DailyDirt: Flying Cars & Other Crazy Stuff

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Considering the number of car accidents each year, it's not exactly surprising that flying cars haven't taken off yet. Most drivers can barely handle looking forward, backward and side to side -- and adding up and down is just going to make things worse. Still, the future promised us flying cars, so people are working on building flying cars. Here are just a few links on the topic of personal flying vehicles and some other ill-advised ideas.

• A flying car from Slovakia recently made a test flight after about 20 years of development. The Aeromobil 2.5 isn't the only flying car design out there, but it actually looks like an almost normal car from the front (though its side-view profile looks like a crazy transformer). [url]
• Maybe there shouldn't be flying cars clogging up the sky, but NASA is helping to develop new rules for how to share the air with drones. In 2015, the FAA plans to open up US airspace to unmanned aerial vehicles above 18,000 feet -- but the skies probably won't be fully open to drones until after 2020. [url]
• If more people are going to be flying around in all kinds of crazy contraptions, it might make sense to develop ways to skydive without a parachute. Gary Connery jumped 2,400 feet from a helicopter in a special wingsuit without a parachute, and he fell for almost a minute before crashing into a landing strip made of about 18,600 cardboard boxes. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: aeromobil, drones, flying cars, gary connery, skydiving, unmanned aerial vehicles
Companies: faa, nasa

DailyDirt: I'm Free... Free-Falling

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There's been a bit of a resurgence in interest for manned spaceflight because the costs of launching vehicles to the edge of space aren't ludicrous anymore, just outrageously expensive. Despite the advances in rocket launching systems, there's always a chance that something could go wrong -- so ejecting escape pods at high altitudes seems like a good idea, right? Only a handful of people have even attempted to skydive from more than a few miles up. By the end of this year, though, a couple brave souls could set some skydiving records and pave the way for a new extreme sport.

• Felix Baumgartner is planning a free fall jump from an altitude of about 120,000 feet (~23 miles up). If it all works out, he'll break the sound barrier, traveling over 700 miles per hour. [url]
• Michel Fournier has attempted to skydive from about 25 miles up, but he seems to have run into a series of problems. Fournier is in his 60s, so he doesn't have too many more years left to cross this goal off his bucket list. [url]
• Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger holds the current record for high altitude skydiving -- at 102,800 feet -- from a jump he made in 1960. The Cold War really encouraged some crazy stunts.... [url]
• To discover more links on space exploration, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: altitude, parachute, skydiving, sound barrier, space, world record
Companies: red bull