Around the Corner? Flying Cars Are

Not likely, says our Car Geek David Traver Adolphus.

People have been working on flying cars not since the Wright Brothers flew, but before. A Hungarian engineer named Emil Némethy and an Austrian named F. Heinz were both trying to figure them out by 1900, which is 14 years after the automobile started existing at all; and almost four years before Wilbur Wright first wobbled aloft for three-and-a-half seconds. Maine’s Flying Auto Company was incorporated in May of 1909, and Blériot Aéronautique took an order for their first aero-taxicab in 1915, although it wasn’t until 1917, when the great aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss introduced his Autoplane, that anyone really had a working vehicle that could both fly and drive on the ground.

And since that time, people have known what a terrible idea it is: “It can readily be imagined how much more awful a flying automobile, or ten flying automobiles, would be,” wrote John Gilmer Speed in The Modern Chariot, his history of transportation in The Cosmopolitan in May, 1900. Any craft light enough to fly could only have one means of propulsion, so most of them ‘drove’ using the same whirling propeller of death with which they flew.

Counterintuitively, there were some factors a century ago that would have made the idea safer than today. People were accustomed to constant maintenance on their cars and what cars need, planes need 10 times more. You can let your tire get worn down and maybe pull over for a flat, but when something goes wrong in the air, you begin plummeting to the ground. At the same time, there wasn’t much other air travel and a flying car would have been so expensive that the airways were never going to be congested.

Now take the 113 million people cited for distracted drunk driving annually and put them in the air. Yes, obviously it could only work with a fully autonomous mesh system with total ground-air-ground control and zero potential human involvement but even if that were technologically possible – and let’s not even get into how much more energy would be required – and people were willing to accept it, there remains the question: would it actually be useful to have flying cars?

While the average commuting time is likely to decline as people continue to migrate into urban areas, in the suburbs and towns we work to create dense, walkable cores. Commuting may not go extinct, but it will rapidly become a problem only for the few who either don’t work remotely or don’t live where they work.

It isn’t technology or societal pressures that will keep killing the flying car but economics. It makes no sense for any private company or public institution to develop an insanely complex, potentially treacherous new 3-D aerial infrastructure for a problem that can be solved for pennies on the ground. It’s not impossible that way, way out in the future we have the limitless energy and resources to do it but if the last 121 years of attempts are anything to go by, it’ll continue to be as much a pipe dream for the 21st Century as it always has been.