NASA Wants You To Fly The Highway In The Sky

rakerman writes "NASA is working on a program called SATS, the Small Aircraft Transportation System, which is designed to improve the automation and safety of small aircraft travel to the point where you could fly the 'highway in the sky' as easily as you drive your car." I'm ready -- when is the Moller Skycar?

bad enough

[tiwason]

Its bad enough to have cars clogging the roads....

Whats this going to come to...

- Can't see the sky... too many flying cars

- Try to get away from it all... go on a hike... flying cars are all over

- They start to leak oil and anti-freeze... watch out below.. (or litterbugs)

anyhow.... cars kill how many people each day ??? Fix what we got first.... and figure out the social impact before going ahead with this one..

(then again... could open up some great back-country skiing.. but what fun would that be)

Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

After reading the info, it looks like it has more to do with getting people to travel in small, possibly independently owned, airplanes, rather than "flying cars" per se. I'm all for it, though. I would love to own my own airplane, and I bet they'll get cheaper to buy in the long run also.

One thing I was thinking about though, is that high-speed chases will take on an entirely new meaning. Obviously there will be police airplanes protecting the skies, but will they be equipped with machineguns to take you down, or what? Those spike strips that they use on cars aren't gonna do a whole lot up in the air. And they can't just chase you until you run out of fuel, 'cause then you could crash into a neighborhood or something. Of course, they can't just knock you down either, or the same could happen.

There are also issues of licences. I don't know how hard it is to get a pilot's licence, but it looks like in order for something like this to work, they're going to have to make it easier, or find some way to intice people to get them.

One last thing. You know how when you watch the news in the morning, you hear about 4 or 5 accidents on the highway, in one day alone? How's that going to work for airplanes? They say that airplanes are the safest way to travel, but it seems to me they can make that claim because there are WAY fewer airplanes than cars. So if there are more planes, are you gonna hear about them dropping from the sky on the morning news? I wonder.

Still sounds badass, though. I'd love to travel by plane.

-- mesh

Whoa!

[HaveBlue34]

Ok. first of all
http://www.moller.com/skycar/
Next thing I want to know is why this isn't already done? With a GPS and a transmitter you could upload a flight plan made with something similar to driving directions from maps.com to a FAA data base, have it approved and fly away on auto pilot. Why dont comercial airlines do this? Couldn't this replace air traffic control people? Taking off and landing would be the hardest part (don't think you can do that with an auto pilot, yet). I know people will post tons of great funny jokes about how bad people drive on the ground but if all this is done via autopilot type controls I don't see a problem. Those of you with pilots liscenses enlighten me please.
HB

Don't get so excited...

[Jace of Fuse!]

If I'm understanding this correctly -- even if it ever becomes a reality it won't be so much like everyone having their own personal flying aircraft as much as smaller commuter type services or the like. Instead of huge passenger jets that are best suited for flights over long distances, this sort of thing would be useful in small towns outside of larger cities requiring people to do more than an hours worth of driving to get to work every day. Not only would it reduce that but it would also increase the distance one could live from work. Instead of driving to work, or riding a bus every day, they simply swing down to the nearby landing strip and catch a ride on the next flight.

It seems like an obvious evolution in our transportation systems, really, since long commutes are getting more and more common and traffic is constantly getting worse.

hmm environment?

[jilles]

It is bad enough to have regular airplanes burning thousands of tons of kerosine in our atmosphere every day. The effect of millions of cars burning extra fuel to stay airborne in addition to getting from A to B would be disastrous IMHO.

Then there's the issue of horizon pollution, imagine sitting in your backyard unable to escape the trafic that is passing right over it. In my country (The Netherlands) it is already hard to find a place where you can't see/hear regular trafic.

Then there's the issue of accidents and their consequences. Apart from probably being fatal for the people inside the flying car, heavy objects dropping from the sky may pose a danger themselves as well.

What's the point?

[vscjoe]

I don't quite see the point of short-hop mass air transportation. A well-designed rail system is more efficient, less noisy, safer, and more environmentally friendly. And we could, gasp, move closer to where we work.

To me, this sounds like NASA is grasping at straws trying to prove its relevance. But developing tech toys won't cut it, I suspect.

Re:More to it than that...

[NatePWIII]

Your absolutely right, just think your driving down the freeway and your timing belt snaps after 130,000 miles (this happened to me on my last trip back from Canada while driving through Montana last year) of driving. No problem just slowly ease your car to the shoulder of the road, turning on your hazard lights and thumb a ride. Ok now lets parallel this to a small airplane... something goes wrong in your engine (I'm not an airplane engine expert so I won't go into details, however whatever the problem is it basically shuts down your engine) no problem you assume the correct glide angle for maximum decent time based on your airplane specs and your cargo weight, this can all easily be programmed into any advanced airplane with an onboard computer. Ok, so now we are descending at a safe rate now the next step, find a safe landing strip... not so easy. What if your flying over residential or urban areas? How about over a large body of water, better yet over a treacherous rocky mountain range. You get my point, ditching an airplane isn't as simple as some would like to think, something else to think about is how many small aircraft pilots have actually practiced a ditched landing without any engine power? I knew a seaplane pilot who had the luck of such a landing, some pranksters drained the fuel out of his tanks about 1 min. after takeoff his engine sputtered to a stop, he managed to land back on the same lake just brushing the tops of the Cedars as he glided in, five feet less altitude and he probably would have been dead. The point is that driving a car and an airplane cannot even be compared, there are alot of different variables that must be considered before mass transit via small airplanes should be considered.

No way

[sluggie]

I can't imagine that this is going to work in a sane way.
Even in "professional" aviation navigating via GPS is only a BACKUP system, not the regular case. Still flying via VORs, NDBs and ISECs is essential.

How should Mr. John Doe learn when to go around, or what to do in very bad weather conditions.. How are they going to keep the civil and this "private" aviation apart?

How is Mr. John Doe going to pay for thes "driving/flying" licence (which won't be cheap, I'm sure)?

How can we decide who is allowed to fly, how can we be sure he is not going to insure/kill others?

Don't you think that with everybody and his brother/mother/etc using this system an reasonable amount of chaos is going to arise?

Re:What's the point?

[vscjoe]

Rail is violently expensive. Profit margins tend to be low even in densely-populated areas.

Rail, when widely deployed, is intrinsically cheaper than air travel. What makes rail expensive relative to other modes of transportation in the US is poor utilization, low-volume production of the components, poor integration, lengthy and costly legal and political fights when trying to build new rail lines, and subsidies and failure to account for the true costs of automobiles and air travel.

You can't "grow your way" into rail travel and hope that it's cost effective from its smallest beginnings to a large scale deployment. If you insist on incremental adoption of a technology, you automatically favor auto and air travel, which have much lower infrastructure costs and can be deployed one vehicle at a time. Unfortunately, the ultimate cost of having 300 million people rely on cars and airplanes are horrendous.

The problems that need to be solved for mass aviation are identical to many highly-relevant military problems: cruise missiles need to be able to autonomously navigate with 10 meter precision using terrain observation and inertial guidance

That seems like another good reason not to undertake that kind of development effort: I can do well without both personal aircraft and without another generation of cruise missiles.

If you want to deploy massive improvements in 50 years,

Actually, I'd prefer to see short and medium range air travel, as well as the personal automobile, be largely replaced in 50 years by rail, high speed ferries, automatic taxies, walk-up car rentals, pedestrian and bicycle zones, and telecommuting. Those are technologically far simpler and have clear benefits.

Re:More to it than that...

[Hee Hee Hee]

Ten years ago, I was training for my private pilot's license. I soloed (what a rush!) and was given clearance by my instructor to leave the vicinity of the airport to go ten miles north to a practice area. One day, after practicing figure-8's, I turned south to head back to the airport. This was in the pre-GPS days, so navigation was all visual. I got lost and (unknowingly) ended up approaching the local military airbase. I heard the air-traffic controller call out to the airplane headed toward him to squawk a code on the transponder and thought to myself "What idiot is flying that close to the base?" The next thing I know, I see the airbase straight ahead! A quick 180, proper squawk, and an apologetic call to the controller straightened that out.

If I was flying an air-car and my GPS or computer went out, I'd have to depend on my "seat-of-the-pants" ability to get me safely down. My story illustrates how easy it is to get in trouble in the air. I'm usually a cautious and courteous driver. Seeing the morons on the road today, I'd be pretty nervous about flying with them, let alone have them fly over me!

I agree - air-cars are a LONG way off. Don't hold your breath.

Re:History Repeating..

[maroberts]

There are lots of reasons for aircraft to follow highways in the sky, the main one being that some point to point routes are bound to be heavily congested. I for one would dread flying round New York if everyione was performing point to point flying. Anticipating what someone is going to to in mid air is extremely hard and remember that closure speeds are going to be much faster (400-1000mph!).

Traffic management can only do so much and the best software in the world is going to go into screaming fits trying to manage point to point flying. If it has some highway rules, then there is the possibility it can do it.

Re:Whoa!

[FlyGirl]

This isn't already there for many reasons.

First of all, innovation in the aviation field are VERY slow thanks to the liabilities involved. If someone introduces some new innovation and then a plane with that new device crashes, even if the pilot is drunk, the innovator gets sued. Almost ALWAYS happens and the innovater often loses with a multi-million dollar verdict. It's pretty easy to convince the non-pilot public that this new device/equipment was at fault.

Also, it just takes time to change such a system. Yes, they have planes that CAN fly themselves from start to finish (including take-off, landing and even taxi) but navigation is not the key role of controllers -- aircraft avoidance is.

A few more innovations need to be made in a system to allow aircraft to travel automatically AND avoid midairs. Not much has yet been done to automate that. It is only recently that the FAA has even required airlines to have the equipment to show the pilots directly where other planes are. Until just a few years ago, the controllers would tell the pilots where nearby aircraft were.

It'll still be a while before they couple this system to the autopilot and program it to find a path through the other aircraft. And that product will have serious potential liabilities should it ever make a "mistake".

Give it time... it'll happen.

Re:Tee hee

[SEWilco]

"IF there were the same number of Skycars in the sky tomorrow, as there are cars on the roads today, each Skycar in the sky would be over a mile away (in all directions) from any other Skycar in the sky!" [moller.com] (see question 4.8)

The surrounding information also make it apparent that a Skycar society would use automated air traffic control and the Skycars would talk to nearby Skycars to fly in an orderly manner.

For several reasons, implementors would probably create highways, although they might arrange themselves automatically rather than being printed on maps. Vehicles in or near Des Moines which are headed toward Chicago might tend to be gathered into a pipe-shaped area (a "highway") and there may be similar standard air routes for moving around Chicago, with slower and vertical flight taking place at altitudes below the air routes. Direct travel would also be possible, but grouping traffic simplifies the navigation problems for all craft. Particularly around the borders of the various restricted airspaces, where traffic going around could get concentrated. Doing the geometry, it's apparent that whether routes are defined by maps or by calculations based on following standard rules, they're likely to appear in some form.

Re:bad enough

[drsquare]

No, it would be far more dangerous. For a start, when a car breaks down or runs out of petrol, you can just pull over and stop. What do you do with a plane?

And computer control? If computer control is so good, why are there pilots on planes? If someone was going to fly a plane into a building, they'd just override it. "Make it un-overridable" you say? Then what happens when it goes wrong?

This whole scheme is idiotic. Planes may be further away from each other in the sky, but what about when they come to land? Are you going to have each house with its own runway, or will there be 6000 of them all circling around the one local runway?

This isnt like driving...

[(eternal_software)]

I am a certified commercial pilot and air traffic controller. The problem with systems like this is that it is always easier than it sounds. No matter how nice that little LCD in the cockpit looks, flying is not going to be a "highway in the sky".

As a pilot, I regularly fly into airports where the wind is gusting to 30+ knots, the ceiling is 500 feet off the ground, the turbluence is slamming me against my seatbelts, and the visibility is below a mile.

If this alone didn't require a lot of skill, you have to constantly be alert for system failures, air traffic control instructions, and all relevant procedures.

All the automation in the world can't prepare your average highway driver for what flying can really be like.

This research will help pilots who are already fully certified reach their destinations easier and safer, but it will do nothing to have your average citizen flying the "highway in the sky".

What will this do to general aviation?

[nsanit]

This scares the bejeezus out of me!

I'm trying to get my certificate to be a private pilot. I read the article stating that the computer would control the planes in 'non-radar' space and 'non-towered' airports...is this thing going to have speech recognition and natural language recognition as well?

What I'm getting at, is that the above airspaces pretty much control themselves. If I'm departing from a non-towered airfield, I announce via radio...is this thing going to be able to track and avoid other aircraft that are being flown the old fashioned way?

Currently conducting research on this...

[TerraFORM]

I am a postgrad working on my doctoral and am involved in the Human Factors issues of SATS. Many are worried about the impacts of such an endeavor, and rightly so. Especially with the events of 911, one wonders if this is feasible at all. There are two sides to this issue: one side is that SATS, and GA in general, is dead; the other says that, due to the currently inherent security issues with commercial transportation, SATS and GA will grow exponentially (i.e., no knowledge of who you're flying with or how intense the security scrutiny of others' baggage causing droves of travellers who wish to have SOME control to seek out alternatives). Being on the Human Factors side of things in SATS, I am more concerned with the interactions that will occur with respect to the 'human in the loop': the displays (visual or auditory), human performance in such things as terminal area procedures and separation maintenance, and investigations into optimal cockpit and aircraft design. Make no mistake: we have (or soon will have) the technology to do this. Surely, some aspects, such as ATC issues and flight path security (i.e., flying over sensitive areas), still need resolving. But, with the data gleaned from the AGATE research and others, we are confident that this will become reality. Current plans are for a demonstration of a fully-operational system, limited to a specific test area, in 2005. Time will tell if this system sells with the public, but I think it will. Witness the increases in chartered aircraft, both for business and pleasure. Several aircraft currently exist and are flying that contain SATS technology (Cirrus, Glasair). Consortia involved in SATS (Florida, Virginia, and a conglomeration of others in Baltimore and Ohio) are feverishly working out testing and experimental designs that produce the data that the FAA and NASA need to make the decisions to continue. I am excited about this, very excited. You should be, too.