[ExI] This Flying Car Costs $599K—and It’s Now Street Legal in Holland

[spike at rainier66.com]

…> On Behalf Of John Grigg via extropy-chat
Subject: [ExI] This Flying Car Costs $599K—and It’s Now Street Legal in Holland

 

>…"We’ve all had the experience of sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic with nothing but miles of red taillights ahead, wishing we could somehow break away from the pack and zoom off to our destination traffic-free…

>…The car is called the PAL-V Liberty, and it’s made by Dutch company PAL-V <https://www.pal-v.com/en/> . It looks a lot like what you’d probably expect or imagine a flying car <https://singularityhub.com/2019/11/01/flying-cars-aerial-ridesharing-and-the-not-too-distant-future-of-transport/>  to look like: a cross between a small helicopter and a very aerodynamic car (with a foldable propeller on top)."

https://singularityhub.com/2020/10/29/the-worlds-first-commercial-flying-car-is-hitting-roads-in-holland/   

 

 

Hi John,

 

This is cool, but note a few things: the PAL-V isn’t a helicopter, it’s a gyrocopter, which means you still need a runway to take off and at least some runway to land.  It cannot do vertical takeoff at all, and if you are forced to do a vertical landing, you will likely walk away but your gyrocopter might not be drivable afterwards.

 

Difference: the motor doesn’t turn the rotor.  It only turns the propeller.  

 

This mode of flight predates helicopters and there have been (kinda) drivable gyrocopters available for some time, but it is a highly inefficient flight mode: it guzzled a lotta fuel.  This is the first gyro I have ever seen which claims it can go 99 mph: that sounds dubious to me.  That max speed of 112, eh, I can’t see it.  

 

Even if it could do those speeds, it sounds very dangerous.  In fixed wing planes the control gets easier as the speed goes up.  But with any rotating wing craft, the control gets harder as you go faster.  This is why you don’t really see helicopter races much: there are too many instability modes in which the pilot cannot recover.  Think of a tailspin in an airplane: that happens when one wing stalls (such as from turning too hard at too low speed.)  the inside wing is going slower than the outside wing.  So the outside wing is still flying and generating lift while the inside wing is stalled.  If you don’t have power to speed up (such as a pilot on takeoff loses power and tries to turn around to make it back to the airstrip and goes into a tailspin) often she can’t recover from a low-speed tailspin.  Helicopters and gyrocopters are the opposite kinda: their maximum controllability is at low speed, but they have instability modes which happen at high speed.  A good helicopter pilot doesn’t push her luck.

 

spike

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