How long would it take to fly from London to North Wales in a flying car?
I grew up on an island in Anglesey, North Wales, and most of my family is still there. I live in London, which is far away from Anglesey. What if I buy a flying car, and fly directly from my house in London to my house in Anglesey?
Before we get to that, let’s first evaluate the default options: I could drive, or get public transport.
Road trip
The drive from London to Anglesey involves staring at the motorway ahead of you for 6 hours while trying your best not to fall asleep. There are a few service stations along the way, where you can get a nice soya latte at Costa and a vegan sausage roll at Greggs. That doesn’t really make up for the monotonous nature of the drive. It’ll set you back £50 in diesel, and £100s in lost life satisfaction.
Public transport
Trains are usually much faster than driving, and you can do interesting things on them like reading your emails. You might even reply to some of them.
The first 30 minutes of my journey is on the London Underground to get to a National Rail Station. I’m now at Euston, and ready to jump on a series of different trains to get to Bangor in North Wales, which will take 3.5 hours on a good day. Once I arrive at Bangor, I’ll wait one hour for the bus, and then sit on the bus for 50 minutes until I arrive at my village. This took 6 hours and cost anything from £50 to £200, depending on the whims of the train pricing algorithms.
Of course, this assumes that the trains aren’t on strike.
Flying car
Did someone mention flying car? Let’s take a trip in a GyroMotion!
I wake up in the morning and walk to a local coffee shop. While sitting at the cafe and taking a sip of a delicious oat milk flat white, I decide to visit my parents for the day. I walk home, jump into the cockpit of my GyroMotion that’s parked outside, and drive for 30 minutes to the nearest airfield. I drive in, say hello to air traffic control, and then take off. The runway is 300m long, but it only takes 70m for me to be in the air.
For the next 2 hours and 20 minutes, I fly over the British countryside. I’m entranced by the beautiful Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, I fly under Iron Bridge in Shropshire, and I wave at hikers on their way up Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) in Eryri (Snowdonia). I land in a field outside my house, grateful that the sheep are elsewhere.
The journey from door to door took 3 hours and cost £50 in petrol. After saying hello to my family, I drive the GyroMotion over country roads to the best chippie on Anglesey. I eat the chips while watching the sun set over the ocean.
The challenge
Right now, the journey could actually take a few decades. I’d first need to stop by the UK Parliament and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to do some lobbying. Small aircraft have barely changed over the past half century due to arduous regulations preventing engineers from innovating, and the GyroMotion Calidus (alongside most gyroplanes) isn’t legal to fly in the UK.
For example, the regulation to determine the “initial airworthiness” of UK aircraft is 758 pages long, and includes sentences like this beauty:
§§ 25.901 and 25.1309 at Amendment 25-40 and 25-46 was adopted in the explicit fuel tank ignition prevention failure analysis requirements of § 25.981(a)(3), the incremental requirement for demonstrating compliance with the ignition prevention requirements of Amendment 25-102 is to develop and implement the fuel tank system airworthiness limitations instead of developing Certification Maintenance Requirements in accordance with § 25.901(b)(2) at Amendments 25-40 through 25-46 and AC 25-19A.
Yes, that was one long incomprehensible sentence. It was the first sentence I read when I scrolled to a random page. The document has 758 pages of those sentences.
As of 2024, only 2 aircraft companies have received approval for any of their gyroplanes to fly in the UK: RotorCraft UK (the British trading name for the German company AutoGyro) and Magni Gyro (Italian). Take a guess when the first gyroplane was invented. Once you’ve made your guess, click here for the correct answer. We’ve made astonishingly little progress since then relative to what we could have achieved if aviation innovators were able to operate with fewer nonsensical impediments.
Where do we go from here
I’ve become convinced that every organisation in the world would benefit from applying this algorithm to large parts of their work. The basic steps, to be done in order, are:
Question every requirement, and make them less dumb.
Delete every part or process you can.
Simplify and optimise. Simple is beautiful.
Accelerate. Whatever the process or system is, make it faster.
Automate.
If the CAA applied this to their work, I expect they would end up with far more effective regulations. Vast swathes of the existing text would be deleted, and the documents would be far shorter and simpler. The rules would be focused only on what’s most important for ensuring public safety, while enabling entrepreneurs to develop new aircraft types and improve on existing technologies.
I could then fulfil my Sunday morning dream.
