Can You Fly This Thing To Work?

[Twelvefield]

Can you fly a Jetson to work? Probably. After decades of asserting, "Well, it's the future now, where's my flying car?" I guess this is what we get: a bathtub that can give you a haircut and a bris at the same time, at 500 feet.

Maybe a better question is, should you fly a Jetson to work? A year ago, I had the same question, but with gliders. And if there is someplace to launch a glider, I can definitely take one to work. Using MSFS, I demonstrated that gliding is easy enough, although using real world conditions I kind of flew into a storm and got taken up in an updraft. Coming out of the cloud upside-down gave me the chance to see my city from a new perspective. The notes for the Jimson account were spread all over the canopy, and I was a bit late for my meeting, but I never liked Jimson anyways.

As an update to the glider experiment, today I took a Jetson (in MS24) to work. My normal commute is around half an hour. As the crow (or the Jetson) flies, it took me seven minutes. Hot dang.

So, the Jetson takes its name from George Jetson, the futuristic cartoon character who flies his own personal flying saucer to work every day. George Jetson's Jetson makes an entertaining electronic warble as it flies, certain to amuse young and old alike. My Jetson screams like a lost soul just escaped from the pit of Hell, minus any bass component. So, it's much like Jim Carrey's "Do you know what the most annoying sound in the world is?"

However, I was able to take off from my driveway and land in the work parking lot next to the ticket booth, which MS24 models correctly, down to the Mad Max aesthetic of being melted into a slag pile by hooligans with spiked hair and wearing cut up auto tires as clothing. I work in a tough, but forward-looking part of dystopia these days.

The only gauge on the MS24 Jetson is a battery meter. The other Jetsons I've seen, the pilot contributes a smart phone as an instrument package, but I don't own one. I'm not smart enough for a smart phone. However, after flying successfully from home to work, I saw that the battery was 40% used up, meaning I had the juice for a return trip. So I did that as well. I landed with just less than 20% charge remaining, meaning that I could have detoured a little to drop a can of Coke onto the head of my worst enemy and still make it back to my home base.

My next tests: can I take a blimp to work? Can I take the hot air balloon? (The former might be tricky, as the mooring for the MS24 blimp seems to be broken, and I really do not understand the valve controls, and the latter will likely be a lesson why nobody hot balloons near mountains that are also near the ocean. We shall see.)

[Twelvefield]

Can I take a blimp to work?

It took me a couple of weeks to find out. The short answer is yes, but it's also not a great idea.

The MSFS blimp is really wonderful. It brings lighter-than-air (LTA) flight to a new level in the sim. There were modded blimps you could get for previous flight sims, but they relied too much on heavily (pun) manipulated heavier-than-air (HTA) flight envelopes. They didn't float right or fly correctly. The MS24 blimp seems really accurate with its flight dynamics.

Not that I have tons of hours of blimp piloting. I've read that real blimp pilots do endorse the model, though. And blimps are really easy to fly. You go up: you're flying. Once, when I started, the blimp unmoored itself and took off with me standing on the ground. So, hooray for having a character that can walk around and do ground checks.

Controlled flight in a blimp is pretty difficult, though. It's some of the most challenging flying I have attempted, and I have severalish hours in real aircraft and thousands in sim. I'm still coming to grips with trimming the air tanks in the blimp. I want smooth, gentle flight, like you see on television. Not so much the mad porpoising with the slow-motion roll that I get with the sim blimp, with the passengers puking and demanding to be let off the ship at once. Hope, my copilot, gazes without hope into my eyes.

The blimp also brought into focus some of the rare control bindings, one of which was duplicated by Asobo, and it took me days to figure out how to fix the problem. No argument from me that the control bindings are a spaghetti plate of disaster, and that every sim pilot needs to spend a lot of time getting their configuration correct. But once I got the controls to work as expected, the blimp became manageable, barely.

"Manageable, barely" is the minimum - and most predictable - qualification to test: Can I Fly This Thing To Work? So, it was time to strap on the blimp and see if it's a good choice for commuting.

I don't own an acreage, so I don't have the room to put a blimp on my driveway. I had to make do with a nearby municipal airport. The blimp, like many other MS24 aircraft, resists an easy start if you don't begin on a runway. Trying to start from the park down the street, the blimp is already airborne. You need an airport to have a blimp mooring tower.
The blimp doesn't always play nice with its tower. Sometimes the blimp flips, sometimes the blimp unmoors itself and flies away. Whatever, just get the thing up in the air.

I picked live weather, and the day was rainy and blustery. A little strange that you get rain on the cockpit windows given the overhang of the airbag, but moments after I launched, I realized why you don't much fly blimps in rainstorms. At altitude, maybe things aren't so bad, you get blown around by the wind but you bob on the storm like a cork on the ocean waves. But close to the ground, you don't get a lot of reaction time if the wind noses you down. And you need to be close to the ground to see where you are going.

The blimp does come equipped with nice weather radar, and it also has autopilot functions, but I didn't try them out. Presumably under zero visability, you could use IFR procedure, but I don't have enough blimp hours to figure that out. I just want to get to work.

The blimp is somewhat faster than the Jetson, and the flight path and altitudes I chose to fly the blimp were similar in profile to what I did with the drone ship. The Jetson makes my commute in seven minutes, the blimp takes five, from the local airport to the parking lot. (By muggle-mobile, the lowly car, the drive is close to half an hour. My wife, who should test-drive for MacLaren, can do the run in fifteen minutes.)

I was thankful that the parking lot was big enough for the blimp. It's just a tiny dot on the planet, though, when trying to make a precision landing with an airship. Blimp landings are careful and planned many moves in advance, like a master chess game. I've discovered, though, that mashing the controls and diving at the ground works as well. More to the point, not every part of the blimp has a hitbox that triggers a crash. It's possible to get the airbag snagged on something, and the blimp just comes to a stop as if it had landed. My next goal is to stick a blimp upon the Seattle Space Needle!

So, five minutes to get to work, maybe an hour of trying to fit the blimp into its parking spot, depending on wind and airbag trim. At the end of it, I caught the wall of the airbag on a power pole, and the airship got stuck about fifteen feet off the ground. Close enough, I figured, and I popped open the door and jumped down the the ground. If my workplace had valet parking, I'd hand the attendant my keys.

[Manwith Noname]

İlk olarak Twelvefield tarafından gönderildi:

I'm not smart enough for a smart phone.

Or rather, you are smart enough to not need one.

[Twelvefield]

Can I fly a hot air balloon to work?

The short answer is: probably not. The accurate answer is: no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ way, followed by the logical corollary - why the ♥♥♥♥ would anyone want to?

I have a strong, strong bias against hot air balloons. They are expensive and wasteful, and the few times I've ever been near one (never in one), the pilot nearly died. if I want to watch a disaster unfold in slow motion, I'll head out to where the hot air balloons are at.

Where they aren't is at work. Trying to fly one to work solidifies my good reasoning as to why hot air balloonists generally avoid coastlines and mountains, seeing as where I live there are plenty of both. A balloon stuck in the mountains does not come back. So many rocks and trees, and maybe the people get eaten by bears and wolves. Same for the ocean: balloons don't swim, and sharks do.

What to talk about first? My personal balloon stories, or my virtual balloon adventure? I did used to live out on the prairies for a time. That's a sensible place for the insane pastime of hot air ballooning. Lots of open fields and it's easy for the ambulance to get to the scene of the crash. So, the wide horizon and big sky of the midland flatlands is where I saw most of my balloons.

I did go to a fancy University for a couple of years, but I ran out of money and had to come home. My father did well in business and lived (still lives) in a very tall stately house in a boondock northern city. It's not a mansion, but the place was big enough that I had room to be on my own. The house is on a hill that overlooks the city. It's not mountainous like where I live now, but by prairie standards the hill looms large.

So I end up at the prairie University, which is cheaper by every standard measurable. Fine. I needed to save money anyways. I'm studying in my room when I hear this steady roar. It's a bit like thunder, but sustained, and while not as loud it was worryingly persistent. And the roar gets louder by a lot, sputters to silence, and then starts up again.

I run downstairs and go outside. Of all things, a gigantic rainbow-hued (one might say immensely prideful) hot air balloon was heaving itself over the trees of the windward side of the hill. Over the trees, and really through them as well, as the basket hung only maybe fifteen to twenty feet off of the ground. Inside are two balloonists, and they are cursing their balloon in very loud French as the burners cut out and then roar back to life. I mean: I am right here, and they are right there. The burners howl like tortured dragons. Then they cough out again.

The balloon doesn't climb. The wind pushes it down.

"High!" I yell at the pilot.

"Hello," he yells back to me in heavily accented French. The French and their balloons, I am telling you.

"No," I reply, pointing cloudward, "High! You must go high! High!" I admit: I always think I'm really funny,

"♥♥♥♥ YOU!" the pilot screams. His English is not bad.

I'll always remember this. The gondola of the balloon passes between the second-storey window of my Dad's house and the second-storey window of the house across the fence from him. It is as silent and large as a cloud, and the pilot and the co-pilot just look at each other and giggle. Then the burner catches again and the balloon by some miracle gains height and flies away.

Another balloon story. At the University, I meet the girl who is to be my wife, only she breaks up with me before I can drag her down the aisle. But we do have some nice dates, and I take her to the big summer fair. This year, the only year they do this, is a massive balloon launch. We watch the balloons go up. It is an otherworldly sight, all those colours against a perfect blue sky. But one balloon goes up way, way faster than all the others. It is shaped like an ice-cream cone, a very tall cone with a corporate logo.

From what I know, the cylindrical shape of the balloon with its very narrow bottom lent it a tendency to trap very hot air at its apex. So the bag got far too hot and the balloon shot up. The airflow caused the bottom to fold and seal up, and that made the parachute vent inoperable. You need a vent to bring in cold air if the the bag air is too hot.

The balloon went up like a rocket. It spun, as well. It was spinning so hard that the basket came out at maybe a thirty-degree angle. All we could do was watch this thing go up and hope it didn't snap. The pilot did manage to regain control after the balloon ascended several thousand feet. I heard he broke his arm and bruised his ribs. I can't imagine how terrifying it would be in that gondola.

Unfortunately, the same pilot some weeks later rode a dinosaur-shaped balloon into some power lines and was electrocuted. I do not understand why people go up in these things.

Well, in MSFS, the worst you can do is crash. It turns out, that's not hard to do. While there are quite a few advanced aspects to modern ballooning, just like flying the blimp, you don't need to know a lot to make the thing go up. But you do need some experience at the controls to make going down not end up in the Emergency Room. There are a few special controls for burners, igniters, and vents that should be set up for hot air balloon flight. You can operate the whole thing with the mouse, but it's better with a few simple bindings.

And maybe that's the draw of the balloon. The technology is very old, and for what it is, it is logical. The burners are very similar to what you have on a gas barbecue. You set up the fuel flow the same way (although an expert pilot will balance fuel load), ignite it with a spark, and control the heat with a valve. The hotter the air in the bag, the more it rises. A thermometer helps you visualise this, so that it's easy to find whatever temperature it is that causes the balloon to be neutral-buoyant. A VSI helpfully shows how fast you are rising to where the oxygen runs out or falling to the hard, unforgiving Earth. An anemometer shows you what it believes the wind speed to be, although if the wind picks up, the entire balloon begins to wobble and sway, and you wonder why there are no seatbelts.

There's nothing to protect you. You stand on a wooden plank that is attached to the gondola by exactly four woodscrews. Any one of them could fail, and then you get to look up to watch the balloon become a dot in the sky while the Earth gets suddenly bigger. And the plank itself looks worn. It could crack open at any time. Termites! They can be anywhere. Even carpenter ants are a menace. A sociopathic Boy Scout with his safety blade could shiv that plank. It's so thin, and the sky underneath your feet is much too vast.

So the wind picks up, and you are tired of counting the ways the wood and wicker (not military grade aluminium, but that least sturdy and most breakable of all of Mankind's technologies - woven wicker!) gondola could fail. So you look up. Generally, the airbag is doing its thing. If it's windy, it moves around a lot. That's when you see that there are just four attachment points keeping you bound to the bag. Four thin carabiners. Not wrought-iron chain or drop-forged steel, but carabiners that look like they came from Goodwill's hardware section. Four for a buck. Oh, ♥♥♥♥, what am I doing up here?

In this instance, I am testing the flight envelope of the balloon. Seeing as a hot air balloon's flight envelope is a literal envelope, I can say for certain that bad things happen when you exceed it. In MSFS, the balloon seems to max out its vertical ascent rate at around 950 ft/min. That's the speed of an elevator in a high-rise apartment.

I got the bag up to 375 degrees Celsius. I roast turkeys at 300 Fahrenheit. Probably, I could get the bag hotter, but I was over 10,000 feet and nearly out of fuel. Be warned; the balloon does use a lot of fuel. If you just use the default setting, you won't get far.

To bring the bag down, I will pull on the parachute vent cord. This quickly spills cold air into the bag, and the balloon loses buoyancy. If you let the temperature go down too low, the balloon goes into its landing-folding animation and the bag collapses in on itself. Even in a videogame, this is alarming to see at high altitude. In a real situation, it would be game over: trying to get more heat into a deflated bag would just ignite it. You would burn, it would burn, and you'd make a big exclamation point in the sky out of fire.

Ignoring the real tragedy this could cause (Asobo sure does, and so do I), the game will allow you to re-inflate the bag. But it isn't quick. As you plummet, you really hear the wind as it whistles louder and louder through that damned wicker while the altimeter spins like a top. It's worth trying at least once, just to have the experience, especially if you have VR.

To my final point: can I fly a hot air balloon to my place of work? Sure, why not. You go up, you go down. The only thing that could go wrong is if the winds fail you, and you end up ditching in a mountain lake where the bears swim out to eat you. More likely, the winds simply blow you the wrong way. Which, given 360 degrees of compass, is 359 different wrong ways.

That's what happened to me. I used Live Weather, so now I'm ballooning in a snow squall. The winds do bring me about halfway in the right direction, which I found miraculous. Ballooning, you can control your direction by finding winds at differing altitudes. MSFS does this reasonably well, although there are at most only four weather layers, and likely they are at least 1,000 feet thick. To get to the halfway point to my worklplace took me around as long as if I had walked there: most of the winds were 5kph or less.

Then, Live Weather brought me a snow squall, which was impressive to watch from the gondola. There's no protective, comfortable airplane to surround you, and definitely no sweet cabin crew to provide you pretzels and half-a-can of soda pop. Even if you huddle down into the foetal position at the the bottom of the balloon gondola (you can do this in VR!), you can still see the storm through the gappy wicker. Boy, do I ever hate balloons.

The snow cloud had an updraft that took me up, but the cold air chilled the bag really quickly. I ended up travelling considerably farther north than I wanted to be. For a time, all I could see was cloud. I brought the ship down, and I saw through swirling snowflakes suburbia unwisely built up a mountainside. I could burn the remaining fuel trying to find a south wind, or I could come down in some guy's back yard before I hit the mountain.

At this point, I felt I understood the plight of the French balloonists heading for my father's house, although their ride was obviously not working right. I pulled the ripcord and came down into the neighborhood. I aimed for the cul-de-sac, but ended up in the yard next to a big tree. I like to think that the lady of the house brought out tea and cookies for me, but I'm reasonably sure that if I stayed in the sim, one of the animals would have spawned on the street and eaten me. Rrrawr! Such is the life (and death) of the ballooonist. Merde!

[Twelvefield]

Can I fly a hot air balloon to work, if it has a goofy propeller stuck to it?

The answer, I am amazed to report... is yes. There are two forms of hot air balloon in MSFS: a more traditional deathtrap design that flies guided by wind directly into mountains and piranha-infested lakes, and one called a Fly-DOO, which has attached to its frame a Jules-Verne inspired motorized propeller that can defy the wind as long as the wind is not more than 5 knots in strength.

It's a kid's problem: if a hot air balloon can't be steered (it can, but you have to have a pilot's understanding of the winds aloft, and enough fuel and patience to exploit that), then why not attach a propeller to the balloon? And you can, with the predictable problems of added weight, fuel consumption, and the option to have your hands chopped off if you lean too far into the thing: the Fly-DOO blades are unprotected. Granted, you pretty much have to climb onto the motor to get your hand caught in the prop. You're much more likely to simply fall out of the basket.

The Fly-DOO construction seems hardier and more contemporary than the non-powered hot air balloon. The basket has plenty of reinforcement, and none of the many shiny bolts that hold it together seem to be laden with rust. Nearly everything has a safety tether, so that if the bottom should happen to fall out, things like the gas canisters or the battery for the electric motor won't plummet like bombs, just you.

My favourite was the small chemical fire extinguisher. Maybe there's a nanosecond where you could put out a fire on a balloon before it either immolates the airbag that keeps you aloft, or detonates the natural gas canisters, or ignites the material of the basket, or burns through the fuel lines. Maybe it's there to put out the candles on birthday cakes brought aloft. There is also a beverage holder, maybe for a bottle of champagne. While I would need to drink a lot before going up in a real balloon, I would hope the pilot stays sober. The pilot would remain calm and level-headed while drunken me would drop the fire extinguisher overboard and try to give somebody's Cybertruck a new sunroof.

Again using Live Weather, I took off from my driveway and pointed my balloon towards work, which is easy to do after you've slaved the seldom-used Engine Direction control to your joystick. You just give the prop its juice from the Master Switch, activate the throttle, and point the engine to one side or the other to steer the balloon. As before, the prevailing winds generally brought me along in the right direction to go to work, but they angled too far to the north. The Fly-DOO allowed me to swing south and catch the fickle western wind.

As I drifted like a cloud - plus the constant drone of the prop, so an annoyingly noisy cloud - I wondered how long the battery would last for the motor. It's the same kind of battery you'd have in an electric car. I guess it must last maybe ninety minutes to two hours, but the fuel on the balloon will last only an hour if you are lucky. Depending on how buoyant your balloon is, you intermittently charge the heat in the airbag, and each blast costs you fuel. It took me about 10% of my fuel to go aloft, and I budgeted another 10% for landing: you need fuel to cushion the descent. I always thought that balloons would drift on forever, but in reality they come down easily (no wings!) and so most balloon expeditions are very short, four hours of balloon time includes around an hour of actual flight.

It took me an hour and sixteen minutes to make it from my house to work (normally a drive of around half-an-hour). So, no speed records. For that, I'd have to be Sir Richard Branson, who holds the world hot air balloon speed record at 245 knots (!). He had help: from his fortune, science, a daring copilot in Per Lindstrand, and the intercontinental jet stream. It's a breathtaking feat, not just being trapped in a balloon with Sir Richard Branson, but all the rest of that stuff as well. I recommend reading up on his amazing flight!

Thanks to the Fly-DOO motor and the fidelity of FS24's model of the parking lot near where I work, I was able to drop the balloon on my exact parking spot, something that brings me great pride. To go home, all I have to do is plug the battery in to the J-charger at the parking lot to re-energize the motor, and steal 80 pounds of natural gas from my workplace somehow. For 1:16' of flight used up 95% of my fuel, cutting my simulated flight probably a lot tighter than most professional pilots would prefer. I admit to a certain number of swear words employed when the wind shifted and I was stuck in a hover over the IKEA parking lot, which is within long walking distance my employer's lot, but unacceptable as proof that I could fly a hot air balloon to work. Hovering costs fuel, and you need fuel to land. I burnt quite a bit to go aloft to soar another two thousand feet over IKEA, but was rewarded with a following wind that swept me over the highway and directly to my intended parking lot with just a few pounds of gas to spare.

Primarily, I am a charcoal guy when it comes to barbecue, but now I have a new respect for those natural gas burners.

[AtomicPrimate]

İlk olarak Twelvefield tarafından gönderildi:

Can I fly a hot air balloon to work?

The short answer is: probably not. The accurate answer is: no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ way, followed by the logical corollary - why the ♥♥♥♥ would anyone want to?

I have a strong, strong bias against hot air balloons. They are expensive and wasteful, and the few times I've ever been near one (never in one), the pilot nearly died. if I want to watch a disaster unfold in slow motion, I'll head out to where the hot air balloons are at.

The entirety of your novel of a post boils down to this: What you are really saying here is that you are scared of hot air balloons because you know nothing about them.

As for taking one to work, it all depends on your job. I've flown them on science missions over the amazon to collect canopy specimens many times. So yes, I actually HAVE taken hot air balloons to work on multiple occasions with no problems at all. For some uses, hot air balloons are far superior, safer, efficient, and more controllable than any other method of flight.

Oh, and also a buddy of mine uses balloons to survey grape fields for wine production. So he takes his balloon to work quite often. In some cases they are even better than drones.

As for the Jetson's flying car, you can take those to work, but a better question is this: Do you want every drunken stoned, illiterate idiot flying them around? Personally, I don't even think most people should be allowed to drive a ground car let alone fly ANYTHING at all ever LOL!!!

[Twelvefield]

İlk olarak AtomicPrimate tarafından gönderildi:

The entirety of your novel of a post boils down to this: What you are really saying here is that you are scared of hot air balloons because you know nothing about them.

YES!! You understand nearly completely. I do know a very little about ballooning, but the amount I know about it is so close to nothing that I can see where from a certain perspective that it would equal nothing. I'm fine with that. MSFS is all about taking virtual aircraft you have no business flying, and then pretending you are Chuck Yeager with them.

And YES!! you make an excellent point about the responsibility of driving. Vehicle manufacturers do prioritize their own payday over client survivability, although most governments call for regulations that insist upon some safety measures. Lobbyists will push back those features as far as they can so that the vehicles make a healthy profit for their parent companies. This is equally the same for cars at it is for airplanes, you don't need me to point to examples.

The Jetson flight computer seems mostly foolproof in terms of pure flight. It won't let you roll and it won't let you fall or overspeed, given decent VFR conditions. You can certainly ram things with it, though. The saving grace is that you can only stay aloft for a few minutes.

Regulation around flying cars is an interesting, under-served legal topic. How much agency should a civilian "driver" (not pilot) get, versus an artificially-intelligent flight computer? A lot of so-called flying cars are more like large drones. A flying car that could be truly piloted would need a pilot that has advanced certification, which would mean too much training for a civilian flying car to be practical. So, to answer your question: sane rational people don't want drunken, stoned, illiterate drivers to take to the sky, but the Jetson is designed so that drunken, stoned, illiterate drivers could do just that. It's the same for cars. Where do you draw the line, if you are a manufacturer?

Your ballooning stories sound great! You should expand on them, A LOT. I would love to learn more. I want to try those things with the balloons in MSFS!

To be clear, my idea of work is to travel from home, where I keep my home computer, and go down the highway to my work, where I keep my work computer. It's not an exotic or interesting commute*, and it's best if I keep it that way in my real life.

*For a while I did commute by train. Some people find trains endlessly fascinating, and one day I did get a tour of the engine. Mostly, I stayed in the car in front of the coffee car, and listened to endless stories from prettily-dressed secretaries explaining how their boyfriend/fiancé should have got them the platinum engagement ring with the baguette diamond, instead of the white gold. On the interesting-commute-to-work scale, does that compare to biosurveying the Amazon in a balloon? I don't think so, but maybe some train nut might.

So to satisfy that, the locomotive is a modified and refurbished 1988 GMDD F59PH, which lacks the distinctive composite panels of the F59PHI.

[Manwith Noname]

I am seeing parallels to what I wish wasn't the real world. Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should.

Back to escapism.

[Eva]

It amazes me that with just 40 hours required for a PPL in the US of A, that general aviation isn't far more dangerous than it is. Grant you the average pilot takes a good bit longer than that. But there are a LOT of ways to kill yourself and others flying (or not) an airplane.

[AtomicPrimate]

İlk olarak Eva tarafından gönderildi:

It amazes me that with just 40 hours required for a PPL in the US of A, that general aviation isn't far more dangerous than it is. Grant you the average pilot takes a good bit longer than that. But there are a LOT of ways to kill yourself and others flying (or not) an airplane.

40 hours is the absolute minimum for a privet pilot's license. It comes with restrictions. If you only have 40 hours, you can't fly on anything but perfect sunny windless days. You can't fly at night or a close to dusk. You can't fly anything bigger than a Cessna, and you can't carry passengers. The 40 hour requirement is pretty much just for people that want to bucket list it. They are not really going to fly anywhere after passing the test. OR, they are pursuing a commercial license. In which case, 40 hours is a basic tutorial to get you ready for the next part of training which requires 150 hours of sky time. AND, on top of that, just because you have 40 hours doesn't mean you can take the test. It's all up to the instructor, and his or her level of confidence in the student. Some people may be ready at 40 hours, others won't be.

The reason general aviation isn't more dangerous than it is, is because we in the usa have the best air-traffic controllers, radars, and regulations in the world. Well... We did have. The current administration fracked that up too.

[AtomicPrimate]

İlk olarak Twelvefield tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak AtomicPrimate tarafından gönderildi:

The entirety of your novel of a post boils down to this: What you are really saying here is that you are scared of hot air balloons because you know nothing about them.

The Jetson flight computer seems mostly foolproof in terms of pure flight. It won't let you roll and it won't let you fall or overspeed, given decent VFR conditions. You can certainly ram things with it, though. The saving grace is that you can only stay aloft for a few minutes.

Regulation around flying cars is an interesting, under-served legal topic. How much agency should a civilian "driver" (not pilot) get, versus an artificially-intelligent flight computer? A lot of so-called flying cars are more like large drones. A flying car that could be truly piloted would need a pilot that has advanced certification, which would mean too much training for a civilian flying car to be practical. So, to answer your question: sane rational people don't want drunken, stoned, illiterate drivers to take to the sky, but the Jetson is designed so that drunken, stoned, illiterate drivers could do just that. It's the same for cars. Where do you draw the line, if you are a manufacturer?

Eventually the "driver" will have no control at all. The flying cars will all be AI network controlled instead. Ground cars are already starting to do this. Some new models don't even have controls in the cabin.