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?

History Repeating..

[NeuralAbyss]

Whilst it might be safe for hundreds, or even thousands of vehicles, what happens when everybody jumps on the bandwagon?

Remember the old films of when cars were had by the minority? Just look at where it's brought us now...

3D Driving

[cosmosis]

Many years ago when I was in Aerospace Engineering School and inspired by the movie Blade Runner, I designed a steerting mechanism that would make flying VTOL easy for anyone already skilled at driving a car. Right now typical airplane flight is quite complicated. My design was based on the notion that compuational power would catch up by the time my design would be feasible. The idea is simple:

For turning left or right you simply turn the steering wheel - the appropriate roll, pitch and yaw are calculated by the onboard computer. To increase or decrease altitute simply move the steering wheel in or out. As for speed, the standard gas and break pedals would speed up or slow the vehical down. This all results in an incredibly easy and intuitive control of a VTOL vehical. Want to come to a stop 100 feet up and then slowly lower the vehical down? First apply the breaks. The VTOL aircraft then comes to a stop, hovering at 100 feet. To lower the car to the ground, simply push the steering wheel in. The speed of decent can controlled by the onboard computer to insure that proper decent velocity is maintained.

But what about the Springfield Interchange???

[House of Usher]

I know this might as a shock for you all, but don't you think that NASA needs to do some coordinating with the Virginia Department of Transportation? I mean, they've just sunk all this money into a 14 year project to help relieve traffic around the beltway interchange here in Springfield, Virginia...
All kidding aside, seriously, think about the security issues you have here. By having little flying vehicles everywhere, we run into the problem of basically being able to let anyone take their car and get into airspace that is restricted. Sure, their might be klaxons going off and the vehicles computer might be saying, "You are in restricted airspace, please turn around" and sure you migth even have security features to change the course, but people will get around them. In my humble and very honest opinion it's a bad move.

Furthermore, not even thinking about the aspect of terrorism through air cars, what about the problem of accidents? I know I know, I'm jumping ahead of what the technological specifications of this are, but think about how bad some of these accidents could turn into it. It wouldn't just be that there was a midair collission, but also that the wreckage might take out some neighborhood. Hmmm, I'm seeing problems here my friends...

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it...

Interesting fact

[Anonymous Coward]

First two automobiles in Illionois crashed into each other :)

I blame there parents myself.

Re:bad enough

[znu]

As they discovered while trying to sneak up on subs during WWII, paint doesn't work. No matter what color you paint an aircraft, when it's far away it shows up as a black dot. You need illumination, which for this application would definitely be more trouble than it was worth.

Similar ideas in the Farnborough F1

[alext]

Just as I was reading this thread, Richard Noble (the guy who took the land speed record a while ago) was on a radio phone-in over here telling people about his plan for independent travel using his Farnborough F1 [farnborough-aircraft.com] plane. (Hmmm, hope the plane goes faster than Richard's web site...)

He says:

"...enter the Farnborough F1 air taxi, which flies point to point faster than a congested airliner and the Farnborough integrated Ops system, which will enable you to book your on demand travel zipcode to zipcode off the web. This means you can be picked up by a ground cab from your office or home, meet up with the F1 at a local airfield and arrive at your postcode destination 1000 miles away in under 4 hours door to door. That's about half the airline time and the best bit is yet to come. The whole activity is low stress with costs comparible to a business class airline fare and you need never go to a major airport again for short-haul travel!

Key to all this is the importance of avoiding self deception. Constantly we check each other out - Have we got this right? Is there some fatal flaw in the project which means that it can never succeed? So far the only real problem is the very difficult finance - the rest is do-able. We can also take great confidence in the fact that NASA has come up with much the same ideas, though with different emphasis for their SATS (Small Aircraft Transportation System programme) which they believe will treble airspace travel capacity."

Gotta love these plucky inventor types!

Re:What's the point?

[sigwinch]

A well-designed rail system is more efficient, less noisy, safer, and more environmentally friendly.

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

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.

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 (GPS simply doesn't *ever* work reliably), fighter/bombers need to land with a precision of a couple of meters on carriers, unmanned warplanes need to follow carefully-planned paths in the air, and so forth.

Remember that speculative gold-plated bleeding-edge military R&D will be civilian bread & butter in twenty years. I think NASA is just beginning the obvious commercialization work. Even if it doesn't quite pan out for 'flying cars', the work directly applies to making conventional jet lines more efficient, safer, and more flexible.

The aviation industry has a slow rate of improvement anyway. If you want to deploy massive improvements in 50 years, you need to start the preliminary work today. No, I'm not exaggerating. Aviation equipment and procedure life cycles are **EXTREMELY LONG** (where are <blink> tags when you need 'em?). For instance, the last B-52H heavy bomber was delivered in 1962, but they are expected to remain in service until 2035.

A better idea

[slow_flight]

This is all well and good, but really doesn't do much for the average commuter. People that have the inclination and ability to fly a plane are probably already doing so.

What I would like to see instead are automated flying boxcars. The technology exists today to allow a completely automated (no pilots) flight from point A to point B using GPS, WAAS, and sophisticated autopilots. Lets use those technologies to build flying package delivery drones, and reduce the number of semis that are tearing up our highways and causing the majority of traffic snarls.

These drones could be used to ferry routine cargo around at a much lower cost than FedEx, UPS, et al. These incumbents spend an absolute fortune on pilot salaries. The two pilots in any given FedEx jet are making in the range of $200k EACH! Multiply this by the hundreds or thousands of unionized pilots working for these organizations and it becomes clear why it costs so much to ship this way. Think about how many .coms went bust because people don't want to pay $10+ for shipping on top of purchase price and tax. Lower that cost to $2 or $3 and see if that works better!

Given that time probably isn't of the absolute essence, it would be possible to route these flights over rural areas and avoid the liability risks of flying umnanned aircraft over crowded urban areas. Most of these flights would happen at night when those 5000 general aviation airports NASA is talking about are essentially deserted, so the risk of a collision between one of these drones and a piloted GA plane is minimal, and could probably be addressed with the same technologies NASA is working on. The aircraft themselves would be cheaper to manufacture than commercial aircraft since pressurization wouldn't be needed.

Moller's lack of vision and NASA's good work

[AB3A]

Ugh. Moller has been throwing designs at the wall for decades now. None have flown in to production. A closer look at his ideas reveal that we'd need some new theories in thermodynamics and aerodynamics to make his vehicles fly. When he publishes such a paper, I'll pay more attention.

However, NASA's highway in the sky concept has been around for a while and only now has it become reasonably feasible for instrument rated private pilots to use.

Most people don't realize how much thinking is involved for aircraft pilots to navigate, evaluate weather ahead, keep track of airfields, aircraft performance, air traffic control instructions, and so on. The workload is high enough that unless an airplane has a capable autopilot, many would not fly "single pilot IFR."

So a highway in the sky concept is a big deal. Reducing pilot work-load means safety. Let's face it, it's hard enough to stay at peak performance for four hours straight, let alone four hours after a long day of activities on the ground.

Not having to worry what frequencies to use next is a big reduction in work, not having to dig out the next chart along the way is a reduction in work, seeing weather depicted in 3D along the route, is a big deal. The less you have to think about where the air route, airports, weather, and you are, the more attention you can pay to how well the airplane is flying.

Sandel already makes a nice electronic HSI display which is finding its way in to many higher end General Aviation aircraft. Garmin also makes a nice GPS+navigation radio combination with moving map displays that are extremely popular among pilots.

However, flying an instrument approach to miniumus is still a lot of work and there is often little room for going stupid and making mistakes. NASA's concepts could help a great deal in this regard.

I can hardly wait.

Ercoupe

[Anonymous Coward]

The Ercoupe also is very tiny.... two passengers only, and doesn't have enough power to get out of its own way. The reason you can't stall one (and therefore go into a spin) is because the elevator travel is limited so much that you can't pitch up to make the wings exceed critical angle of attack... either with power on or power off...and has nothing to do with how the rudders and ailerons are "hardwired" in a quasi-coordinated configuration.