World's First Electric Flying Car Gets Certified

[AugieTN]

Drive and Fly

....According to Alef, the Model A has a 200-mile driving range and a flight range of 110 miles.....

World’s first flying car ‘Model A’ gets flight certified, and it’s 100% electric

 

[olbriar]

Interesting... I wonder what sort of propulsion system the car uses? Does it take a pilot license to operate? What little I know about the FAA is that they are very protective of air space. Do you file a flight plan? Are flight instruments required? Flight communication equipment? I can't see a person zipping across town in the air. The FAA won't let me do that with my little drone.

 

[mikedt]

All the propellers/fans are internal. And apparently it's supposed to lift a payload of 100kg. Which probably means it can take one adult, provided they're not overweight.

I suppose one would require a VTOL pilot license to legally fly it in air-spaces. Drone licenses are for unmanned remote piloted aircraft AFAIK.

 

[mikedt]

Interesting... I wonder what sort of propulsion system the car uses? Does it take a pilot license to operate? What little I know about the FAA is that they are very protective of air space. Do you file a flight plan? Are flight instruments required? Flight communication equipment? I can't see a person zipping across town in the air. The FAA won't let me do that with my little drone.

I guess you'd be using VFR only, not IFR. And with VFR you must have good visibility, to whatever the metrological conditions required by the FAA for the aircraft type.

 

[mikedt]

Another point I thought of, about safety of this thing. When a quad-copter drone fails, they drop from the air like a brick, and don't glide like a conventional fixed wing aircraft. Even helicopters when they fail can sometimes safely auto-gyro to a soft landing.

 

[olbriar]

There is a question of altitude in my mind. Air space has different altitudes for different directions of travel. Can they just fly willy-nilly or do they adhere to flying over given highways and roads? All military bases have no fly zones and so do airports. I discovered that as rural as Kansas is, the areas where I can legally fly a drone are quite limited without permission. I'm not dogging the tech. I think flying cars will be cool if they can be closely regulated so that normal air traffic isn't hindered... and everyone remains safe as possible.

 

[nickdalzell]

I would assume there's some sort of autonomous feature to enable flying without the effort (and tons of $$$) needed to obtain a private pilot license. Probably with tons of limits, too.