flying cars

For the FAA, it's not the flying that keeps regular joes out of the sky. It's the landing and the navigating. Dealing with air traffic control is so attention consuming and complex that large planes require multiple crewmen, and single-pilot planes have significant restrictions and where and when they can fly.

However, a new flight management system (FMS) created by GE may automate so much of the navigation and landing that commercial flights could use only a single pilot, and the rest of us could get cleared to use flying cars.

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How to build a commercially viable flying car: first, make it a motorcycle. The idea of creating a personal transportation craft that can both take to the skies and travel along the ground has been alive as long as science fiction. But meeting both the FAA's regulations for aircraft while simultaneously meeting the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's guidelines for automobiles means compromises on both sides.

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While we seem to be closer than ever to seeing a flying car in our lifetimes, The Economist seems to believe the flying car will die before it was ever really born, but not necessarily for reasons in the air. They think flying cars will have trouble getting road certified.

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Terrafugia's prototype roadable aircraft - or flying car - recently completed its first successful flight after six months of road and runway testing. The company announced the flight of the Transition, an aircraft with foldable wings that can drive at highway speeds and fit into the average garage, at Boston's Museum of Science yesterday, calling the feat a historic milestone in aviation. "This breakthrough changes the world of personal mobility," says Terrafugia CEO Carl Dietrich. "It's what aviation enthusiasts have been striving for since 1918."

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Popular Science has been daydreaming about the flying car for decades. (Seriously, I’ve been to the office. You think an editor is working diligently, and then you glance over his shoulder – and there’s the proof. Dozens of doodles of flying cars.)

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The future wasn’t supposed to look like this. Here we are, one month from the very futuristic-sounding 2009, still waiting for robot armies to do our bidding, nuclear fusion to power our homes and a space elevator to zip us up through the atmosphere. Decades, even centuries ago scientists were promising that certain life changing technologies would be ready to go any day.

It might seem that the future is running a little behind schedule. But never fear! It is, indeed, only a matter of time.

So today, allow us to present to you eight technologies that were supposed to be up and running by now, but still haven’t become part of daily life; along with info on when we can expect the technologies to actually arrive.

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The Transition is not a flying car. The vehicle, set to go on sale next year, will cruise smoothly on the road and through the sky. It will have four wheels, Formula One–style suspension, and a pair of 10-foot-wide wings that fold up when it switches from air to asphalt. And when the engineers at Terrafugia in Woburn, Massachusetts, let me sit inside their just-finished proof-of-concept vehicle and grab the steering wheel, it’s easy to imagine piloting this thing up and out of traffic, into the open skies.

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For any vehicle—airplane or car—to fly, there needs to be some force pushing it up so that it can overcome gravity. Airplane wings are specifically designed to create just such a force. As a plane moves forward, the wings push air down, and because for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction, this action creates an upward force on the wing, called lift.

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