Game Ideas Un limited: Flying Cars

Not too many years ago, Avery Brooks appeared on a commercial in which he was bemoaning all the things he had expected to have when he grew up that he doesn't have. Chief among the list, he demanded, "Where's my flying car? I want my flying car!"

There is an idea in this that I am going to address one day, about predicting the future. Today, however, I am interested particularly in the fact that there are no flying cars. Like Brooks, I grew up in a world in which the future was so bright, sunglasses were standard issue. I saw videophones at the New York Worlds Fair in nineteen sixty-four, and expected these to appear in homes within a few years. Flying cars were an assumed part of the future. After all, they were so thoroughly integrated into our expectations that even George Jetson drove one. Yet today there are no flying cars.

The immediate reaction most optimistic futurists would have is, no, there are no flying cars yet. They just have not been developed; we're not that far along. I'm not certain this is the reason, though. I recently learned that there very nearly was a flying car, and it was not something relegated to the future. In the late nineteen fifties, a mere couple of years after my own birth, the Federal Aviation Administration approved the production and sale of a vehicle that would operate on the roads but also could fly like a small airplane. The designer found someone to produce it. It was almost a reality.

The dream died for lack of interest, really. The company would not start production without five hundred advance orders, and those orders never came. Perhaps the price was too high. Maybe potential customers weren't sure whether they would need a pilot's license or what would be required to operate such a vehicle. Perhaps the company failed adequately to promote their efforts, or the product did not match the hype. Possibly people didn't really want to fly after all. In any event, it never happened. Avery Brooks and I can complain that the future of which we dreamed was stillborn.

That may not be the only time it didn't happen. In the early nineteen eighties airplane design genius Dick Rutan designed a one-man airplane that was about the size of a compact car and flew with an ordinary Volkswagon engine. Such a vehicle was clearly designed with the commuter in mind, and at the time you could buy the plans from Rutan and build it yourself from materials easily acquired from hardware and auto parts stores, for something comparable to the price of an economy car and the willingness and ability to assemble it yourself. It did not revolutionize transportation as we know it. There just weren't that many buyers. Again, the flying car slipped through our fingers.

Not everyone is disappointed, however. Marilyn Vos Savant has written in response to a question about flying cars that she hopes these do not debut in her lifetime. After all, the roads are dangerous enough as it is. What would traffic be like if we took to the skies? In that context, fender benders become fatalities. One passing scene in Back to the Future Part II gives something of the feeling of air traffic in a world of flying cars, and other science fiction movies including Blade Runner and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones have offered similar frightening visions. It may be that the failure of the flying car was a blessing.

Not everything that is called progress is so; and not everyone welcomes progress. There often is a difference between what we say we want and what we actually do want. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country said people are afraid of the future because we are afraid of change. It is true that some people have an irrational fear of change. On the other hand, sometimes the fears are quite reasonable, based on sound thinking. I imagine, based on their slogan Birds fly, men drink, that the Man Will Never Fly Memorial Society would object to flying cars merely because they leave the ground, but Savant objects to them because she perceives a much greater danger in such a proliferation of personal aircraft than ought to be tolerated.

Savant's position, on the other hand, might be alarmist. After all, arguably automotive traffic has resulted in more accidents, accidents which are more serious, and far more fatalities from transportation accidents, than anyone could even have imagined before the technology appeared. We would, by and large, accept that the benefits to society are worth the costs, even in lives lost. In fact, to some degree the increased accident rates spring less from the technology itself and more from the fact that the technology has increased the number of people traveling and the number of miles traveled. If you've ever seen a twelve lane highway completely snarled in both directions with rush hour traffic (I have seen the New Jersey Turnpike so snarled around Newark International Airport at rush hour), try to envision that with horse drawn carriages and wagons instead of cars and trucks. The very absurdity of that image springs from the fact that without the vehicles we have now, there is no imaginable reason for so many people to be traveling the same road at the same time like that. The accidents occur because the ability to travel so easily becomes the impetus for masses of people to do so.

At some point, though, modern governments committed themselves to making the automobile a reality. Roads had to be built, gasoline stations encouraged to proliferate, and parking accommodated. With the flying car, it occurs to me that major changes in infrastructure would again be required to accommodate such vehicles. That is, where would I launch and land? Even assuming I can get airborne at fifty miles per hour within fifty yards (I am not sure whether this is practical), that means I can't do it on the street in front of my house. I also can't do it in downtown Wilmington in Delaware, and that's a relatively small city. George Jetson parked on the roofs of his apartment and his office. I can imagine high rise buildings with hangers built into the structure at different levels, so you can park near your floor. Building such hangers makes no sense without the flying cars to use them. Owning the flying cars has little practical value until such facilities exist.

It seems also to be a peculiarly American dream, born of our individualism. It is not a practical view of the future. Flying cars will consume more of our dwindling energy supplies than ground-based ones, and do more damage to our environment. There are different assessments of how serious these problems are, but they are indeed problems. A more environmentally sound view of the future replaces such independent vehicles with mass transit systems. The latest plane to splash onto the headlines was not an innovative personal transport but an airbus billed as the largest yet, outstripping the reigning Boeing 747 and hoping to dominate the market in high volume passenger service over the next decade. Certainly big business thrives on providing services we cannot provide for ourselves, so there is a strong incentive to push people into mass transit of various forms and out of independent vehicles. There is sense to the argument. Private flying cars are problematic. Too many aspects of the idea lead to unanswered questions.

We may one day hurdle these obstacles, leaping forward to a time of common private air traffic. How those problems will be solved is at this point a matter for speculation and brainstorming. Certainly the society which launches such vehicles will be very different from this one in more ways than merely that there are roadways in the sky. Designing such a world in a fictional setting is almost as challenging as solving the problems of such technology in the real world.

Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.