Are personal Flying vehicles in our near future?
In my opinion flying personal vehicles are at the very least 2 or 3 decades away from becoming a reality. Here’s why. The airways are governed by 2 major agencies, the FAA (American) and EASA (European) and we have very strict guidelines called FARs that we have to adhere too.
I have worked under these guidelines for over 40 years in my aviation career. I also worked with a company that was working side by side to develop the rules and guidelines for powered lift aircraft. As of today they’re still working on developing the guidelines to make this a reality.
But there are a lot of things to address before you ever see one of these things actually operate.
1. Licensing: you will need a pilot license to operate anything that leaves the ground and that requires training.
2. Where you can fly: No operational corridor have been established. You just can’t fly one thru a city and risk one crashing into pedestrians or flying into the flight path of a major airline and having a midair collision.
3. Operation ceiling: this will dictate how high you can fly one of these things so that you cant run the risk of midair collisions
4. Infrastructure: there would have to be a major change in infrastructure like Parking/landing zones, refueling and etc.
5. Risk: I know I addressed this in the other examples. But who wants to risk a 2000lbs+ vehicle falling on their head while walking down the street?
6. Design parameters: open blades spinning at 10,000 rpm will definitely cause the death of anyone in its way.
7. Policing: How do you police these vehicles?
Today’s example: as drones became more popular the FAA starting making operators register their drones, limited the operational ceiling to 500 ft and you have to get licensed. Ever see a small toy sized drone lose control and come down/ if you are under it it can cause major bodily harm.
On propeller aircraft the is an area called the “circle of death” this is the area that if th prop fails and come off it can harm anyone standing or sitting in the area directly inline of that prop. Most aircraft add extra protection to those areas just incase.
I have witnessed this first hand when a 757 airliner’s fan blade section came apart and made Swiss cheese out of the fuselage and some fragments actually made it into the cabin. If you watch YouTube you will see countless companies experimenting with personal flight vehicles and I have only seen maybe one or two with nacelles or any protections around the blades.
Is it a cool concept”yes” but do I see it happening in my lifetime “NO”. No matter how much we want to be like the Jetsons we are not close yet.