The Other Flying Car

Flying cars. Key metric of 21st century progress? Or wasteful symbol of peak oil profligacy?

I vote key metric. Justification to follow, eventually.

The Instapundit wants one. The Speculist(s) want one. Hell, I want one. And so does Calvin, but Hobbes is dubious (scroll down). He thinks we don't deserve them. Me, I'm with Calvin. It seems like we've been waiting forever. Paul Moller is making progress, but he's been plugging away for decades now. Who knows when he'll be finished? Luckily, the field seems to be opening up a bit. Say the words flying car and many people reflexively think of Moller, but that needn't always be so.

An Israeli company, Urban Aeronautics, has announced a small but significant milestone on their road to market. Perhaps they're gaining on him.

The cooperation between us and our U.S. design partners, UPMC and STAT/MedEvac, continues to benefit the program. In addition Herzlia Medical Center, a leading private hospital in Israel has joined us as our Israeli design partner and has placed the first purchase order for an X-Hawk. We are currently in the process of recruiting additional orders from a number of EMS and general helicopter fleet operators.

Finally, with the design of X-Hawk on its way, we are constantly checking our initial performance estimates, to make sure the vehicle will indeed meet its OEI (One Engine Inoperative) OGE (Out of Ground Effect) hover capability, as well as its maximum forward design speed. Analysis recently performed by Professor Omri Rand of the Aerospace Engineering Faculty of the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel confirm and appear to even exceed our initial estimates.

Well, good for them. It seems like a shrewd move to avoid a mass market model. There is no mass market.

There is, however, a market for fast nimble medevac vehicles. In close quarters, conventional rotorcraft present significant hazards to the surrounding environment, bystanders, and themselves. X-Hawk avoids those problems. The rotors are tucked away all nice and safe inside their cowlings. Fuel economy suffers, but that's not so important in a geographically limited urban area. It's not like you're flying to Hawaii. You can always drop down and tank up.

Here are some renderings of possible future applications.

Here's a picture of one of their prototypes hovering in ground effect. Sturdy looking little brute.

And here's an article outlining its technical ancestry. (Not to be missed if you're a propeller-head. How about that Chrysler VZ-6CH?). Sorry it's a pdf. If you liked it, you'll probably also like some of the old photos at the Piasecki website.

Anyway, the point to take away is that this is a technology with a considerable history behind it, not some utterly newfangled death trap. Quite the opposite, if all goes as planned.

Back in the late eighties, I seem to remember reading of a test program carried out in Los Angeles. It was mentioned briefly in High Technology magazine. For a few months, helicopters were employed as emergency medical response vehicles.

They couldn't afford to do it permanently, but for the duration of their experiment they managed to generate some interesting data. If I'm remembering correctly, they found that by cutting their average transit time to the emergency room by half they were able to reduce patient deaths by thirty percent.

That's fairly impressive. If long-term historical trends continue and the economy continues to grow, we might see such an innovation become standard practice. We're already developing the tools, and we would eventually have the money to purchase and operate them routinely.

I love it when engineers save lives.

Of course, you might be one of those "big picture" people. Reduce Emergency Room mortality by thirty percent? What's the point of that? Unexpected accidental death has been an integral part of the human condition since our earliest days on the planet. It probably defines us somehow. Why would you ever want to change that?

To which questions I will merely shrug mulishly and reply, "I don't know. I just do."

posted by Justin on 09.19.05 at 12:32 PM





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But.. but.. but..

WHAT ABOUT CHILD CAR SEATS IN THESE DANGEROUS THINGS???

Eric Scheie   ·  September 20, 2005 10:49 AM


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