Flying Cars, Airspace, Autonomous AI, and Traffic Schemes Considered

Not long ago I was talking to a fellow private pilot and he also happened to be a former airline pilot about the prospects of flying cars in our future. One of the biggest challenges will be that if there is an accident, that would be considered a midair collision, and it's not as if you can just pull over the vehicles and exchange insurance information. When two aircraft hit generally they come crashing down. Okay so, how might we prevent all of this?

Well, consider if you will all the autonomous work that Google is doing with the self-driving cars. If you'll recall DARPA had the grand challenges motivating automotive high-tech folks to get together with computer science engineers to build the first autonomous cars - now we have them, and Google has received a license from Nevada to drive their robotic car around all by itself. There will be issues with flying cars if we allow people to control them because they will be going every which way and there will be lots of crashes as these vehicles or personal flying craft proliferate.

A smart concept would be to have each one of these cars talking to centralized control, in a very similar way as an air traffic controller in controlled airspace, but the only difference would be there wouldn't be in human involved at all, just a centralized computer system. When you wanted to go somewhere, you would put in the coordinates get to where you wanted to go and then tell the car you are ready, and it would contact the computerized system which would then give authorization for it to take off and go on the approved route.

Chances are the approved route may not be direct due to privacy issues, for instance folks that live in gated communities or high-rise buildings wouldn't want flying cars zooming overhead or alongside violating their privacy. Also if there was ever an emergency or your autonomous car might crash, we wouldn't want it to crash over a school, or an open assembly of people such as the Stadium, or a large event in the park. Surely you can see that.

The computer system would realize and already know the safest routes, and the location of all other personal flying craft and aircraft in the area, as that would prevent midair collisions. Your flying automobile would also be communicating with all other flying personal craft, to prevent midair collisions in case something happened with the main system. That's pretty much about the only way it could work and still be safe. Please consider all this and think on it.