Way to go! THIS is the future, and about time too. I have lived under the flight path of an airport for the last 7 years. It has been hell!! Now that the airport has moved to another location I am enjoying the peace and tranquility at last. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all could?

Two words: winter storm.

Not a bad idea but the whole point of high altitude air travel is to rise above the often volatile conditions experienced in the lower atmosphere and its high level of unpredictability. What happens when you come across a bad weather system stretching miles and miles across or unexpected tornados and erratic movements of tropical systems such as hurricanes.

I imagine a titanic oops at some point.

Unbelievable plagiarism. You could have at least linked to source form which you copied there entire post.

Here isthe original link form where the “nynerd” stole the article.

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/whatsnew/18ac893302839010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

Is that first picture for real or computer generated? There’s no caption.

Unsafe and impractical. First, at only 8,000 feet (as pointed out by someone else), the craft is subject to the vagaries of local ground weather. Second, since it is only going 174 miles per hour, if anything happened to the drive motors it would not glide very well, and there would probably not be enough time to use the vertical lift engines to avert a crash. There are other issues too.

This looks like one of those things that seem like a good idea at first but were not well thought out.

“top speed of 174 mph”

It sounds more like a replacement for train travel than airplanes at that speed.

This looks like one of those things that seem like a good idea at first but were not well thought out.