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The idea that we'll ever have them is an utter joke, and has been since before Avery Brooks made a meme of it. And that's true, it is an utter joke. But at one time people thought we would have flying cars. The ever-increasing regulation on anything airspace-related has made it so we don't have flying cars, we won't have flying cars, fewer people have their own aircraft, and even flying toy airplanes is mostly illegal.
There are of course substantial technical barriers to flying cars, but almost no one is even interested in trying to overcome them because the regulatory barriers to marketing them and getting the general public to be allowed to fly them are obviously insurmountable. No one goes into the aircraft industry unless they want to live, sleep, and breathe FAA regulations; nobody's designing better airplanes, the whole object of the business is to make more cost-effective (cheaper or more fuel-efficient) airplanes while still satisfying the myriad FAA regs. Which mostly means finding some way of claiming the new airplane is a variant of an old one, otherwise the regulatory cost of certifying the new airframe AND getting pilots certified on it is too high.
If the regulators get their way, we'll have the same thing in household automation. We'll still be doing the dishes the same way (only with less and less effective dishwashers, since it's an obsession of the US government to do dishes without water), laundry (same thing about effectiveness) and cooking too. Nothing that could be automated will be (except toys like the Roomba)
Here is where we get to the BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT part. Every couple years, I see another flying car concept from some start-up. Every couple years, it's technologically fucking absurd, because "there are of course substantial technical barriers to flying cars".
You have zero reason for anyone to believe that the core reason why we don't have flying cars is regulatory and not technological/cultural/practical, especially when I can see with my own two eyes that every proposal that comes up is obscenely whack from a technological/cultural/practical standpoint. Don't get me wrong, I'm no FAA-lover, and they would almost certainly get in the way, but they're the reason we don't have flying cars in the same way that Space Force is the reason we don't have aliens invading earth.
Of course they're "obscenely whack". The only people foolish enough to propose them are those who know nothing about the industry and thus the fact that the regulatory barriers are insurmountable.
If you want to fly you have to learn a bevy of arcane radio procedures, log every trip you take, follow various checklists every time you fly, get your aircraft maintained only by FAA-certified mechanics, have regular medical examinations, and more. And you still only can fly in good weather, which makes every trip a risk of being stranded. There's no market for a flying car, even if technical barriers were overcome, given those requirements.
Those were pretty much real-world constraints until automation developed enough to be a reasonable approach. This is very very very much directly in my domain of expertise. The good news is that the FAA has opened up to these sorts of "alternative navigation and control schemes". As an expert in the field, this reads to me very much as you just wishing that we lived in a different world, where this sort of technology was feasible a few decades ago, when it definitely definitely wasn't, regardless of what regulations existed/didn't exist.
If the FAA hadn't foreclosed it all at the start by freezing the technology in place with regulations we might indeed live in a different world already. If the NHTSA existed back when the model T was current, we might need checklists for driving cars and have regulations based on needing to turn a crank to start.
If you're going to just ignore everything I wrote, then we're probably not going to make any progress. Perhaps we could leave this tangent where it is, and you can actually specify your claim, so that we can determine whether this tangent is even meaningful to your actual claim. Or if, ya know, you're just whining about the world.
Or, of course, you could read what I wrote and actually respond to it. You could show your expertise in flight navigation and control, particularly with regards to automation technology. You could make an argument that actually competes with mine, in order to show that I have mistaken some points of fact or something. What is non-responsive is just pure imagination about hypothetical alternative realities, completely disconnected from any facts about the world.
I'm not ignoring it, I'm rejecting it. I'm saying requirements to fly an aircraft have frozen in place because FAA regs froze them in place.
I'm not going to argue about the specific regulations because that's implicitly accepting that the regulatory framework is a good thing, and I think it's a bad thing.
The Motte and Bailey. You Bailey your way to claims about the FAA and navigation automation, but then immediately retreat from defending it. You simply refuse to argue any specifics about any portion of the Bailey.
You retreat to a Motte of simply rejecting any epsilon of regulation ever, but refuse to acknowledge any actual claim that this position makes.
This is the quintessential form of reasoning that this place was made to reject.
No motte-and-bailey; slippery slope. I'm not going to argue about the specifics about any particular spot on the slippery slope because the main problem is that it is on the slippery slope.
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