A year after it was pronounced airworthy by the FAA, and 14 years after it was first announced, the Samson Sky Switchblade is officially off the ground. This street-legal three-wheeler converts to a 200-mph (320-km/h) airplane at the touch of a button.
People can barely drive. Personal car-planes will be chaos.
People fly light aircraft all the time. Getting a pilots license isn’t as easy as sitting in line at the dmv… relax.
Yeah personal mobility is great and all but I don’t think these will be popular. I expect city flying stuff will be autonomous
Especially considering it looks like it still requires a runway like a plane to start then it flies with low mobility… i would think a “flying car” would almost need like the mobility of a helicopter
You get a crappy car that turns into a crappy plane: what’s not to love?
Yeah I don’t think they’ll ever get FAA approval. And if they do, I think your testing requirements would have to be so high as to basically be a full fledged pilot. This is all just proof of concept and fantasy hype click baity BS.
They’ve been feeding us this same exact level of flying car drivel for decades now. I’m not holding my breath for it….
It’ll be licensed pilots if it happens
I wouldn’t be surprised if a separate license for low power, small, perhaps partially automated “Air Taxis” was invented IF these types of things became popular
I’d think this would mostly be for the wealthy anyway before possibly someday getting cheap and normal enough for the commoners to use occasionally
They need to be fully automated when flying.
It makes sense because flying in largely open 3 dimensional space is comparatively easy for computers but harder for humans, whereas driving on roads is the opposite.
The only reason it’s harder for the computers on the roads is because there are a lot more stupid humans in close proximity than there would be in open air. Under a well designed fully autonomous system cars wouldn’t need 95% of the things we humans need to drive effectively.
I think the target audience will still be licensed pilots that own their aircraft. But instead of buying a small plane that need to be stored in a hangar, you can drive this to your home garage from the local airstrip/airport. Or use it to drive around town at your destination and then drive back to the airport for takeoff on your way back. So if you don’t own a Cessna or were planning to get one, this is probably not for you. Very niche, still cool IMO.