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World's First Electric Flying Car Gets Certified

Interesting... I wonder what sort of propulsion system the car uses? Does it take a pilot license to operate? What little I know about the FAA is that they are very protective of air space. Do you file a flight plan? Are flight instruments required? Flight communication equipment? I can't see a person zipping across town in the air. The FAA won't let me do that with my little drone.
 
All the propellers/fans are internal. And apparently it's supposed to lift a payload of 100kg. Which probably means it can take one adult, provided they're not overweight.

I suppose one would require a VTOL pilot license to legally fly it in air-spaces. Drone licenses are for unmanned remote piloted aircraft AFAIK.
 
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olbriar said:
Interesting... I wonder what sort of propulsion system the car uses? Does it take a pilot license to operate? What little I know about the FAA is that they are very protective of air space. Do you file a flight plan? Are flight instruments required? Flight communication equipment? I can't see a person zipping across town in the air. The FAA won't let me do that with my little drone.
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I guess you'd be using VFR only, not IFR. And with VFR you must have good visibility, to whatever the metrological conditions required by the FAA for the aircraft type.
 
Another point I thought of, about safety of this thing. When a quad-copter drone fails, they drop from the air like a brick, and don't glide like a conventional fixed wing aircraft. Even helicopters when they fail can sometimes safely auto-gyro to a soft landing.
 
There is a question of altitude in my mind. Air space has different altitudes for different directions of travel. Can they just fly willy-nilly or do they adhere to flying over given highways and roads? All military bases have no fly zones and so do airports. I discovered that as rural as Kansas is, the areas where I can legally fly a drone are quite limited without permission. I'm not dogging the tech. I think flying cars will be cool if they can be closely regulated so that normal air traffic isn't hindered... and everyone remains safe as possible.
 
I would assume there's some sort of autonomous feature to enable flying without the effort (and tons of $$$) needed to obtain a private pilot license. Probably with tons of limits, too.
 
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