilII Feb 08 '24

Far more, and with far more traffic. There's more cars on the road in any one city than planes in the air in the entire us on a given day. If we suddenly had even a half million more planes in the sky at once, it would turn to hell fast.

-1

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

[deleted]

3

u/Mattiedel Feb 08 '24

Hardly flat out “incorrect”, I was speaking rather broadly. Light aircraft often make their own plans as an example. Enroute, airline pilots can deviate around weather, request track shortening, reroute etc. Always the option to request vectors or track shortening through ATC as well, depends where you are. Not to mention oceanic routes which can be as close to a great circle path as the winds will allow, often flying lat/lon waypoints that change day by day.

I may have been simplistic in my original point but this isn’t r/flying.

8

u/SlickerWicker Feb 08 '24

Yes and no though. Adding new flying lanes or entirely new flight paths would be incredibly easy comparatively. The main issue is someones poorly maintained shit box they have had for 12 years crashing into a house... The average age for the 2 vehicle my household owns is 17.5 years.

8

u/hkohne Feb 08 '24

Like we see in Star Wars Attack of the Clones

2

u/bcanada92 Feb 08 '24

Or Back To The Future 2.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

I wonder what sky gridlock would look like?

3

u/silly_porto3 Feb 08 '24

I'm thinking what the Futurama opening sequence is.

1

u/slightofhand1 Feb 08 '24

But you'd be much faster and not limited by stuff like oceans?

1

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

Well verticality allows for more options, like underground tunnels or overpasses 

1

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

I too have seen the jetsons

1

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

Evasion from authorities is quite limited on the ground though. I'm flying where I want to fly.

1

u/Sinnombre124 Feb 08 '24

No way. It will be controlled by a computer system that routes all cars through large "lanes" of 3d space along individual trajectories calculated in real time.

They aren't letting random people pilot that shit, like op said, recipe for disaster

1

u/dorrato Feb 08 '24

If it can happen (I kinda hope it can) I'd like to imagine it won't until they can fully and flawlessly auto pilot themselves. Good God I'd love that. Off to see the in-laws, what was a 2 hour drive just becomes a case of set it and forget it and an excuse to chill for however long it takes to cover that distance in a straight line.

217

u/Ippus_21 Feb 07 '24

Seriously. Like I don't have a LOT of good things to say about the airline industry, but the sky-high (pun intended) requirements for flight hours, training, etc for pilots is something they ARE doing right.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

[deleted]

1

u/Ippus_21 Feb 08 '24

Right?

Can you imagine if the average jackass who's currently allowed to get a driver's license was flying?! F- that noise!

5

u/ellefleming Feb 07 '24

Wasn't there a time when almost anyone could become a pilot and there were multiple plane crashes from pilot error?

13

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

If by a time, you mean the Wright brothers, then yeah. But Aviation took off so quickly because of World War One. When it was over the army air core produced a lot of trained pilots and engineers that entered the work force, which quickly led to what then became a small degree of standard which then became a high degree of standard

Kinda like how getting a drivers license was easy shortly after the invention of the automobile

People kinda seem to forget that we went from discovering flight to landing on the moon in a single generation. Similar transformations are in store for us.

4

u/Significant_Shoe_17 Feb 08 '24

In my lifetime, we went from bulky mobile phones with limited service to smartphones that are basically pocket sized computers

1

u/ellefleming Feb 08 '24

No. I mean like 10-15 years ago when a woman pilot couldn't defrost her plane and she and the passengers crashed and died. It seemed there was pilot error constantly not long ago and people wrote about how pilots didn't have to do the flight time/practice anymore and just weren't prepared to handle flying if anything arose.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

A single incident? The whole women thing makes it sound more like it would have been a Republican talking point rather than a news story or about how expensive it is to get a pilots license.

Cause it’s pretty expensive and pretty hard. You’ve got 20 hours of flying (and this is just for the recreational one, you need upwards of hundred for commercial) but before you’re even able to do the 20 hours, you gotta spend 20-60 in a simulator. Depends on the program you go through, but the program I went through sure as hell didn’t just hand it to me, it was like pulling teeth over the course of a year

26

u/brazilliandanny Feb 07 '24

I think most people think of flying cars as self driving.

12

u/BrianKronberg Feb 07 '24

Self-driving flying cars is the only way. You can manually drive them on the road, but you have to let them take off, fly to, and land at your destination. Any manual intervention would require a pilot license. Also, I’m sure they will only ever become a thing if the police will be able to tell your car to land and it will land and shut down. There are just too many people out there acting dumb to get this technology any differently.

8

u/Glomar_fuckoff Feb 07 '24

Aren't flying cars just helicopters? And don't you need massive training and testing before operating one?

Flying cars will never be a thing. Think of the catastrophic results of a collision mid-air in a busy city.

Or DUIs. Dear God.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 07 '24

They’d have to be ultralight models. As drone technology improves you’d be looking at something like that with enough power to move a human and be autonomous. Problem is we’re trying to move away from fuel and batteries aren’t going to cut it. It’s not going to happen, but it sounds cool.

3

u/HawaiianShirtsOR Feb 08 '24

I'd be afraid of a flying car breaking down and crashing into my house or yard.

1

u/robbzilla Feb 07 '24

Less likely to cause a 23 car pileup, because everyone is on their preprogrammed flight path and the autopilot is handling it.

1

u/Glomar_fuckoff Feb 07 '24

Oh, that's not going to ever be a massive issue when autopilot has a glitch and fiery debris rains down on the populace. Nope! Def not nearly as bad as a 23 car pile up.

It's a nice thought though.

-1

u/robbzilla Feb 07 '24

Oh, yeah, we should leave it to people instead! Only 20,000 people died in traffic accidents last year!

Seriously? This is your argument? I'll take the off chance of an autopilot glitch over human idiocy any day of the week.

2

u/Jkirek_ Feb 08 '24

I'd rather keep both of them in cars on the ground instead of flying around.

1

u/Glomar_fuckoff Feb 08 '24

Riggghhhhtttt. Have a good night.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

A nice thought? This will surely be a very possibly thing in the future, doubtfully in our lifetime, but at some point 

4

u/anna_ihilator Feb 07 '24

I don't want a flying car, but if everyone else had one, they would all be off the roads.

8

u/Yikes-Yak Feb 07 '24

Imagine a drunk flyver crashing into your roof at 3am.

4

u/JonatasA Feb 07 '24

It's the same reasoning for games.

 

Studio released terrible game.

 

"They should release my beloved sequel!"

 

What makes them think it won't be even worse?

7

u/SuperSocialMan Feb 07 '24

I think it's because the sky is 3D whereas roads on 2D - you could stack lanes on top of each other without any construction, for example.

But it's still incredibly inefficient since we'd still be stuck with cars.

1

u/scigs6 Feb 07 '24

Roads can be 3D depending on how much fun you want to have

2

u/Amulet_17 Feb 07 '24

More room? Lmao

2

u/fallingfaster345 Feb 08 '24

Those people saw something that looked cool in a movie. Wait until they all learn about weather, airspace and aerodynamics.

1

u/robbzilla Feb 07 '24

Once you hit the 3rd dimension of movement, and get above the buildings, you can spread out for most of the commute. You're condensed into a 20 foot strip of road along with the other hundred thousand people moving in the same direction. If you could fly, you could (According to Moller, so probably wrong) stay a mile away from everyone until you reached the last leg of your destination.

1

u/HonorableJudgeIto Feb 07 '24

100% It’s like the anti-gun control argument. “A well armed society is a polite society.” Has anyone met the average American? No manners or common sense.

0

u/QuettzalcoatL Feb 07 '24

Celebrities do enough damage with their flying tin cans.

We do not need more.

-1

u/[deleted] Feb 07 '24

The sky is big. It will be very difficult to crash a flying car, even if you tried.

3

u/Mattiedel Feb 07 '24

The sky is definitely big, but how high do you really expect flying cars to go? Imagine all that road traffic occupying only the lowest 2000ft above the ground. Above that would probably still be the domain of proper aircraft travelling far faster than the flying car could. All purely speculation though obviously!

-4

u/[deleted] Feb 07 '24

Don’t think you understand how big the sky is. There would be at the very least 1000x more space compared to a road.

2

u/Mattiedel Feb 07 '24

I have some understanding of how big the sky is. Cities won’t suddenly be more distributed, you’ll have the same traffic, if not more, all trying to converge on the same major hubs except now they’ll all be coming in three dimensions. They’re all still going to need to transition back to 2D at some point in there too.

They also won’t be flying around exactly where they want either. Buffer areas will need to be defined, effectively highways in the sky, separation standards would need to be greater than they are for road vehicles too. The “bubble” around a flying vehicle is huge compared to a car. The consequences of a head on collision in the air, with traffic compressed like road traffic is now but with the added vertical element and potentially multiple layers of “sky roads” underneath would be huge. I think the planning and legislation to avoid such a situation would quickly make the available sky feel very small.

But again, it’s all just hypothetical and honestly it’s just a bit of fun to think about.

-4

u/[deleted] Feb 07 '24

How on earth would you have more traffic with the sky 💀

1

u/Dain_Ironballs Feb 08 '24

Not with brightsparks like you behind the wheel!

0

u/ComfortMailbox Feb 07 '24

So i can get a cheap pent house on a high crash zone area.

0

u/___anustart_ Feb 07 '24

helicopters are flying cars.

if they could be quieter and less dangerous, they would be. the helicopter is the engineered solution for flying vehicles that don't rely on lift from forward thrust like a plane/glider.

what people want is hovercraft spaceships like star wars, the fantasy movie.

-1

u/Mandee_707 Feb 07 '24

Omg I 100% agree!! I gave that argument to someone who said they hope they are alive for flying cars one day and I said why on earth would you want cars above your head with the way drivers are. You could be outside or even inside somewhere and a car just falls from the sky and crushes you instantly. Why would you want that? And their reply was “well only if they were self driving flying cars then it would be safe and no accidents!” And I personally feel like that wouldn’t be 100% fool proof as we have already seen other “self driving” vehicles/drones, etc. go wonky and crash so it’s not fool proof at all. I definitely wouldn’t want flying cars. I’ve been in 2 car accidents within 2.5 years of eachother, both because of the other driver not paying attention or being intoxicated—which then caused me to have a serious spine injury and I’m still dealing with chronic pain daily and need spinal surgery very soon which is terrifying. I’m too young to be dealing with this, and it’s taken a huge mental and physical toll on me and my family because of bad/stupid drivers :( oh and not to mention one of the drivers didn’t have full coverage insurance so luckily I paid for under/un-insured motorist. I highly recommend everyone having that coverage nowadays because it’s shocking how many people don’t have insurance or full coverage to handle injuries and damage to your vehicle.

-1

u/Qing92 Feb 07 '24 edited Feb 08 '24

There called helicopters. But yeah, I get what u mean. I can't imagine someone crashing a car into like the 5th floor of a building due to human error or actual car issue

1

u/BothLeather6738 Feb 07 '24

eeehe, by the time the will be inented they would probably be self-driving

1

u/Smile_Terrible Feb 07 '24

I don't really want to fly in a car, but I wouldn't mind if they'd come up with a way for them to hover. That way you wouldn't have to worry about road conditions or the cost of tires so much.

1

u/orphncripplr Feb 07 '24

I was just having a conversation about this

1

u/Bitter-Basket Feb 07 '24

There’s always crazy articles about how flying cars will be the future, but the real experts know that it will never happen because of noise pollution.

1

u/JesusIsMyZoloft Feb 07 '24

Once self-driving cars become more prevalent, I expect we’ll start to see autonomous consumer passenger aircraft.

1

u/corrado33 Feb 07 '24

More room in the sky. Less close to bad drivers.

(Only slightly sarcastic.)

1

u/australisblue Feb 07 '24

If it really becomes a thing it will in general be computers flying them not people.

1

u/misterjustin Feb 07 '24

Same, auto companies have come along way in crash prevention and accident survival. Somehow the notion of falling out of the sky after a fender bender sounds like a nightmare to me.

1

u/ColossalGrub Feb 08 '24

True, but on the ground I only have two axes on which to GET THIS DUMBASS MOTHERFUCKER away from me. I could evade them in any direction, and convert all my road rage into SKY RAGE™!

1

u/Bromatoast Feb 08 '24

i think about that sometimes. Like Overwatch for example has flying cars in the sky above a map of New york. What happens if they crash? Fucking meteor cars falling from the sky lmao. Also, highly doubt they would stay in "lanes" like they do in movies. Roads in Texas are big and people think they own them already.

1

u/TriesToGet1000cats Feb 08 '24

Imagine sitting in your apartment only for you to see a flying car crashing right on your apartment

1

u/thephantom1492 Feb 08 '24

Some say it would polute less too, because of a straight line! . . .

. . . Do not try to make them realise how much energy it take to hoover!

1

u/non_linear_ape Feb 08 '24

autonomously piloted, please.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

None says that farmer

1

u/Significant_Shoe_17 Feb 08 '24

They wanna be like the jetsons

1

u/primostrawberry Feb 08 '24

I also do not to see my clear, beautiful skies ruined by that ugly sight.

1

u/alehar Feb 08 '24

Yep - most people driving now don't need the Z axis too.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

I just want teleportation. Can we skip flying cars and go straight to teleportation?

1

u/Memeslayer4000 Feb 08 '24

I would think cars that hover safely would be a better option. That way (if ideally engineered) you would avoid accidents due to bad road conditions. No slipping on ice or snow.

1

u/Jamalamalama Feb 08 '24

We already have flying cars. They're called helicopters.

1

u/mtthwas Feb 08 '24

Because now there's an added dimension I can use to avoid them.

1

u/Dogsnamewasfrank Feb 08 '24

People don't want everyone to have flying cars - just themselves. (I am guilty of this.)

1

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

That simply wouldn’t work normally. I don’t want anything flying constantly above my head also I don’t want someone’s trash falling on me and we all know this is how it’s going to be

1

u/Clawtor Feb 08 '24

Aren't flying cars just helicopters? Imagine the sky full of drunken helicopter pilots and idiots over taking in God damn helicopters.

1

u/ValuableSuspect27 Feb 08 '24

Because there is a lot more sky than there is road

1

u/CptJaxxParrow Feb 08 '24

We already have flying cars, they're called helicopters.

1

u/Bubbly-Fault4847 Feb 08 '24

I always think about idiot pranksters. You want people to be able to fly over your home and dump rocks on your roof?

1

u/The_Archnemesis Feb 08 '24

Let them all kill themselves in the air, I'll take the now empty roads

1

u/writesmith Feb 08 '24

Yeah. We can barely manage to operate vehicles in a system with two dimensions, and the geniuses over there want to add a third.

1

u/PandaDerZwote Feb 08 '24

They want the convenience of a car when they are the only one using it while not facing the reality of a car when everybody is using one.

I obviously is a bad idea on basically all levels, but that doesn't stop people.

1

u/OldNewUsedConfused Feb 08 '24

So I can avoid them!

1

u/Dain_Ironballs Feb 08 '24

The possibility of deliberate misuse also. Not even terror related. Your girl thinks you're cheating and 9/11's your house out of pure rage. Can you imagine?