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The Air Age
Topic Started: Mar 31 2013, 03:34 PM (170 Views)
Simon Darkshade
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Nefarious Swashbuckler
Challenge: Make the wartime and early postwar assumptions about air travel come true, whereby personal air transport is common place and used as a day to day means of transport.
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Basil Fawlty
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Post Tenebras Lux
It would be a difficult feat to accomplish even with cultural changes and advances in technology. The fundamental problem with any type of personal air transport device is the inevitable mechanical failure. When that happens, a car can coast to the side of the road, but aircraft must crash unless they are able to glide. Even gliders run the risk of setting down in rough terrain.
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John
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The most likely solution would be a small helicopter with some kind of parachute-deploying device above the blades that would be controlled by at least two devices: A gyroscope and some other kind of device that would measure rate of descent. If the aircraft were to move beyond a certain tipping point in either its orientation or rate of descent, the parachute would deploy. The aircraft speed would have to be tightly-regulated to probably less than 150 mph (241 kph) total and with even lower limits depending upon altitude. There would have to be control towers all over the place, but that cost would be vastly outweighed by the savings from fewer roads and vastly diminished maintenance costs.
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Simon Darkshade
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Nefarious Swashbuckler
A very novel and interesting approach.

Some aspects of the 'air age' have come to pass, with a lot of regional airports and airstrips, but there hasn't been the level of private aircraft ownership and operation that had been forseen in the 1940s.
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