• Question: Is it possible to make a car that flies?

    Asked by 456brna45 to Áine, Victoria, Lydia, Eoin, Ciarán on 20 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by 449brna45.
    • Photo: Lydia Bach

      Lydia Bach answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      Hey,

      slightly difficult question. Planes fly because of their weight is overcome by lift and thrust. The weight of any plane is pushing it down, but they air under their wings gives it sufficient lift to keep it in the air.Thrust pushes the plane forwards, but is counter acted by drag.

      So to fly we need both speed and lift and preferable a light material. A car without any gadgets that would give it that could not fly. So we would have to increase the take off speed of a car and get wings attached to it for lift.

      There is a guy who invented detachable airplane wings for exactly that, it flw around 70 miles before running out of petrol:

      We could also attach propellors to the car – making it a mix between car and helicopter I guess. That could work as well.

      The best attempt was the aerocar made of fibreglass that could switch between driving and flying (at 120km per hour), but was never produced on large scale:

      Wouldn’t mind having that to avoid traffic.

    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      It should be plenty possible. I live in hope that hovercars will be invented before I die 🙂

      Like Lydia said there have been cars with wings that work well but never really took off (Ahaha!). They might well be the most efficient way of flying right now.

      There’s some cool research happening with superconductors and magnetic fields that can make objects hand in the air as they get “locked” in a magnetic field, that will enable hovercars that could “fly” along magnetised roads, or maybe even use the Earth’s magnetic field to really fly. Here’s a video showing it off. As you can see researchers are only using small objects, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be scaled up to the size of a car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyOtIsnG71U

      Someone recently invented a hoverboard that does some very clever things with magnets to make it float above the ground, although it’s limited to flying very close to metallic surfaces right now: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/ever-wanted-to-soar-on-a-board-like-marty-mcfly-100566560479.html

      But there are loads of scientists working on different ways of making flying cars. Sooner or later we’ll have them, the only real questions is “Which kind of flying car will become the popular one?” 🙂

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