From: Michael S. Lorrey (mike@datamann.com)
Date: Tue Mar 07 2000 - 09:27:01 MST
> On Mon, 6 Mar 2000, john grigg wrote:
>
> > James, the scenario you gave of skycars crashing into people on the ground
> > is frightening and yet each year in the U.S. about fifty-thousand people die
> > in car accidents! And a large percentage involving the abuse of drugs and
> > alcohol. I see skycars being safer then that! Especially with automatic
> > controls guided by gps.
The Moller skycar uses automatic ejected parachutes as a safety system, so the fear
of skycars falling out of the sky is an erroneous fear. Most all car accidents occur
due to a car colliding with another car or another object in or along a roadway.
Roads are rather confining spaces, and constituted less than 1% of all surface area
of the country. It only follows that if cars were free to travel over any surface,
not just on roads, there would be far fewer car collisions. Furthermore, given the
addition of a third demension of altitude to the transportation system, there is
millions of times more space for people to drive sky cars than they can drive
conventional cars, so this will actually reduce the number of collisiions.
While air traffic accidents are frequently in the news, there are less than one or
two dozen such accidents in the US each year, compared to tens of thousands of
accidents on the congested roadways. Most air traffic accidents occur because of
three reasons:
a) pilot error
b) mechanical failure
c) overuse of congested air traffic pathways near airports with minimal air traffic
controllers and NO collision avoidance systems.
Because the Moller skycar is a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, it can take off
and land from anywhere, so the need for airports, and the congested airspace around
them, will be obsolete.
The collision avoidance technology, and the parachute safety system built into the
Moller sky car, eliminates the problems of crashes due to pilot error or mechanical
failure, (except in the case that there are multiple engine failures AND the
parachute sytem fails.) The Moller Skycar has eight rotary engines built into it,
and it can withstand the loss of all but two of these and maintain level flight as a
conventional aircraft (and can land horizontally at a conventional landing field in
such event).
My own prediction that if the Moller skycar is adopted, traffic accidents will go
down markedly.
--
TANSTAAFL!!!
Michael S. Lorrey
Director, Grafton County Fish & Game Assoc.
http://www.lorrey.com/gcfga/
Member, Extropy Institute
http://www.extropy.org
Member, National Rifle Association
http://www.nra.org
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
- General John Stark
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