Re: falling cars

Taking planes to the masses does require fixing exactly the problem that Kurt describes. If it's going to be a mass-market means of transport, it's got to be robust. The Moller Skycar is a good example of this - for all that it was only a prototype, it had redundancy on redundancy for what are already pretty reliable components, to ensure that it *doesn't* fall out of the sky. In particular, some VTOL (or at least VL) capability to get you down safely when something goes wrong is vital. A single-engine light aircraft just doesn't cut it.

That doesn't mean that the "sky car" is impossible, just that the engineering assumptions that go into it need to be different. The engineering assumption for safety on a car is "if it all turns to worms, the engine cuts out and the driver pulls over". Doesn't work on a plane though, for pretty obvious reasons.