During his historic visit to China, President Vučić optimistically stated that he expects Chinese investors to start production of electric buses and cars in Serbia. We, of course, have our trump cards for trade, all that remains is to iron out some details regarding lithium mining (used for the production of batteries and sedatives), the export of pig legs, heads and hooves, so that we can rightly say that we have concluded the deal of the century . Of course, at the same moment they began to make fun of our president, as if we had forgotten that Serbian exports began in the 19th century thanks to the plums and pigs of Miloš Obrenović.
"Trade is in Marva", said the grand duke, "the only product of our region that is exported to the other side and from where our people get all their needs and taxes". Miloš Obrenović bought more than 200.000 pigs all over Serbia every year. He chased the purchased mangulica and pulina, at that time valued Serbian autochthonous species, through Serbian and Slavonian forests, fattened them along the way with oak acorns and delivered them well fattened to customer addresses throughout Austria-Hungary. The road the pigs took even had its own name - "Pig Road from Serbia to Austria-Hungary". Is it a shame to renew the old tradition again, if only by exporting raw materials for piglets instead of whole pigs? In return, we will receive various electrical devices and vehicles, and not only that. Vučić clearly told his hospitable hosts that we know they have a flying car prototype (is there anything our president doesn't know?). "Let's do something in Serbia as well." We have some ideas that I got after talking with Sheikh Muhammad Bin Zayed (UAE), they are doing something together," said Vučić.
So, we also welcomed that miracle. Who was lucky enough to have already seen a flying pig at Pink Floyd's concerts. And the rest of us? After Knin, Karlovac and Karlobag, the singing fountain in color, the subway, the "Mubadala" chip factory, the Serbian "Mercedes", the gondola and the 250.000 meter mast, we will also see flying cars. Let's make them, ride them and have fun. Is there anything better than carefree hopping from place to place in a personal flying vehicle? And all that for a couple of wagons of hooves and pig heads.
FROM SCIENCE FICTION IN THE GARAGE: What exactly is a "flying car"? The term itself is a rather unluckily chosen oxymoron. A car, by definition, is something that has wheels and rolls on a road or meadow. What flies can be a helicopter, a kite, an airplane, a rocket or a drone, but not a car. The coin was probably created as a result of the desire to create a completely new type of vehicle. That vehicle, on the one hand, would be small, relatively cheap and easy to drive, just like an average car, and on the other hand, it would be able to move completely freely both on the road and through the air.
Although we have yet to see anything that fully matches this vision, the idea itself is not new. Henry Ford, the man who invented the assembly line and the mass production of cars for the masses, declared as early as 1940: “Mark my words: the combination of the airplane and the automobile is inevitable. Feel free to laugh at me, but it will happen sometime". The idea was immediately taken over and "developed" by science fiction writers, so that flying cars would then appear on the big screen (we remember the ones from the movies "Bladerunner", "The Fifth Element", "Star Wars" and "Back to the Future" for the longest time). Although there have been many engineering attempts to make something similar in reality and commercialize it, everything has remained largely experimental, and what has come off the ground looks more like a hovercraft, modified drone, small helicopter or airplane than a cheap car. There were so many unsuccessful attempts that today there are museums in America whose main exhibits are these magical flying vehicles that have only one flaw: they don't fly.
The concept of the flying car is often taken today as key proof of our absolute inability to predict the future. American actor Avery Brooks summed up our disappointment in just a few sentences: "Today is the year 2000. Where are those flying cars? You promised me flying cars! I don't see any flying cars. Why? Why? Why?"
Maybe because in the meantime it turned out that the construction of such a car is much more complex than it seemed to us at first. You need to add something to the car that allows it to fly, be it classic wings, propellers, drone-like motors, or some combination of these. Creating a configuration that will perform satisfactorily both on the ground and in the air is a big challenge that has not yet been satisfactorily overcome. In addition, the flying car will certainly not be a champion either in height or in flying speed. Given that flying is most economically viable at high altitudes and high subsonic speeds, it is clear that only those with deep pockets who don't mind the cost of transportation will be able to afford a flying car. Many of them have already invested money in business jets and helicopters. What do they need another flying machine?
WEIGHT FALL FROM HEIGHT: The ecological aspect is also not negligible. All of today's aircraft larger than a drone have very noisy engines, so there are numerous regulations that limit their use over populated areas. In practice, this means that it's perfectly tolerable to have a helicopter flying overhead every few hours. But imagine the situation when next to your terrace, while you are peacefully drinking your morning coffee, an endless line of flying cars with local "shepherds" at the wheel, throwing pickaxes straight into your pot with muscats through the open window, parades continuously? It is even more difficult to make an ecologically "clean" flying car, one that will fly on electricity, that is. on batteries. Today's battery technology, although advanced, is still hopelessly lagging behind advances in new materials, computer hardware and software. Batteries are still too heavy, flammable, toxic and too low capacity.
The question of managing such a flying machine also arises. Controlling a car is still a job that requires skill, attention and concentration, despite all the software and safety mechanisms that have been crammed into it in the meantime. Imagine adding another, vertical dimension of transportation to all that, which actually replaces one traffic lane with countless others, and you will understand how challenging it can be to navigate the "hive" of flying cars. A collision that could be trivial on the ground, usually a "scratch" or a slight bump on the bumper when parking, in the air could be fatal for those who fly, and for God's sake, for those on the ground who are unexpectedly showered by debris from the sky during accident. How all this new urban traffic chaos in the air will be controlled in general, what regulations will have to be passed, what kind of training the pilots-drivers will have to undergo and how the abuse of this technology for criminal and terrorist purposes will be prevented remains to be seen. .
In order to minimize the potential damage and risk to people, it is necessary to make a compromise: a flying car is, after all, a car and must meet all existing safety standards. Those standards actually dictate that the car must be robust enough to withstand various incidents, which in translation means that it must have a reinforced, therefore heavier construction. And what is difficult is even more difficult to fly. On the other hand, today's aircraft are so fragile that even the slightest external contact with them during flight can have catastrophic consequences. Finding the optimum between these two extremes is still a supreme engineering problem.
SKIPPING AND REPEATING CLASSES: But, let's go back to the beginning of the story; how does our president know through his "Arab connection" that the Emirates and China are "messing" with flying cars? It is probably rather stale news from November last year, when the Chinese startup "EHang" requested a license from the authorities in Dubai for taxi-transportation with drones that can reach a speed of about 100 kilometers per hour. By the way, Dubai is open to other similar projects and under certain conditions is ready to issue permission for test flights in the city environment. Soon after, the mass production of Chinese vehicles was announced, all on the condition that the city authorities approve the new taxi service, with the ultimate intention that the identical service will soon be offered in Singapore and several European cities. And how is it even possible to imagine a representative selection of European cities without Belgrade? Imagine, for example, how, at the beginning of October, a column of air taxis, all of them made in Serbia, parades over the long-standing New Year's lights in Kneza Miloša Street. What an impulse it would be for GDP and Bulgarian tourism!
And where are we going to make all these flying miracles?
In the industrial park in Borča, says Minister for Innovation and Technological Development Nenad Popović, with the assessment that by opening that park with Chinese partners, Serbia will become not only a regional leader, but one of the largest digital hubs in the whole of Europe.
"For Serbia, which skipped the second and third industrial revolutions, it now opens the possibility to be a direct participant in the fourth industrial revolution, complete digitization, and the most important thing is that you have a strong technological partner in this process," Popović told TV Pink.
How industrial revolutions can be skipped remains to be seen. It would be said that China, Japan and America would not be what they are today if they did not participate in one way or another in all the previous ones. Once upon a time in Serbia, you had provincial factories that were able to make serious components for "Boeing" airplanes, and today, realistically, we are in a situation where it is difficult for us to assemble a budak (luckily, the country is full of budaks that are already closed). If we've learned anything from our own decade-long decline, it's that industrial revolutions can be skipped - but only when you're going in reverse.
Finance Minister Siniša Mali is even more specific in his statement to "Tanjug": "When you cross Pupin's bridge on the left, in the next couple of years a huge industrial park will be built on 320 hectares." A park that should attract over 1.000 Chinese companies. When we calculated with CRBC, the company that will invest in the park, it will create almost 10.000 new jobs. It will be the largest Chinese industrial park in Europe. (…) If all the companies that will come are taken into account, the total investment will amount to around two billion euros."
A simple calculation says that the average Chinese company will come to Serbia to invest in a business that requires ten workers and 32 acres of wages, and that they will invest two million euros or 200.000 euros per worker. Good news for the nation of cable winders who have long been accustomed to working for a foreign investor in three shifts for a thousand times less "minimum"!
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: When someone already masters higher mathematics with such ease, he is able to prove various fascinating "theorems" in black and white. Let's say that America has largely passed its zenith and is now on a historic downslope. There is no better illustration of this than the fact that in America, in completely peacetime conditions, 3.153.600 window cleaners die every single year, and another 8.640 of them commit crimes. When window washers are added to other high-risk professions such as football players, rodeo riders, trapeze acrobats, tank drivers and scuba divers, the number of Americans who "evaporate" in the workplace each year probably reaches ten million. . And that trend is probably not from yesterday. It is quite possible that, in fact, there is no one there anymore, which made our (re)orientation towards the Chinese super-partner necessary and completely logical.
If any "Chinese" statement by our president deserves the full support of the entire nation, it is the one about importing "artificial intelligence" from China. A flying car cannot assemble itself in Borča, we need someone smart enough for that. Given that we have mostly driven our natural intelligence out of the country, it is high time to compensate for that by intervening importation of intelligence from abroad, even if it was done with a surrogate. We will pay in hoofs, God willing, at least we have enough of them.
Terrafugia
Despite the fact that the flying car is still only a futuristic concept with very modest results in practice, this does not mean that there is no investment in their development at all. On the contrary, there seems to be more investment in the idea than ever, and the renewed interest is likely fueled by technological advances and the growing number of cities that are slowly losing their battle with chronic traffic jams.
One of the projects that has a solid chance of success is "Terrafugia". The company was founded by a group of ambitious graduates from the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but it recently passed into the hands of the Chinese concern "Geely Holding Group", which also owns "Volvo". The company has grown tenfold and currently has 200 employees with a hangar in New Hampshire that will house the first eight examples of the vehicle.
Terrafugia (pictured) looks a bit like a robot from the Transformers movies. It has four wheels, just like any car, but the bodywork is more aerodynamic, with wings that fold over to keep it out of the way on the road and pronounced tail stabilizers. However, this is not a flying car in the classic sense. The company's idea is to create a light sports aircraft that licensed pilots will be able to keep parked in their home garage. The wheels would only be used for transport to the nearest airport, and the airstrip would still be used for takeoff.
The company nearly went bankrupt in 2009 when it failed to deliver fifty aircraft already ordered and paid for. In addition, the company faced a series of objections from regulatory agencies that insisted that "Terrafuggia" simultaneously meet virtually all automotive and aircraft safety standards. This led to an almost complete redesign of the entire aircraft, which today has a license for use and more than 200 hours of experimental flight.
With the new Chinese owner, the situation has improved significantly. The plan is to start mass production next year, with parts being made in China, while assembly and testing would be done in America. Belgrade has not been mentioned so far, which does not mean that it will not. At the same time, they are working on the design of a new model that will not need an airport runway to take off. The price? Trivia: $380.000.
One of the leading private investors is Larry Page, one of the founders of "Google", so far he has invested money in three different flying car projects: "Cora", "Flyer" and "Opener". All these projects have a similar technical concept: they are radically redesigned drones with a large number of smaller drive motors, with an emphasis on good maneuverability, ease of control, safety and superior design. Compared to helicopters, these drones have two significant advantages: they are much quieter, and a very small space is enough for them to take off and land. Unfortunately, they lack a longer range, which typically does not exceed 40 kilometers, and the solution could be next-generation batteries, the development of which may take a decade. All this does not bother Page much, who has repeatedly stated that his life's mission is to create things that do not exist.
Among other projects, we mention the German "Volocopter" (which is financially supported by "Intel" and "Damiler"), then "Joby" ("Toyota", "Blue Jet" and other investors have so far invested about 100 million dollars in this project) , as well as experimental aircraft developed by "Airbus".
There's also Uber, the controversial giant that sees air-taxi as a natural extension of the company's core business and a whole new market waiting to be shared. "Uber" has no intention of creating its own vehicle, it will simply buy the one that turns out to be the most cost-effective and of the highest quality. Instead, Uber concentrated on developing software that would monitor and control air taxi routes. Although there is still no official confirmation of this, it is speculated that "Uber" is cooperating with the American agency NASA on this project. The main challenge is how to coordinate and integrate the movement of thousands of new small aircraft into the existing air traffic control system.
Finally, we should also mention "Pal-V", a model of the Dutch company of the same name, which was presented this year at the Farnborough Fair. This gyrocopter looks like a futuristic tricycle when it's "folded" on the ground, but it looks even better in the air as it demonstrates its superior performance. Its maximum speed is 160 km/h on the road and 180 km/h in the air, with a maximum flight height of 3.500 meters. If it gets all the necessary papers and permits, "Pal-V" will go on sale in 2020 at a price of around 300.000 euros. Along with the driver's license, an adequate pilot's license is also mandatory.
