Will it fly II - Moller M400

Here are the specs on the website.

www.moller.com...

Passengers: 4
Top speed @ 13,200 ft: 375 mph
Cruise speed @ 20,000 ft: 275 mph
Maximum rate of climb: 6,000 fpm
Maximum range: 750 miles
Payload excluding fuel: 750 lbs
Operational ceiling: 36,000 ft
Gross weight: 2,400 lbs
Engine power (2 min. rating): 1,200 hp
Fuel consumption: approx. 20 mpg
Fuel: Ethanol
Dimensions (LxWxH): 19.5' x 8.5' x 7.5'
Takeoff and landing area: 35 ft dia
Noise level at 500 ft (Goal): 65 dba
Vertical takeoff and landing: yes

From the above we can calculate the following rough estimates:

Fuel Load = ~ 250 lbs
Engine Dry Weight = 640lbs (8 rotary engines of 80lbs each)
Everything else (including chassis, electronics, transmissions, etc, excluding engines) = 760lbs

An addtional note about the engines is that they are rated on the web-site at 75 peak horsepower each (so 8 would produce a peak of 600hp), but Moller claims these are temporarily capable of 150hp each. This is how he explains claiming 1200hp for the M400.



[edit on 11-3-2006 by orca71]

Uses ethanol as fuel, where is thir world going...

Well, we can only wait and see...

They've done hover tests with it already, they just have to get the FAA Airworthiness Certificate (good luck with that *snort*) to start doing flight testing on it.

Will it fly? It already has flown !!
But if you are talking about how well it will do, I would say that it would be a total disaster. Simple reason, reliability and ease of operation.
The thing looks like a million things could go wrong with so many moving parts and also where is the thousands of hours of testing required to prove that it is resonably safe ?? I also wonder if how it would rate on noise pollution tests ??

I don't know how aware people might be of this but the Mollr sky car is not new, I first saw it in a big four page splash in 'Autocar' magazine way back in 1989 and it looked exactly the same. 17 years later and it still doesn't work!

This has no chance of success whatsoever in my opinion and is destined to be filed along the other flying car efforts of the past.

Is that so... Well usually it's bad news if a project goes on for a long time without really getting anywhere... (An exeption is the EF )

BTW, what is that save the millers Waynos...??

Ah but there you have it, the Eurofighter has had a slow and painful birth but between 1989 and now you can see massive progress, and this thing is supposed to be a car! albeit a flying one.

Save the Millers is a campaign to save my local football club from closure, they have over 130 years of history and are a full time professional team in the English Football League. When we were in Div 2 with Chelsea 20+ years ago I even saw my team beat Chelsea 6-0 at home and 4-1 away! Happy days, but now they need help desperately or they will go bust by April, see these links

www.themillers.premiumtv.co.uk...

www.rotherhamunited-mad.co.uk...

football.guardian.co.uk...

When you say football you mean soccer correct? Or do you mean American Football?

Anyways, the skycar have many problems? Kind of reminds me of the V-22 and it's beginnings. However I don't think the Sky car will get anywhere.

Shattered OUT...

Waynos=England=football=soccer...

I don't really like the V-22 either... it's doomed... I hope I'am wrong though...

Even if they finally get it all working and FAA approved after the umpteen years it's been in development, how would it actually work in the real world ? Would it fly along roads ? Be used like a helicopter ?

For it to recoup the investment, surely it has to sell in numbers and if it did sell in numbers...then a lot of thinking and policy would have to be set around the usage by TPTB.

Personally, it's a great idea, but I doubt it will get off the ground (pun intended).

CodexK

I dont see why people get all down on the skycar because how long its been under development. This is really the work and dream of a single man its not like GM is making this thing of course its going to take along time.

Even huge companies take years to develop a new car that rides on the ground.

But if it had a chance wouldn't one of the big corporations have snapped it up?

The consquences of thousands of these in everyday use is quite horrific if you think about it.

FIN & Shattered - Yes, Football is the game that is played with the feet (hence the name) that Americans think is called soccer thanks to them calling a game where the ball is carried in the hands 'football'. In contrast to this, anybody who calls the game 'soccer' here in Britain is instantly regarded as an idiot and gets some very funny looks. Even US players in our league call it 'football' now they have seen the light

[edit on 11-3-2006 by waynos]

Originally posted by waynos
But if it had a chance wouldn't one of the big corporations have snapped it up?

Big corporations arent always the most innovative or out of the box thinkers. Alot of the most innovative ideals started out by small groups of mavericks your average joe. The home PC for example or the video game industry

Big Corporations didnt snap up either of those when they were first getting started. Once they saw others making money then they were ready to get behind it.

Some very radical ideals started with a small group of men and very little money

Originally posted by waynos
calling a game where the ball is carried in the hands 'football'.

Handball didnt have a good ring too it

Orca71,

Here are the reasons why it _should be made to_ work-

1. 250mph = 20 miles in 5 minutes on one gallon of fuel. Ask yourself how much fuel you /waste/ turning that damn engine over at idle in gridlock? Depending on congestion and accidents, we average 45 to 75 minutes in the I-25 corridor to go 17 miles. We refuel a 20 gallon tank once per week with less than 20 miles spent for 'recreational travel' on the weekends. That's 190 miles divided by 20 or 9.5 mpg.

HALVE YOUR FUEL CONSUMPTION AND THE ARABS CAN GO TO HELL.

This is one way ot assuredly getting there by abandoning the wagon-with-powered-wheels (concept hasn't changed in over a century) contraptional idiocy. Not as a funciton of distance travelled (mechanically, a surface vehicle exerts much less effort for work done vs. miles travelled than any aircraft ever will) but by /time/. As the hours you waste (5X2X45 = 7.5hrs per week in transit) 'feeling every bump, sucking down every fume'.

2. If it's so refreshing, exhilirating and an expression of personal freedom (as the car companies would have you believe in every advertisement), why is our vehicular transport grid so much like a rat's maze? Every time you stop at a stop light. Every time you obey channelization laws painted on an asphalt road. Every time you PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE of utter frustration via registration and taxes and tolls for being trapped behind everyone else also stuck on that 2 dimensional strip of _no choice_ directionalized travel. You are becoming more and more a slave to the things you cannot experience BECAUSE you are stuck in that single road.

3. Given we get the A#1 threat to our society (overpopulation) under strict control, it is quite possible to create 'green belts' (imagine 1 mile wide parks stretching for 50 miles or more) in which no human dwelling is at risk to inadvertant crashes, even as we cease paving over the planet with highly pollutive, impossible to clean up roadways.
Because DGPS is so precise (within 1m most of the time) and the aircraft so fast, it should be readily possible to 'dial in a flight time' sitting in your car, lift off and be at your destination in next to zero flight time, so that with less than one TENTH the total number of vehicles in-motion (creating noise and emission pollution) you maintain a like degree of transport mobility at GREATER safety levels of say 1 mile and 500 ft altitude separations (HITS) between all aircraft.
Again with virtually NO 'intersection' conditions (necessary to accomodate opposed traffic lanes or 2D restricted obstacles to the traffic path), 90% of all state-change performance issues should go away.
Lastly, since the aircraft will supposedly fly on any 2 nacelles or four motors it should be readily possible to fly to a point at which an airbag and rocket extracted ram parachute are capable of providing near zero fps controlled descent rates with less than 10mph forward velocity on the car.

CONCLUSION:
The reason it won't happen is simple. Governments and indeed /societies/ are 'not in the business' of emancipating humanity from any established drudgery as a state of existence determined by change. Indeed where governance is an attempt to enforce staticism on any given dynamic scenario as a function of expectation as much as experimentalism in CHOICE, they are terrified of being outmoded across the board by the existence of options whose complexity they are not designed to deal with.

In this case, the problem is not as much commercial as social psychology. Because if you can 'afford' to lay off 30,000 workers at 20 plants, you can easily afford to /invest/ in the societal infrastructure by which such a massive paradigmatic change could happen. (257 billion dollars and counting on the JSF, 'of course it will work' even though /analytically/ it is exactly the wrong system to do the job).

Such is the cybernetic rationale by which we only accept change when risk is minimalized and the emperical evidence or 'reality principle' is so high as to offset any native misgivings of uncertainty. When you entrust people for whom /choice/ is itself a risk, of course they are going to say: "Don't go there it's risky..." And you will believe them because you have elevated them to the position of saying what is needful, what the specifications of that need are an whether the specs have been met. In a closed loop (secure but ultimately incompetent) system.

For myself, the risks inherent to four failure points are no better than that of one if nature of the air vehicle (four post VTOL) is such that there is no recovery mode point in trading their separate installation mass variables for the power that is needed to have a useful powered lift margin overall.

Because either way, if you lose one nacelle, you've lost controlled recovery. And the true trade then becomes the weight variable and freewheel drag functions vs. the suspension stress and total mass trade for an emergency recovery system ala so-

www.fas.org...

I would concentrate on THAT element, along with netcentric comms for airspace control using milspec or developmental improvement (microturbine power to weight for a single or paired electric motor) before I would write off the concept altogether. Because it is only through _diversity_ of initial investment that you can determine not merely whether the goal but which of the paths to said objective is worthwhile.

Singular focus on implementation being the surest sign of someone who doesn't want to succeed but only to justify their failure.

Yet one needs only look at the dark and dreer cyberpunk beginnings of 'Bladerunner' vs. it's escapist bucolic fantasy ending _in a car_ to see how tired we all are, as a society, living in the muck of our fellow's plodding commute.


KPl.

As much as I would love to have a "flying car", I dont see it happening in the near future. Roads arn't going away anytime soon. As for gridlock...in the near future that will start to go away. When you put a lot of vehicles on one road...its inefficient, Why: because of people. So I think that as computers in cars get smarter, they will be the ones in controll. But I wouldn't expect that to happen for another 15 years.

But they are allready showing up in todays vehicles.

Examples of cars getting smarter:
Some cars these days can parrellel park without human intervention.
lights in your car, by your mirrors, will light up (warning you) that a vehicle is in your blind spot.
A couple radars in the front of the car, that know where other cars are at, so when your car in on cruise controll and your not paying attention and a car in front of you is going slower, it will apply the brakes for you, and when ever that car moves, you will accelerate back up to your pre-programed speed.

There are also concepts out there that use gps and road paint, but those are still a little ways off from happening.

ch - 9.5mpg? "halve your fuel consumption and the arabs can go to hell"? There seems something very wrong with this statement. My own car does 36mpg and there are many more that do much better round here, the very best, if dullest, do up to 100mpg, on the plus side we hardly know the meaning of the word 'gridlock' here as long as you put your local knowledge to good use

20mpg for the Moller Skycar is very poor by comparison, equal to maybe a Land Rover Discovery. Maybe you should get rid of your crappy american cars instead of dreaming about skycars?

Also, 20mpg for a VTOL flying machine sounds very dubious in its own right, what does it do, levitate unpowered?

Originally posted by waynos
Also, 20mpg for a VTOL flying machine sounds very dubious in its own right, what does it do, levitate unpowered?

20mpg is quite plausible as average fuel economy for a maximum range trip. In fact, it should do a little better than that as typical cruise fuel economy should be in the mid 20s. The problem is short trips such as grocery getting will be very inefficient and probably dangerous as, according to Moller, hover can only be maintained for 2 minutes.

Even if it can take-off and land at you local grocery store in 2 minutes, you will lose atleast 3 gallons of fuel each way. If youre grocery store is within a mile or two thats between 1-3 gallons per mile. If it's beyond a mile or two its very unlikely to be far enough that it would be possible to transition out of hover (due to slow speed and the resulting lack of lift) and its probaby too far to reach within hover.

Having said that, if the M400 can indeed fly out of ground effect and transition out of VTOL without hurtling to the ground killing all it's passengers, it might make a pretty decent inter-city taxi.

[edit on 12-3-2006 by orca71]

I'm afraid I can't buy that, a VTOL jet lift vehicle surely must use gallons of fuel simply lifting itself up off the ground? Is this fuel economy calculated purely on fuel used in forward flight or for the trip as a whole, including the landing? If its the latter I can't make any sense of it.

Originally posted by waynos
I'm afraid I can't buy that, a VTOL jet lift vehicle surely must use gallons of fuel simply lifting itself up off the ground? Is this fuel economy calculated purely on fuel used in forward flight or for the trip as a whole, including the landing? If its the latter I can't make any sense of it.

You underestimate fuel use. It actually will use about 3+ gallons getting off and transitioning to cruise the ground and another 3+ while landing. This leaves about 30 gallons for cruise.

A vehicle that size should be able to get about 24-26 miles per gallon in cruise (lift is aerodynamic rather than powered) so their claim of 20mpg sounds plausible for average fuel economy for a 750 mile trip including take-off and landing. However, for shorter trips, average fuel economy will be much less. Fuel economy for a trip your local grocery store could be less than 0.3 miles per gallon!

They've certainly got their math right as my own calculations based on the specs they've provided get pretty much the same numbers for fuel economy and range but the real question is if it can take off , transition to cruise, transition back to hover, and land using those rotating nacelles and engines stressed to two times their rated peak power.

Murcielago,

>>
As much as I would love to have a "flying car", I dont see it happening in the near future.
>>

Which is why oil companies, car companies and the people in the third world who slave to make their own top-10% richer than god continue to profit.

You don't expect it therefore you don't want it because it disrupts your expectations. And the cybernetic theorem is proven.

>>
Roads aren't going away anytime soon.
>>

I never said they should. For individual communities and select (high payload density) arteries. That said, our entire transport infrastructure is slowly dying for want of FEDERAL attention which has pulled almost completely out of the local roadway programs to fund stupid wars.

>>
As for gridlock...in the near future that will start to go away.
>>

Not without mandated legislation and severely protectionist action on the part of the government.

1. You want that next 'middle income tax cut'?
You get in a registered 4 person commute program. With a 10,000 dollar fine _per head_ for anyone who doesn't play by the rules. i.e. Tattle Tales are mandatory.
2. You want that corporate equivalent?
You arrange your workforce arrival/departure times so that anyone NOT needed for time zone X (before or after) can go whenever their cross-country expertise has timed out for the day. Anyone who must 'supervise' the salary slaves may go as soon as all their cubicle zombies have gone. Anyone in a 'support mission' (janitor, cafeteria, secretaries) can go whenever said mission is done. So that you have shifted arrivals: 7-8-9(10) and 3-4-5(6) to THIRD the number of 'authorized to be on red routes in peak density period' (window tag = ticketable).
3. You want to have cheap oil again? FINE. You learn to make do with 1-2 work cars per family (based on GPS coordinate separations of workplace locale) whose fuel is guaranteed. And on the weekends you drive a 'designated recreational vehicle' with it's own, separate, allotment of fuel. i.e. Every family gets 60 gallons per month at base rate for their work vehicle/s. Anything past that pays double for the next 50 gallons. Anything past that pays triple for the next 40.
4. Since Japan and Korea do nothing to ease our trade imbalances, we shut them out of the market for four years with huge protectionist tariffs on imports at the same time we make major, _governmental_ investments in OUR automotive industry. So that, rather than 2025, we achieve zero emissions by 2012. This effectively lays off the R&D 'sunk' costs for revamping our automotive industry, much as it does the defense industrial base which isn't worth /crap/ for what it contributes to society '90% of the time'. Once we have a working, commercial-spec fuel cell. And/or hydrogen fueling infrastructure, we further speed the shift by offering 'buy back incentives' equal to 2-3 times blue book value for all car owners who are willing to buy into an American Ideal:

Defeat Terrorism by denying the little barbarian trash the petro money they pay their whacked fringe elements to do us with.

Is it laisez faire? No. Is it something the WTF/G8 would look kindly on? No. Is it /dangerous/ with the amount of foreign held loans? Yes.

But it's PDQ clear that the entire world laughs at our attempts to avoid 'businesss and state' the same way they make snide comments about our religion and state.

And they are right. Because democracy is not a capitalist endeavor (PRC as prime casepoint). And by restricting our governments ability to be a positive influence on our society, we assure that they are a negative one with militarist police state expenditures on items that can never buy the pillage and tribute to sustain our worthless armies.

'Because that would be wrong too'.

>>
When you put a lot of vehicles on one road...its inefficient, Why: because of people.
>>

NO. Because of the need to stop and go through a fixed, 2 dimensional, routing path. Go outside, look up. HOW MANY PLANES DO YOU SEE?

Ahhhhh.

3D doesn't need road maintenance. 3D doesn't need a chassis built to withstand terrible /pounding/ shock and friction of direct surface contact.
3D gets you to your destination before congestion of shared traffic /time/ 'in lane' becomes a problem (imagine a super highway stacked 5-10 lanes deep, every one moving at 200mph).

>>
So I think that as computers in cars get smarter, they will be the ones in control. But I wouldn't expect that to happen for another 15 years.
>>

At projected estimates, by 2020-2025, oil production will begin to taper off vs. rising demand from the nations whose slave labor actually /produces/ something useful to the world market.

As that happens (as they get richer themselves by doing so) America's position as the tape worm center of the universe will lose it's relevance as a 'sell to us or else' dominant consumerist force.

And we will be screwed because we will have spent money on utterly wortheless muzzle mutts and their fracking /slaughter toys/ with nothing left to start the conversion process.

OTOH, if we _do what we have alwasy done_ which is lead the world as a cultural force. Changing 'the fashion' of our existence as a function of making a statement about our future, screw everyone else, we have a chance to stabilize in a post-superpower climate run by the beginnings of a UN type global government.

But we cannot wait for it to happen. We are 8.8 trillion dollars in debt for home loans. We are 3.4 trillion dollars in debt on commercial credit loans. If we don't start the process while still a dynamic enough economoy to bully our way into some kind of energy efficient transport system (windfarms and solar will make local power easy, I think). We will be at the mercy of global vultures pulling our carcass apart 'by the time it's really necessary'.

>>
But they are allready showing up in todays vehicles.

Examples of cars getting smarter:
Some cars these days can parrellel park without human intervention.
lights in your car, by your mirrors, will light up (warning you) that a vehicle is in your blind spot.
A couple radars in the front of the car, that know where other cars are at, so when your car in on cruise controll and your not paying attention and a car in front of you is going slower, it will apply the brakes for you, and when ever that car moves, you will accelerate back up to your pre-programed speed.

There are also concepts out there that use gps and road paint, but those are still a little ways off from happening.
>>

Whoopy. I'm sorry to be sarcastic but sometimes people create 'engineers sand boxes' of excessive complexity for _needless_ reasons.

One of the neat things about flying through the air with NO TRAFFIC.

Is that you don't need to pay for all the crap of signal recognition sensors and lane channelization and 'guy ahead and behind' vehicle separation (which, bumper to bumper at 60mph _will fail_ with mass casualty, at some point).

You just fly.

Because the air has no contour and because you are moving so fast and through such a deep medium that lane clearance is simple.

And the most that you require is a DGPS coordinate system, radalt and a 'pad clear' auto-approach-to-hover system before taxying your _lightweight_ vehicle on the strength of in-wheel motors to a parking spot only a few hundred feet at most from where you started.

Put simply, KISS is a principle orders of magnitude more readily achieved in air transport than /any/ system of intelligent ground vehicle autonomous navigation

While assuming that a smarter car will achieve better fuel efficiency is flawed we drive around in 14-17mpg SUV and Minivans, having 'thrown back' the rice grinders we put up with in the 70s and early 80s.

Again, what it comes down to is someone saying they'll never give up a 'freedom' to motorvate until someone pries their cold dead fingers from around their car keys.

Well, 9/11 was all about dying for FORD.

And you are never more trapped than when you are strapped into a 10X8X5 vehicle enclosure, doing all of 15mph average as a monkey-pushes-gas-pedal consent enabler.

And if you truly /believe/ in the notion of 'journey not destination', take a helicopter ride and SEE what tall buildings and the bloody Ram Pickup on each side of you is obscuring.

We lose more preserving our 'rights as Americans' than we ever would experimenting with systems that don't require us to invest in past modalities.

And that too is the Cybernetic Rationale in-action 'by design'.


KPl.