What was snarling up traffic was a small, Piper Cubbish plane that had landed on the highway.
It was quite a sight. I'm just sorry we didn't see it make its landing. (Sorry/not sorry: that might have been plenty scary to look up and see a plane speeding a few feet over the car roof.)
Maybe not soon, but surely someday, that little scenario will play out a bit differently. And if it's going to play out, it'll probably be in New Hampshire:
...which last year became the first U.S. state to make flying cars road-legal. Per House Bill 1182, also known as the Jetsons Bill, roadable aircraft require noinspection. So long as the machines pass muster with the Federal Aviation Administration and their owners pay a $2,000 registration fee, their pilots can drive them to an airport on public roads, then take off in them.
As an instrument of personal freedom, the Jetsons Bill is at home in New Hampshire, where license plates read “Live Free or Die.” Motorcyclists in New Hampshire can ride without helmets. Adults in cars have long been allowed to eschew seat belts. And now, New Hampshire’s spirit of liberty drives a nascent (and sputtering) flying car movement whose visionaries see wondrous things on the horizon.
Colburn says the Jetsons Bill “opens up interesting possibilities for leisure trips to islands.” He adds that the legislation could particularly aid businesses whose clients are spread far from urban centers. “The time savings in a place like New Hampshire, where the mountainous topography makes for some very indirect and lower-speed driving trips could,” he says, “be substantial.”
Laurie Garrow, an urban and regional air mobility specialist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says the Jetsons Bill positions New Hampshire to become an industry leader. “I can see a lot of developers going there to test roadable aircraft,” she says, in part because they could find plenty of routes with minimal traffic. (Source: Bloomberg)
I'm a bit disappointed to see that this looks like when you're on the highway, you're a car, and that when you're a plane, you'll be taking off and landing from an airport. Bor-ing! Still, it's a start.
The real, problem, however, is that flying cars have been having a hard time getting off the ground, production-wise, since way back in the early part of the 20th century. That's when innovators, perhaps inspired by Tin Pan Alley tunes like "Come Away with Me, Lucille, In My Merry Oldsmobile" and "Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine, We'll Go Up, Up, Up" started playing around with mashups.
Oh, there are companies trying to come up with vehicles that both hit the road and get their wings, but there's not much merchandise on the market.
There was Massachusetts-own (but Chinese-owned) Terrafugia, which had been taking $300K orders for its flying car, the Transition (a "roadable aircraft"). In January, the FAA blessed the Transition with an airworthiness certificate. In February, the company announced layoffs - and said that they were no longer focusing on flying cars. (You can still see their roadable aircraft on their website, which has not yet caught up with their new strategy.)
While Terrafugia may have crashed and burned, there's still Pal-V, a Dutch outfit that produces the Liberty ($390K), which the EU Aviation Safety Agency has certified. It's still not legal to fly-drive it, however. But the good news is you can buy one using bitcoin. Samson-Sky of Oregon is another competitor.
Also on the horizon - not my horizon, but someone's - are the eVTOLs (electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing vehicles), a.k.a., flying taxis.
They function more like helicopters and won’t ever travel on roads.
EVTOLs, which are expected to be approved by the FAA sometime this decade, will be electric-powered jitneys of the air. They’ll drop down onto urban landing pads and whisk paying customers on pricey short hops — from downtown Manhattan to the Hamptons, say. Unlike roadable aircraft, this version was conceived during this century to meet the demands of the 21st century city. They’re green, if short-hop flights for wealthy consumers can be deemed green, and they’re expected to be lucrative.
Personally, whether they're landing on the street in front of my house or not, I'm not looking forward to looking forward to all these fly-boys (and -girls) taking to the skies. It'll be bad enough with all those Amazon drones delivering raisins, and sneakers, and baby grand pianos, let alone all these fly-by-nighters (and -dayers). I know they'll all be equipped with sensors up the yin-yang, but I anticipate both midair collisions at altitudes low and high, and plenty of things dropping from the sky with a thud.
There are additional problems. Even though flying cars are still under development, they already have an outspoken critic: Kevin DeGood, author of a 2020 white paper, “Flying Cars Will Undermine Democracy and the Environment.” An infrastructure policy specialist at the Center for American Progress, DeGood argues that flying cars will allow the super rich to wall themselves off from social problems that he feels demand “collective action” — for instance, alleviating poverty and climate change. The flying car, he adds, represents the “technological apotheosis of sprawl” because it will enable the airborne elite to settle far from cities and “unleash development of pristine lands.” These lands, DeGood stresses, “provide essential environmental services related to air and water quality as well as carbon sequestration.”
They'll all be living free, and we'll be dying thanks to their f-ing roadable aircraft and flying taxis.
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