“Silicon Valley is full of very smart people, but they don’t always get the laws of physics. Gravity is a formidable adversary.” The quote comes from John Leonard, a mechanical engineer from MIT. His remarks closed a recent news story in the New York Times about Kitty Hawk, a startup based in Mountain View, California. The company makes ultralight electric-powered flying machines.
The Flyer, as the machine is known, is designed to take off from and land on water. Equipped with two pontoons, it resembles a Jet Ski in that the operator mounts and straddles the fuselage like a motorbike. It also resembles a drone. Arrayed around the rider are eight propellers that provide lift and propulsion.
A sleek promotional video for the Flyer shows a woman who hops on the machine to fly across a lake to join her friend for dinner in much less time than it would take her to drive around the lakeshore. Judging by the video, Leonard’s skepticism could be misplaced. The Kitty Hawk Flyer has overcome gravity triumphantly. But whether it has done so efficiently remains to be seen. Although the company has released the Flyer’s top speed, 40 km/h, it has not disclosed how far it can fly on one charge of its battery.
The Cinder Hills Off-Highway Vehicle Area near Flagstaff, Arizona, is set aside for quad bikes and other vehicles, some of which cannot be legally driven on Arizona’s roads.
The Cinder Hills Off-Highway Vehicle Area near Flagstaff, Arizona, is set aside for quad bikes and other vehicles, some of which cannot be legally driven on Arizona’s roads.
The question Where’s my flying car? has become a shorthand for the failure of science and technology to deliver an advanced future as promised. “When we were kids, they made it seem like it was just around the corner,” complained George Costanza in “The Dealership,” an episode of Seinfeld that first aired in 1998. Jerry Seinfeld voiced his own disappointment at the absence of flying cars and underwater bubble cities: “It’s like we’re living in the fifties here.”
To be fair, the technical challenges of building a practical flying car are formidable. Given the tight topography of urban landscapes, a flying car should be able to take off and land vertically like a helicopter, but more quietly.
Besides the laws of physics, flying cars must also obey the laws of the land. According to Kitty Hawk’s FAQ webpage, “the Flyer operates in the FAR 103 Ultralight Category of US FAA regulations. It does not require registration or a pilot’s license and may be flown in uncongested areas for recreational purposes.” Worries about noise and crashes could relegate flying cars to designated areas, as is the case for quad bikes and some other off-highway vehicles.
Scientists are expected to tout the future technological benefits of their research. That’s fair. The general public, which ultimately funds research through taxes, can reasonably expect payoffs. But scientists should be careful not to overpromise. In their August 2007 Physics Today article, “Graphene: Exploring carbon flatland,” Andrey Geim and Allan MacDonald managed expectations deftly when they asked,
What kind of mind-boggling technology might emerge from graphene? Before we proffer an answer, imagine you are on a boat trip watching a school of dolphins. Everyone is mesmerized by the magnificent animals until someone spoils the moment by voicing the unromantic question, “But can we eat them?” One-atom-thick materials have only recently been spotted in our universe and most researchers are happy, for the moment, to expand our understanding of this new and captivating type of matter.
