Expert questions the allocation of $2M in Arizona budget to study noisy flying cars

The current state budget contains $2 million earmarked for research and planning into “advanced air mobility infrastructure.”

State Sen. David Farnsworth, a Mesa Republican, is among those supporting this research, claiming Arizona needs to position itself as a magnet for the eventual flying car industry. This comes alongside legislation passed earlier this year requiring the Arizona Department of Transportation to make a statewide plan for so-called “vertiports” — the takeoff and landing locations for these vehicles.

That means a "Jetsons"-like future may not be science fiction for much longer. So, what would such a future actually look and feel like in metro Phoenix?

To find out, The Show reached out to David King, a professor at Arizona State University who studies the codependence of transportation and land use. For starters, he said flying cars is a slightly misleading phrase.

David King

Full conversation

DAVID KING: They're multi-rotor vehicles so they look more like large drones than they do like a car, like a “Jetsons” sort of flying car. And because of that they're large so they are bigger. And they're also, they're incredibly noisy because it's very noisy to keep a vehicle in the air.

We're really not anywhere close to these types of things living in your garage and being able to take off down the street like you'd see in “Back to the Future” or “Jetsons” or something like that.

So they need to have a designated space where they could take off and land. Essentially, it's short-range air travel. Rather than driving from Queen Creek to downtown Phoenix, you'd leave the vertiport in Queen Creek and rather than whatever, a 50-minute drive, that would take you to downtown Phoenix, you'd have a 10-minute, 15-minute flight.

SAM DINGMAN: So if someone is hearing this and they're sort of imagining what the implementation of this would look like, which I realize is a good ways off, we're just talking about studying it right now.

Would it be fair to say that much like there was a time when parking lots just had parking spaces for gas-powered cars, but now some of them also have spaces for electric cars and charging stations for electric cars? In this version, in addition to those two types of vehicles, there would also be these vertiports for flying cars?

KING: I'd frame it a little bit differently than that and it's, think about bringing a tiny airport closer to where you live.

DINGMAN: OK.

KING: So, because it's really going to be that sort of thing. It's going to be takeoffs, landings, there's going to be a lot of traffic in and out, if these things take off the way they would.

DINGMAN: As it were.

KING: As it were. Air travel is incredibly regulated and I don't expect that these would be any different. And so there's going to be very strict rules about where it can fly, where they can fly, what the flight paths are, things like that that are all going to affect their use and sort of the way the vertiports interact with the urban environment.

DINGMAN: Well, let me ask you about that because this legislation that again has passed also calls for ADOT to study “the infrastructure needs of advanced air mobility efforts.” So, from a nuts and bolts standpoint, like what are those needs?

KING: Well, there is sort of the physical built space of the vertiports. Where are you going to store these, parking. So you have those infrastructure needs of the physical space. But you also have the infrastructure needs of the airspace.

DINGMAN: Right.

Now Phoenix has very, very rigid guidelines for where helicopters can go. Imagine adding an unlimited number of personal helicopter-type things to that. It's not going to be that you can just go up and then go to any point. It's not … like that. It's very going to take off and you're going to go on a prescribed route. So there's essentially going to be roadways and pathways at certain designated heights that will exist to go from vertiport to vertiport.

DINGMAN: And so these pathways that these vehicles would have to follow, they would not be physically prescribed, if I'm hearing you right? They would just sort of be understood to exist kind of in the ether.

KING: Yeah, well they would be mapped routes, you know, in three-dimensional space, you can't have thousands of different flying vehicles going hither, thither and yon. There's going to have to be very, very prescribed delineation of space in the air so that everybody can operate safely. And then you know, again, if you're flying from say Queen Creek to Phoenix, if you go there in the morning, you're going to have to go back. So these are going to have to be two-way airstreams.

DINGMAN: And forgive me if this is too pedantic of a question, but do we know yet roughly how high in the air these airstreams would have to be? I mean obviously they need to be enough above the physical roads to not interfere with traffic on those roads or buildings.

KING: Well, this is an excellent question. So the vehicles themselves can go quite high. It’s my understanding that they're being designed to go thousands and thousands of feet in the air. But I don't know if you live near a hospital that has medical service, air medical service. You hear those helicopters all the time.

And imagine not just hearing one a day or a couple times a week, but imagine your neighbors are commuting like that and you have a steady drone of it. So these are really, really noisy machines. So they're going to have to be high enough that we're not hearing them.

DINGMAN: Are most of them powered electronically or are they gas-powered?

KING: So far most of them are gas powered or more conventional fuel. Right now to power them with electricity requires bringing a battery and it's very, very heavy. I know that some of these firms are promoting these as being electric, but they're going to have very, very short range.

DINGMAN: It seems also like there's an environmental question here.

KING: There's going to be potential pollution, obviously if they become electric at scale, then great, but we still have the pollution from generating that power. To come back to the point I've made before, but I think the noise is going to be the big issue. These are going to be a bit of a blight on our communities.

Like if we're trying to sit outside and enjoy an evening or something and we're going to have a steady stream of, you know, of these large drones coming around making noise. And I think to your point on environmental impacts, if they do allow for people to live further and further away, it will be just sort of sprawl on steroids, and people could move further and further away.

And that makes me wonder: What's the problem that these flying cars are solving? This is just my personal opinion. I don't think that we need to spend state money so that rich people can figure out how to live further away from everybody else. Like that's, if rich people want to live further away from everyone else, that's up to them, but we don't have to subsidize it.

And that said, there are things that these vehicles could be very, very good at. We regularly have people who are lost hiking or they have to be rescued from Camelback Mountain or South Mountain or other places.

Being able to bring one of these vehicles there to lower first responders to get people out, that would be a benefit, rather than in the summer heat having to send them hiking through these dangerous weather. Or being able to bring medicine or other help to other places that are further away.

So there's definitely a lot of opportunity for this type of technology to do good in the world. But this type of technology to just avoid sitting in traffic, I'm just not sure that it's solving that problem.