An article posted yesterday in BusinessWeek postulated that flying cars – once the stuff of science fiction (a la George Jetson) – are soon to be made a reality!
Apparently Honda and Toyota are both working on flying cars with Honda having developed an experimental jet-powered air taxi, now in flight testing.
The article mentioned two entrepreneurs currently working on flying cars but missed one of the best known inventors dedicated to making flying cars a reality – Paul S. Moller. Paul S. Moller’s Skycar is already a reality and out-performs helicopters in tests. Moller has been working on the Skycar’s development for over 40 years. The entry now of Honda and Toyota into this space has to give impetus to this new form of transport.
At $500,000 to get one of the first 500 I think I’ll be waiting to get one of the first 5,000,000!
We do have RAID 1 0 on the DB servers, a live backup running now, and have done a few other things to ensure this wont happen again. The timing was unfortunate because things were still in transition because of the datacenter move.
Hi
Just to set the record straight. None of these flying cars has ever flown off of it’s 50 foot safety tether. So, none of them has ever been tested vs. a helicopter, or anything else. The latest vehicle, which, by Moller’s own admission is underpowered, consumes 80 gal/hour in hover flown unmanned and otherwise unloaded, with 8 gal of fuel on board. (yikes!)
That’s way more than a similarly sized piston helicopter, like a Robinson R22, which burns about 11 or the R44, which burns about 16 . Oh, and the helicopter can actually fly and carry a payload – something the Moller vehicle has yet to do in a meaningful way.