“Japanese Student Takes Flight of Fancy, Creates Flying Bicycle” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJrJE0r4NkU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJrJE0r4NkU)
*Edit: Far beyond regulations and air traffic control issues, only regarding to physics:*
I’ve just seen this video of a Japanese student that has achieved making a flight of about 200 or 300m with a mechanism that turns the pedalling we normally do in a bicycle to the turning of a propeller.
Now, if we as humans and a very great bike can reach 40-50 mph (and very light planes such as cessna can take of with only 60mph – not to mention Bush Planes – all of these weighting easely 4 to 5 times the weight of a person + an extra light airplane design, specifically created for that porpouse) – why does this seems too hard to achieve/sustain? I can only guess its a matter of efficiency (or the lack of it), but which one of them?
In: Physics
What stops us from having flying *anything* in the ~~personal transportation~~ bicycle/car sector is air traffic control. 2D traffic control is already a pain in the neck. You’ve got speed limits, traffic lights, different kinds of road lines, different kinds of intersections, rules for when police are coming toward you or behind you, etc. etc. Naturally, you can’t drive through trees or walls, or drive off-road without destroying your car, so there’s a bunch of natural laws supplementing the municipal ones.
But once you go 3D, all that goes out the window. Now you’ll have to govern how high you can fly, what zones you can fly over (if any), what speeds you can fly at (if they’re different from road speeds), noise restrictions, how you’re supposed to respond to police vehicles, how police vehicles are supposed to respond to you, how to handle cross-traffic and intersections, ON TOP OF the existing land-based rules, which might have to be completely rewritten now that they can take to the skies.
It’s certainly *physically* possible for us to have flying bicycles and cars, absolutely. We’re *long* past the point when we were physically able to make them sustainably. We probably could’ve done it some 30-50 years ago, tbh. It’s mostly the air traffic control problems that are holding it up. If the problem of self-driving cars gets solved, I can see an air-traffic-control solution not far down the road, because controlling the human element is probably the biggest factor here.
That’s my two cents.
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