RamblingSimon Rants About: The Flying Car

Flight - the dream of any land dweller with an active imagination on a beautiful Saturday afternoon just staring at the blue sky, watching the birds go by, wanting to go where no man has gone before...well, go where Icarus had gone, but not melt your wax wings and plummet to Earth.

Wouldn't it be awesome to have a flying car!?! To be able to fly yourself? To be able to not feel the limitations that gravity has on you? To look like a total badass hovering above the ground as you pass everyone stuck in a traffic jam on the express lane?

Too bad. I'm here to crush your childhood fantasies.

It'd be nice to own one of these luxuries, but let us think realistically for one moment. First, safety. Now, I can guess that at least one or two of my readers have been in a motor vehicle on the road before. Just a hunch. Anyways, we are always told to drive defensively. You know why? It's because you are supposed to assume that everyone around you is a terrible driver. If you make an hour commute every single day, you are almost guaranteed actually spotting one of these people. People are naturally stupid and irresponsible. Give a person a new axis to roam on and you are giving the bad drivers the upperhand to kill. Get a drunk teen in a flying car, the kid is gonna wind up in the second story of someone's home. Nobody's going to be safe.

Secondly, regulation. Pretty much, you are putting the public on free roam. How can you possibly keep order without a systematic approach to keeping the airway in check? It works for airlines because flights can easily schedule when they are coming and going. A metropolitan area, on the other hand, would be a bit trickier. By rush hour, everyone is trying to travel and there's no way you can get from Point A to Point B without a case of Flying Rage.

Lastly, cost. Let's ring up the bill, shall we? A flying car would prolly cost around $100k when first made 'AFFORDABLE' to the general public. After that, you have to buy fuel, which it would use more of to propel it vertically, and at a much faster rate than a standard automobile. These are only DIRECT costs! Don't forget you are still a taxpayer who owes the federal government money to be able to regulate air transportation with new construction and outfitting the police force with both ground and air vehicles.

Yeah, reality sucks. Let's go back to what we were thinking of...














Ahh....