Alphecca

The Unfriendly Skies

Living in a rural area, and especially the past week spent at a remote camp, I get to appreciate the quiet of the sky. No, or precious few planes to annoy me with their sound and vision. At night, and without the light-pollution of urban areas, nothing but bright stars.

NASA and Boeing would like to change all of that. From Red Nova News:

It's a frustrated commuter's escapist fantasy: literally lifting your car out of a clogged highway and soaring through the skies, landing just in time to motor into your driveway.

Researchers stress that the ultimate dream - an affordable, easy-to-use vehicle that could allow regular people to fly 200 miles to a meeting and also drive 15 miles to the mall - is still probably decades away.

But engineers at NASA, Boeing Co. (BA) and elsewhere say the basis for a flying car is there. People have been building, or trying to build, such vehicles for decades.

The problem is, those ideas have generally required both a lot of money and the skills of a trained pilot. And melding cars and planes hasn't always been very successful.

"When you try to combine them you get the worst of both worlds: a very heavy, slow, expensive vehicle that's hard to use," said Mark Moore, who heads the personal air vehicle division of the vehicle systems program at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

The goal isn't just to create a neat gizmo: These vehicles will become more appealing - and necessary - as highways and airport hubs grow more clogged, and commutes more distant.

I really don't look forward to the day (and fortunately I probably won't be around for it) when rich folks clog the skies with their Jetson Cars day and night. And as the cars become more popular, what happens to any hopes of enjoying the night time quiet, maybe amateur astronomy, or the daytime vistas of mountains, lakes, expanses... What happens to those quiet moments of hunting or fishing when we start having these flying SUVs screaming all about as the wealthy now find it easy to get to their vacation homes? And lastly, how much harder will it be to keep our borders secure if anyone can just "hop" over?

And when these Jetson Cars crash, who pays for the burning wreckage that falls on our homes and property? Who will enforce "traffic laws" up there? Aren't urban skies noisy and crowded enough now?

Maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy but this is the kind of progress I can do without.