Asymmetrical Information

Just off of the top of my head, there are 3 reasons I can think of [and probably more that will be raised by others]. Demographics/economics: As cities evolved, it was largely by way of contiguous suburbs. Roads were more economical and practical ways to move people, supplemented on the East Coast by trains using existing right of ways. The economics did not work. Technological: For all of Mr. Sikorski's admitted brilliance, the state of the art did not advance as far as he predicted. In the 1950's helicopters were noisy, inefficient [this is largely pre-turbine engines] and downright scary to civilians [and quite a few military too]. Bureaucratic: To be honest, the FAA is inherently hostile to general aviation and "low and slow" fliers. They are set up for scheduled airlines flying long distances at high enough altitude to be tracked and controlled from a central ATC system. A whole lot of bus and taxi equivalent aircraft, converging at low altitude in urban areas scares the bejeezus out of them. Picture a rush hour traffic jam a'la the Nimitz freeway in the San Francisco Bay area or the Holland Tunnel in NY, in midair. Thus, more bureaucratic hoops to jump through. That is roughly the order that the problems will have to be solved, too. First it has to be something that can be made economically feasible. Then the technology has to mature enough to make it possible. Then you have to drag the government kicking and screaming into reality.

Because these future NPR patrons, even in those ancient times, knew somehow it would be Wrong to commit urban sprawl by moving into those sacred mountains. See them in their demographic wisdom, joining the countrywide migration from farms and small communities to great anonymous cities, whose socially conscious politicians would spare no effort fifty years later to prevent any reversal of the human flood. You can't just move out of town into the country, even if your father was born there - that would corrupt the unspoiled environmental temple of nature. And helicopters burn petroleum products and make noises and cost much to run, and remind our betters of Viet Nam.

It is happening, just not in the way that Mr. Sikorsky thought it would. The growth in broadband capacity and the distribution of work within companies has already allowed many companies to work without having to support big expensive to maintain "downtown" office space inside crowded city infrastructures. At the time Mr. Sikorsky was writing this, it was a given that you would have to go to "the office". There were only two types of office, the "headquarters" and the "field office". Today, companies put thier offices in much smaller buildings in many more locations, usually in suburbs placed inthe "outer ring" of metropolitan areas. It is also no longer an oddity that employees would work from their home office, but more often it is becoming the norm. In my company ( Fortune 50, second largest software company in the world, starts with an "O") you have to prove and justify why you need an office or cubicle, if not, it is expected that you work from your home office. I work on a team spread out all over the world, the closest other person on the team is 500 miles away, and we've all only met in person together once. One member of my team works via two-way satellite from his mountain home in Jackson Wyoming, the rest of us are on either DSL or ISDN. we use video/voice conferencing, desktop sharing software, remote support software tools to do what we all used to travel the world to do just a few years ago.

It is no longer "how are you going to get from your home to work", but "how are you going to get your work to come home to you".

You're economist Jane, but nevertheless I think the main reason is that it simply isn't economically feasible. Helicopters are still incredibly expensive to build and operate, relative to just about any other kind of transportation. They require tons of regular maintence, and are still relatively unpleasant machines.

Unless you're talking about super-expensive models, helicopters still are very rough machines to ride in.

Also, in the situation described in the article, can you imagine how much local wind would be generated by a helicopter capable of transporting 15 people comfortably? Almost enough to rip the guy's clothes off.

Russell has a very real point. Consider fuel costs. How much gas does it take to operate a helicopter? And we're talking about the best high octane stuff you can get.

A PDF file with the gallon per hour consumption rate can be found here.

James

There are many practical and economic reasons why such a fantasy did not happen. Consider the example given: the commuter lives on an otherwise inaccessible mountain. Somebody had to build this home which means construction crews and material had to get there. Furniture had to be delivered. The family needs to be able to get to the store. The kids have to get to school.

The same factors that keep us all from being primarily dependent on public transportation would play here but more so: a fleet of helicopters is a lot more expensive to build and operate than a fleet of buses.

A rather obvious technical point is that a helicopter has to spend a lot of fuel just to hover,whereas a car will use nearly all of it (not counting climbing hills)to move forward,making it a lot more economical.

Funny that you and I should be blogging on exactly the same article at nearly the same time. Jinx!

Loved the article and comments from all but as a helicopter pilot with 30 yrs experience I can say you all missed the real reason. Its the one thing neither government nor science can change.

It's the weather.
Helicopters are only really useful in VMC conditions (1000/3). Below that you have to go to an airport which .. well ... you get my point.

Two issues with Sikorsky's scenario:

1) Helicopters are hideously maintenance-intensive, which translates into cost.
2) Imagine the air traffic control issues. In a major city, at rush hour, there could be 50,000 or 100,000 helicopters aloft simultaneously. At least in bad weather, they would all have to be under the control of Air Traffic Control..I don't think a controller can be expected to handle more than maybe 30 aircraft simultaneously, so this would mean perhaps 2000-3000 controllers on duty in each major metropolitan area..which in turn leads to other problems, such as radio frequency congestion.

There's a lesson here. Sikorsky was certainly a "practical aeronautical engineer," as he says, and a very smart and creative one--but he should have looked beyond his own technology and considered the impact of adjacent technologies such as air traffic control, radio, and radar.

Unless I read too quickly, no one seems to have mentioned safety. Most car accidents are minor; similar accidents in a helicopter are likely fatal. Same with stalls.

But the exercise reminds me of an article by Isaac Asimov about predicting the future. He imagined what someone from the 19th century would think if transported to the modern day and saw skyscrapers for the first time. How do they work? Obviously, each must have all businesses and apartments within a few floors of each other because no one could climb all those stairs twice a day. In fact, each must be a self-contained city, because the average person of the 19th century could not predict the elevator.

Don't Sikorsky's predictions sound like a dot.com business plan? "In only ten years, our product will have changed the way the entire world works!!" In today's terms, it appears Sikorsky simply "ran out of runway." :)

As Russell and David have said, I think the biggest factor is maintenance. My sister flies helos (I think that's the current term) for the Navy, and she talks about an hour of maintenance for every two hours in the air. This immediately precludes the "copter in every garage" that you see in some of Heinlein's novels ("If This Goes On" comes to mind), or The Jetsons, or Back to the Future.

I think if the maintenance problem were solved, we'd see some significant changes. Sure the FAA wants to control the skies, but I doubt they could stand up to pressures from all the upper-middle-income people who wanted to commute from the Catskills (or West Virginia, or Death Valley...). They wouldn't really live in the middle of nowhere, but they could each have a acre lot, within 20 minutes' drive of schools and stores, and commute 100 miles to the Wall Street heliport. That would involve more of a heli-bus than a private copters, but I think maintenance is the primary problem in both cases.

I'm not sure everyone would own a helicopter, even if they were cheap (and relatively foolproof). We've been evolving traffic laws for cars for a century, and I don't think everything was worked out until the 70s. Now add multiple layers of traffic, and rules for landing, and emergency crashes...

Still, moving everyone into the sky would reduce congestion a lot. Also save taxes, since we wouldn't need as many roads.

All in all, I think transfer booths ala Larry Niven are the way to go. (See The Alibi Machine in A Hole in Space, for example.)

Helicopters have many problems.

I saw a program in 2001 on an inventor who had built a jet/car using four small jet engines. He claimed that it had better fuel efficiency than a car, and traveled in excess of 200MPH. The problem was control, since no one would want to fly through the downtown at 200MPH, and he was currently developing a system to allow these jetcars to avoid one another and the surrounding buildings while traveling towards their destination.

It sounds fantastical, but it was on a science channel, and definitely not a hoax. So maybe we'll be flown to work by our jetcars in ten or fifteen years. And if the robotic driver is good enough, we'll be getting there very fast.

As to the initial question "Why didn't this happen?" The same thing applies to our nuclear-powered cars. Where's mine?

Actually, more on point was the expectation that the many thousands of pilots would come home and keep flying after WWII - while aviation was slightly boosted, it wasn't the dot.com kind of takeoff everyone was expecting. (P-51 designers built a 4 seat airplane (Navion), including lots of feedback from the complaints of the P-51 pilots about things they didn't like).

Did that happen? Nope.... Heck - they couldn't even find buyers for most of the military planes (trainers and others), and scrapped them for the cost of the metal.

I have a great uncle who was a flight instructor for B-17s and B-24s during WWII, and he's never flown since he was demobbed.

Wife/Kids/Work just take too much time.
Flying takes some degree of continuing practice. I was out for 2 weeks after they grounded us after Sept. 11th, and my first landing (at a short strip) took me 3 tries to get down in good order. My flying club requires me to go up with an instructor if I haven't flown an hour in the last 90 days.

The airplanes I fly are "4 seat". Yeah, right. 900 pound useful load. Plus you have to actually measure it to a degree and make sure you're within design parameters of balance. Compare that to the ol' station wagon. Did you have to worry if Edith or Jimmy was in the front seat?

Moller thinks he's onto something (And give him credit he does have one flying), and a large part of his design is that all the complicated stuff's going to be done by computer, you'll just guide it like you do a car. (I'm skeptical, but check out his website)

As to the tremendous cost of helicopters, others have brought up well, that's right, but wrong. Yes, turbines are expensive. That's a cause and effect sort of thing. The military needed turbines, they funded research, bought them, etc.

Local police departments are buying Robinson's in great numbers. Far cheaper initial cost, flying cost, maintenance costs than the almost free military choppers (who have been flown by Army pilots for 20+ years).

http://www.robinsonheli.com/products.htm

Those are the new affordable choppers that *are* starting to make it into the "general" population.

The R22 starts off about $165k (Slightly less then the old standard Cessna 172). Same engine (Minor differences). Uses avgas (horribly expensive compared to jet-a, but the R22 burns 8 gallons an hour compared to ~60-150 for a turbine.

http://www.robinsonheli.com/BetaII.htm

The R44 is making a lot of Police inroads - that's got the same engine as the Cessna 182s (And many other planes). Those burn about 12-14 gallons/hour of flight time.

http://www.robinsonheli.com/R44reliability.htm

So perhaps Sikorsky was just a tad bit ahead of his time:
http://www.avweb.com/articles/toyotawar/

Apparently Honda's got a prototype flying around in NC somewhere. Interesting.

But right now, there's nothing big that will happen barring some sort of major tort reform. Right now the aviation community is being regulated by lawyer. FAA might think they're in charge, but I promise insurance companies have put more pilots and flying business out of business than the meanest FAA inspector on an ingrown toenail day.

Lawsuits put all the GA planes out of production in the 80s. (Piper, for instance, was found to have been negligant in its design of the Super Cub, dating back prior to WWII, despite the pilot, in violation of regulations, sitting in the wrong seat, attempting to take off from a closed runway, and failing to clear the runway and running into a van (remember the wrong seat bit?)) Mr Brazil wasn't the only one who apparently wasn't responsible for his actions.

How Toyota and Honda are going to (theoretically) deal with that I want to see.

As to the "danger" of airplanes, its overstated. In almost every case, if you keep your head in an emergency, you're fine.

http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/month.asp

(And stalls? No, they're not usually fatal. Close to the ground they can be, but that's one reason pilots are drilled about recovery and how to deal with them. No, its not always successful, but neither is it a dread occurance. (Unlike, say, an accidental spin in a Grumman AA-1))

Right now a new Cessna goes for $170k, (Close t the Robinson's, but helicopters are horribly inefficient to fly forwards (and planes suck at hovering)). A New Tiger is $220k (*drool drool*). The "new" Diamond airplanes are $120-170k. (All composite, we'll have to see how they hold up, if someone wants to give me one, I'll test it). Etc.

IMO, for aviation to really take off (NPI) tort reform will have to be enacted. The FAA will have to be disbanded and replaced. After that, if planes/helicopters get under $100k, I think you'll see more and more start showing up. The technology is getting us where Sikorsky was dreaming of. (Some of the new diesel aviation developments are damn interesting).....

Ah well. Anybody got a plane for sale?

Addison
PP-SEL

Helicopters are necessarily far more complex than fixed-wing aircraft: their wing rotates, and pitch must be varied and controlled during each rotation unless the vehicle is simply hovering. Doing this isn't trivial, and the mechanism's complexity (plus necessary maintenance) is higher than on fixed-wing aircraft... and it always will be.

Many of the other comments are also correct -- weather, fuel use (remember, it costs no fuel at all for a car to rest on the road), pilot availability (helicopters are hard to fly, although computers are making that easier), and terminal control are all killers to some degree.

Sikorsky's love for his inventions blinded him to some of the realities; his failure to anticipate faster improvements in competing technologies than possible with helicopters did the rest.

I think Yogi Berra had the answer to your question. "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

Jane,

It's so obvious.

We're not commuting by helicopter bus because we're all commuting with our individual Rocket Belts!

As this NASA image indicates

http://www.nasm.si.edu/nasm/dsh/artifacts/RM-RocketBelt.htm

the Rocket Belt has it all over outmoded helicopter bus technology, which is essentially mass transportation - which American hate.

Gotta go now - I'm due at the Los Angeles Ray Bradbury festival.

First, there's the economics. As various people have mentioned, helicopters are more complex than fixed wing airplanes, thus they cost more and require more maintenance. And fixed wing airplanes require higher quality parts and maintenance than cars, because when something goes wrong in an airplane you can't just pull off the road and call AAA on your cell phone. Yes, there are cheaper helicopters, but they still cost several times as much as a car to run.

Second, helicopters are tricky to fly. Most of the business executives who might be able to afford them would have difficulty freeing up enough time to learn to fly them. And flying in traffic is considerably more difficult and dangerous than driving in traffic. Computers could handle most of those issues now, but with all the infrastructure we've already built for autos...

That bit about only flying in clear weather (VMC) depends on the pilot and the airplane. I used to know a Coast Guard chopper pilot - he'd do routine flights in snowstorms bad enough to keep most drivers home. Just follow a railroad track or highway at treetop level.(This was 10 years before GPS became operational, which at least takes much of the navigational load off, but still requires the pilot to deal with 40 mile gusts.) He had a LOT more training and flight time than the average private pilot, and a big powerful helicopter that can handle a lot more wind. Even if computers could equal his skill, if you tried to take a small chopper to work in high winds, you'd likely wind up splattered on the side of your office building or tangled up in the power lines.

There was an article in the S.F. Chronicle a few years back about an inventor
who was developing a personal aircraft. It opened with a scenario where somebody flies from the Sierras to a Bay Area locale. Haven't heard anything about this guy since.

For what its worth, the "Moller" referred to by one of the commenters is probably the same guy referred to by two other commenters as developing a flying car. His website is here.

Forget the econmics, weather etc. I am a military pilot and NOTHING would scare me more than lowering the entrance requirements so more people can fly. Tort reform is needed but I cannot believe that anyone would want a chopper in every driveway. The pure numbers of aircraft in the air would overwelm the ATC system and pilots ability to maintain situational awareness of everything going on. Flying is a couple of orders of magnitude more demanding than driving and we kill roughly 50K/year on the roads. I see no way of making large numbers of people capable of flying well. See the latest crash on the East coast or the story by the earlier poster. Sikorsky's dream is just too dangerous...

Robot/computer pilots might be an answer to the pilot question, but without FAA & Tort reform they'll never be commercially viable.

Now, if they're widely and successfully used in military drones for a decade or so first there might be an opening, but I'm afraid that's what it will take, and that decade is just getting started for fixed-wing aircraft with helicopters still a few years away.

It's not really economics. An R22 (mentioned above) can be rented for about $110/hour "wet." That includes insurance, maintenance reserve (money set aside for oil changes and the like), engine reserve (money set aside for the engine overhaul every 1500-200 hours of operation), loan amortization, fuel, and profit. Those prices recognize that each R22 is essenitally handmade, with some automation on specific parts, but assembly almost entirely by individuals on a floor, not an assembly line in the automated, Detroit sense.

If enough people wanted helicopters, the direct costs of ownership could be reduced substantially by upgrading manufactories to modern factories. (See http://www.eclipseaviation.com/ for an example of a company making great strides in this regard. A 4+ seat jet for $1m, 40% or less of an equivalent Cessna jet).

It's airspace and enviornmentalism at this point. Instrument conditions mean positive control from ATC. ATC means people in the loop. GPS navigation systems for the first time make it theoretically practicable to have large-scale commuting by aircraft, but there are now so many vested interests in keeping small planes and helicopters NIMBY that there is very little chance of the now-useable technology getting used.

Peace,
Brian

A few comments:

First, thanks for the link - my father always tells me about the time his Dad took him out to see the Sikorsky's first public demonstration of a helocopter (Dad grew up in Bridgeport during the War) I'll have to send it to him.

I think a lot of people are mistaking what Igor was talking about. He was not predicting a helocopter in every garage, but a helocopter-based cummuter airline. And what makes you think that hasn't come true? (Check out http://www.airhamptons.com/) Aside from being overly optimistic about the economics, I'd say the only thing he got majorly wrong was the willingness of the authorities (both federal and local) to allow takeoffs and landings wherever you please...

If I may comment, I think it's a similar question to the reasoning that Rand Simberg has pointed out regarding the lack of a true "commuter" space system, i.e. the current system doesn't allow economies of scale. The FAA's lack of regard for the small pilot is one aspect, but I wonder if Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System isn't the largest single cause. I personally suspect that small planes would be much more prevalent, given a modern economy and the desire of most people for a little green space around their home, if the feds hadn't gotten involved in the pavement business. And really, safety arguments aren't necessarily a good argument, considering car safety is order of magnitudes worse, even when you normalize by the numbers of pilots versus numbers of drivers.

Safety IS the primary concern. Planes are safer because of high standards and high $ required to enter the air (professionally or as a private). This tends to keep the less qualified out. Even with this high bar you still get huge number of people in the air with a lack of common sense (and they tend to die...). Cars are much less safe because anyone can go drive one. The entrance bar is incredibly low. Thus high causulty rates on the highways. Lastly you can always pull off the road. Thats impossible in a plane/ helicopter. You have to perform a difficult manuever (landing) last just to stop. Worse air crashes must land somewhere, they just don't end in a ditch. Bottom line: I do not want the bar lowered to allow less qualified people in the air - its too dangerous.

No one said anything about relaxing the requirements. I have two points. First, most people currently driving cars are probably unable to qualify under the current private pilot licensing schemes, so it's not really even valid to directly compare the driving population to the population of pilots. Second, assuming that the regulatory and economic climate were changed such that more people were able to afford to fly to work, it's probably a mistake to assume that they would all be personally piloting. Most of the people in the United States do not work in office towers and commercial parks with the required area for any kind of flight vehicle above a rocket pack. Ultimately, given that the Sikorsky speculation did not come to pass, the only model that we can even remotely compare to is current commuter flight patterns, and there are too many possible variables with which people would have been able to make smaller planes a viable competitor to the current transportation scheme, in both safety and economics.

Sure, it is practicable, but is it practical?

It's all economics and energy. I am not going to go through all the math, but for an example I'll give this:

While living in Hawaii one, apparently very serious individual, recommended the us of blimps instead of busses for commuters. Any reason to consider further?
If the idea was that great, bankers and investors would be all over it, all you have to do is show that to produce, oh, say 100 blimpa you could bring the price down to 'x', charge only 'y, per passenger per trip, and fuel (and other expenses) would only be 'z'. NOBODY has bothered to run the simple numbers. THAT is how good an idea it is.

Now, with helicopters, one could do the same. A poster above said rental costs 'wet' was on order of $110 an hour. A car, with fuel and the tax on gas to build roads, works out to about ($500 a month payment, $100 month maintenance and insurance, a gallon of gas an hour gives about $750 a month = 1350 a month / 730.5 hours/month = $1.85 an hour) is about $1.85 an hour a nest.
Tha is a cost ratio of about 60:1.

'Nough said?

Apparently helicopter commuting is becoming more practical at the high end in certain places, like Brazil. I don't have the links handy, but it was written up in the NYT maybe a year ago.
Key factors: horrible traffic, risk of attack while stuck in traffic, rich people who commute, cheaper 'copters that are easier to fly.

So, you're sitting at home, reading, watching TV, whatever. Above you, two of Sikorsky's 16 passenger commuter copters crash, and drop 34-36 bodies, two big machines, and hundreds of pounds of fuel through your roof.

ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MOTHER-FUCKIN' MINDS?

The idea is ridiculous on a safety basis, horrendous on a noise pollution basis, unlikely on a logistics basis (where will all these copters park?), and still can't cut it economically (the 'cheap' Robinson helicopter carries four people, one of them the pilot, and gets 8-11 mpg).

We would need multiple breakthroughs in multiple fields for this to come to pass. Most especially, in air defense, because if these things are ever legal and common, I'm buying Stingers and shooting the fuckers down.

i need to know about the jetcars technology works and what it is all about for a school project thanx

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