Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Why Are There No Flying Cars?

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

When airplanes were developed in the early 20th century, the technology developed rapidly.  Within a matter of a couple of decades, aviation had become a norm for transporting people and delivering mail.  As flight technology kept improving, people assumed that it would keep improving to the point where everyone would own their own personal airplanes. …except that never happened.  Learn more about why we don’t have flying cars and how all the predictions were wrong on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When airplanes were developed in the early 20th century, the technology developed rapidly. Within a matter of a couple decades, aviation had become a norm for transporting people and delivering mail. As flight technology kept improving, people assumed that it would keep improving to the point where everybody would own their own personal airplanes. Except, that never happened. Learn more about why we don't have flying cars and how all the predictions were wrong on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. When there's a new revolutionary technology, it's natural for people to extrapolate where they think the technology will go. and this was certainly the case with airplanes and aviation. The motorized heavier-than-air aircraft was developed in 1903 by the Wright brothers. People had been working on the problem for years, but it was Orville and Wilbur Wright who finally proved the concept over the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Once the dam was broken and people realized that heavier-than-air flight was possible, it unleashed a torrent of innovation.

Within a decade, airplanes had become safer, larger, and could fly further. Most of the advances were incremental. Improvements and new designs to engines, propellers, and body design, as well as metallurgy improvements, kept making planes better and better. Furthermore, the rise of the airplane roughly coincided with the rise of the automobile. So it wasn't a stretch to assume that one day cars and airplanes would merge such that everybody would have their own flying car. The first attempt at creating a flying car was in 1917. American inventor Glenn Curtis, developed the Curtis Autoplane. As far as design was concerned, it wasn't very clever. It was literally just the front end of an automobile with a three-wing triplane attached to the back. The airplane part was detachable, so it could still be used as a car. The major difference between the autopplain and the automobile of the time was that the autoplayne was built out of aluminum, which was still pretty rare for any

sort of vehicle. The autoplayne was capable of getting off the ground briefly, but it wasn't able to achieve any sustained flight. It was shown at an aviation event in New York in 1917 before development was halted when the U.S. entered the First World War. Despite this failed attempt at merging cars and airplanes, it didn't stop people from dreaming. By the year 1927, people were envisioning what the future of aviation would look like. The epic science fiction film Metropolis by Fritz Lang envisioned a world where airplanes would fly between the buildings of large cities. A flying car was just something that most people assumed would happen at some point in the indeterminate future. In that same year, Henry Ford unveiled the Ford Fliver. It was really just a small single-seat plane,

but it got a lot of press attention because Henry Ford was associated with the project. They only produced five prototypes. The next attempt at achieving the flying car came in the 1930s from another American inventor by the name of Waldo Waterman. He created the Waterman Aerobile. The aerobile was a two-seat vehicle with a rear propeller and no tail. It was really more of a small, lightweight airplane than it was a flying car. Development on the aerobile took place throughout the 1930s, but in the end only five were ever made. Unlike the autoplane, the aerobile could actually fly, and one actually flew 2,000 miles, but construction ceased in 1937. Despite all of the failures, people kept trying.

The next design was by Robert Edison Fulton, June. who was actually a distant relative of Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat. He unveiled the Fulton Air Fibian in 1946. Unlike previous attempts at flying cars, rather than just merging a plane in a car together, the Air Fibian had the plane part detachable like the original auto plane. It also had a detachable propeller that had to be taken on or off whenever it went from car to plane mode. Four models were made, and some can still be found in aviation museums. Around the same time, the Convair Model 118 was released, which was one of the oddest flying cars ever made.

It was literally a car with wings and a tail and an engine that could be bolted to the top. It actually did a one-hour test flight but was damaged when it landed because, as it turns out, cars aren't really designed to land after flying. Over the years, there were many more of the same types of designs that would periodically pop up. They were all chimera vehicles. They were just one part automobile and one part airplane, which were just smashed together to make a flying car. Despite the fact that some of these could actually fly, it wasn't what people wanted. The dream of a flying car wasn't about an airplane that could drive on the ground. It was about having a car that looked like a car, but could fly around in the air just as easily as you could drive a car on the ground.

All of these chimera vehicles behaved like airplanes when they flew. They had wings and a propeller and required a runway for take-off and landing. They weren't flying cars. They were just airplanes that sort of looked like cars. As science fiction advanced, it solidified exactly what the dream of a flying car was supposed to be. One of the best illustrations of flying cars was, believe it or not, the Jetsons cartoon show. Everyone in the Jetsons flew around in personal vehicles that flew. These were not vehicles that were across between a car and an airplane.

They were just cars that flew. How exactly they flew was never quite explained, but they were car-like vehicles that just flew around in the air. Science fiction continued to expand in the idea of the flying car. It was something that almost every depiction of the future had. Blade Runner had literal cars that could just take off vertically and fly around. Star Wars has similar flying vehicles. Back to the future, had a fusion-powered flying car. What all of these fictional examples had in common were vehicles without wing,

without propellers and that didn't require special runways. Despite the fictional portrayal of flying cars that just magically flew, companies kept coming out with prototype flying cars that looked like it was an airplane. And these prototypes kept failing for the exact same reasons. First, cars and airplanes are very different things. You can't just tack some wings in a propeller on a car and make it fly. Flying takes a lot more energy than driving. For example, a Cessna Skylane, which is a small,

four-seat aircraft has a fuel tank of 87 gallons, or 329 liters. Even a large SUV will only have a tank about a third to a fourth of the size. On top of that, if you want the ability to take off and land vertically, that requires even more energy, which means even more fuel. Second, flying a car requires licensing and regulatory approval as both a car and a plane. Operators would need to have both a driving and pilots license, and the vehicle would require approval by both aviation and highway agencies. Third, these regulatory requirements ensure that a flying car would be really expensive. That's why so few have ever been built beyond prototypes. It would literally be cheaper to buy a small airplane and a car than it would be to buy a

flying car, which wouldn't be as good as either a car or an airplane. And finally, there's the issue of safety. Cars driving past each other at high speeds are dangerous enough. However, cars can make contact without it being a catastrophe. Certainly head-on collisions can be horrible, but if you side-to-wipe another car, there might be damage, but the passengers probably won't be hurt. If two flying cars were to even clip each other while flying, the results would be catastrophic. Factor in the sheer number of potential flying cars, if everyone had one, and it would be a disaster. So flying cars that are based on airplanes will probably never happen. But what if we used a different model to build off of? There aren't that many ways to fly.

so the other option would be probably a helicopter. There are small personal helicopters, but they're helicopters. Likewise, there's a hybrid vehicle called a gyrocopter, which uses an overhead helicopter propeller for lift and a horizontal airplane propeller for thrust, but those still need runways. But one possibility could be something like the Moeller M-400 Skycar. The Skycar was the brainchild of a Canadian engineer named Paul Mueller.

It looks like a single-seat car with four duck, fan pods, which kind of look like but are not jet engines. But despite being in development for over 40 years, the sky car has yet to make an actual flight. So it looks like a flying car, but it doesn't actually work yet, and given the financial problems with the company, it'll probably never fly. However, there has been an innovation in flight that has finally taken a major step towards the dream of a flying car. And that innovation is drones. drones may not seem like a technical innovation in vehicles because drones are really small and don't carry passengers. However, the quadcopter design has been adopted for passengers by a large

number of companies. In researching this episode, I found at least 20 different companies that are developing flying vehicles based on quadcopter designs. Sometimes they have more than four propellers, but the concept is basically the same. They're drones on steroids. Moreover, because this is just a scaled-up version of something that already works, aka a drone, most of these companies have working flying prototypes already. The companies working on these are ones you've heard of, Uber, Boeing, and major airlines such as United Delta and American, in addition to a host of startup companies. On top of these human flyable drones, there are people that have also modified the design to create a Back to the Future type hoverboard,

albeit with large propellers. So big quadcopters are going to be the thing that finally delivers us flying cars. Well, not quite. Most of these products are being marketed as air taxis, not flying cars. The reason for the naming convention is that they're being designed to fly very specific short routes. These air taxis are usually electric and powered by batteries. Just as with drones, these have a very limited amount of energy that they can provide. Most of these systems have a limit of about 20 minutes of flight time depending on speed, altitude, and wind. So this isn't something that you can just fly around willy-nilly. The primary use case for these electric flying vehicles is for short-distance routes from city centers to airports. It's something that might cost $100 per trip and drastically

reduce the time it takes to get to the airport, especially during heavy traffic. Some of these vehicles are being sold to consumers, but it's probably a very limited market. The range you can fly is so short that it really constrains how useful they can be. It might be fun to fly around for short periods, but you can't really go anywhere. Even if personal electric quadcopters go into regular use, it still isn't going to result in everyone with a flying car in their garage. While it is a big step forward, it doesn't address the issues with licensing and energy. So unless there's a new form of energy or propulsion that's discovered, the flying car is probably going to be something that is forever out of reach. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel.

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