it makes a lot more sense to do basically what the yellow line ons their -- this line productivity. some ambiguity in the data. there are some cases where becomes a little ambiguous and activity.lculate the thank you for coming. we appreciate your interest. if you have not done so already, please read the report. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> members of congress are reacting to the death of i today. all the boxing champion died yesterday at a phoenix area hospital where he was being past few days. john mccain posted on twitter

ant mohammed ali was incredible man. tim kaine says he was an inspiration worldwide and his contribution to sports and athletes were invaluable. yarmuthtative john writes, i am just one of the many in louisville, whose heart aches for the loss of my friend. and, congressman keith ellison has this to say on twitter, mohammed ali was much more than enough it for me, he was an inspiration. he was the recipient of the insidential medal of freedom 2005. that event.rtion of say thet bush: when you

greatest of all-time is in the room, everyone knows who you mean. to make.laim as mohammed ali once said, it is not bragging, if you can back it up. [laughter] up. man backed it erom the day when th gold medal at the 1968 olympic games, we all knew there was something special about this young fighter from louisville, kentucky. in his record including 37 knockouts hardly begins to tell the story. future, fans of students of boxing will study the films and some were even try to copy his style. defy imitation. the shuffle, the jobs, the total command of the ring, and above all, the determination that he

brought to every fight. this is a man that wants fought more than 10 rounds with a fractured jaw. he fought until complete .xhaustion and to victory the real mr., i guess, is how he stayed so pretty. [laughter] [applause] it probably has to do with his beautiful soul. he was a fierce fighter and a hisof peace, just like parents believed their son could be. across the world, people know him as a brave and compassionate man. the american people are proud to call him one of our own. [laughter] [applause]

our country and our world have been improved by the lives of the men and women that we honor today. i asked the military to read the citations. ali.hammed one of the greatest athletes of all time, mohammed ali produce some of america's most lasting sports memories from winning the gold medal at the 1960 summer olympics to caring for the big torch at the 19 96 summer olympics. of the heavyweight champions of the world, he thrilled and inspired us. his deep commitment to justice

and peace has touch people around the world. the united states on his mohammed ali for his lifetime of achievement and his principled service to mankind. [applause] [laughter]

>> this statement today from president obama and the first lady that reads in part, he shook up the world -- >> american history tv on c-span 3. tonight at 10:00 eastern on railamerica. fleete than 10,000 cubans cuba. they come from the port of to qs, florida in nearly two dozen boats. why did they come? why are there so many? theuring the spring through fall, approximately 125,000 cubans refugees arrived in

florida. here interviews from the new arrivals to america and find out why they left. 10:00, bill clinton excepts the presidential nomination in new york city. >> in the name of hard-working theicans who have forgotten working class, i probably accept the nomination for president of the night states. bush excepts his nomination in houston. >> i'm proud to receive an honored to accept your nomination for president of the united states. the:45, barry lewis on creation of new york city's greenwich village. >> when the l opened, it gave us what we basically understood. square, westington'

w, no one crossed that line. to be aey crossed servant, but believe me, they never went west of 6th avenue. presidency."he >> it is unanimous. unanimously president of the united states, unite appointed -- po scholare washington explores the even though washington was officially retired, he continued to meet with political figures and was newn called upon to a craft policy. for the complete schedule, go to c-span.org.

>> now, a look at the latest advances in technology that could lead to flying vehicles in the future. this is 40 minutes. " continues.journal next guest is talking about flying cars, good morning. guest: good morning, how are you? host: this sounds more like science fiction but you say it is fact and it's happening today. guest: yes. on the right here this morning, to get to the studio, i kept looking out the window. i encourage any viewer to do this on your way to work today or the grocery store. you will see that there are kids on hoverboards and people on electric icicles, you will see people on homemade solar bicycles. ofre is an explosion

experimentation that's going on now in the country in every respect of transportation. i would argue that this is the inventionplosion of since the 1890's-1910 which is when the modern combustion engine came into being. we are clearly at some kind of big hinge point in technology innovation -- and fuel and innovation. there is a lot of experimentation going on. if not a coincidence that you hear about flying cars, self driving cars, robotic cars, smart cars, all manner of bicycles, public transportation. muskple of years ago, elon runs tesla proposed the hyper loop which was a superduper train system based on the old pneumatic tube idea.

in this creative frenzy right now to try to figure out what is the next , financiallyent smart way to move us around. that's what happening. host: there is a mockup of one of these type of vehicles on the pages of smithsonian magazine. can you give us a sense of what these cars will look like? guest: it depends on which one you are looking at. the flying car right now -- there are flying cars. there is a company in massachusetts that has one. you can go online and order one. it does require a pilot's license. it fits inside a garage. it is folded up with the wings on the side of the car. you can drive that car to an airport and push a button and the wings poke out. then you can fly. are inve done this and the process of now manufacturing these and selling them. the flying car exists.

the big leap i think people are looking forward to and what all of these flying car companies are trying to build -- there is about dozen of these flying car with prototypes and mockups. you can find them online. they are trying to get to the robotic flying car. which is better than what you saw in the jetsons when you were a kid. george had to steer that. the hoped-for flying car is the one where you would open the app on your phone and say i want to fly from new haven, connecticut to boston, massachusetts and punch in the address and a robotic car would come to your house and you would get in it and there would be no steering wheel. they would be no steering whatsoever. the car would go to an agreed-upon launch place and take off and fly robotically to

boston and land and drive you to your location. flying cart these companies are shooting for. host: we're talking with jack hitt from smithsonian magazine. questionst to ask about what these cars look like and how they will operate and the regulatory issues and other things involved come you can call and ask our guest directly. you can also post on our website and facebook and twitter page. in this video, it seems that will have tordles be conquered to make these more mainstream. guest: there is a competition between the driverless car which happens on the ground in the flying car which happens in the air. each have advantages and one of the disadvantages are the flying car is there are more regulatory

hurdles to go through. really has not clarified where drone policy is right now. they will have to work that through and then get to the issues of flying cars. ground,ss cars among they have an easier task in terms of your craddock castle but they have a more difficult task in terms of technology. strangely, flying cars probably technologically more feasible than a driverless car. think about it -- a car on the ground is on a two-dimensional sort of plane. it's on the ground. it can only operate in these little core doors. it cannot drive on the sidewalks or go anywhere wants to. it can only go in specific places and it has to look out for a huge area problems like children dashing into the road, anything. a plane in the air has a three-dimensional space to work with.

that has very few obstacles in the way. even if we loaded up the air with lots of flying devices, computers would be good at is a multiplicity of objects flying through space. it sounds contradictory but that is true. that is the hassle that the flying car will have to contend with is the bureaucracy of regulation and regulating the air moves slowly. we have 120 year experience of bureaucratically managing the ground. we have been pioneering that for quite a while. have an easier technological hurdle to climb over but a more difficult bureaucratic one. host: let's hear from our viewers. its is from egg harbor, new jersey, independent line. i don't know if you commented on this.

words, profit and control. right now, it has been a with planes and air traffic going on. amazon came out with drones. traffic control. guest: yes, think about it -- planes crash very rarely. traffic control in the air is actually very efficient. when planes go down now, what is our first thought? terrorism. it's not that traffic control screwed up, it's that someone tampered with a regular system of flight. actually, traffic control in the air is an easier path to deal with an traffic control on the ground. hitt is joining us

and these are the phone lines. this is going to be pretty much an economic thing in the sense that not everyone will be able to afford these vehicles? guest: we will see. there are several revolutions happening at the same time. one is technological but the other is fuel. we are at a juncture in the way we use fuel. it's the same way when oil came online and we moved into the combustion engine age, we were coming out of the coal age and oil was the clean energy 100 years ago. now call has been in decline since world war ii. now fossil fuels are in decline. thalternative energies are growing every year and getting more efficient and better. the way to think about this is

there is a number of different innovations that could happen. any one of them will push our transportation future into a different direction. if batteries become more efficient, a lot more efficient, we would then be able to do things with their cars and trains and planes that we never thought we could do before. if the technology becomes more efficient, there will be other advantages in that direction. let me give you one. the people who really promote the driverless car idea love the notion of transponders. those are the devices inside cars which already exist in the newer models that become aware of other cars in the road. eventually, those computer systems will be able to speak to road.her cars on the imagine if you are 10 cars in a line at a red light and all of the cars are talking in the redline turns green, everybody can move at the same time. there are huge energy efficiencies in that.

awarenessituational and that which means there will be fewer actions because the car will be aware of other cars in the vicinity. if that kind of technology takes off and we have enough cars with transponders, then the whole ground transportation system becomes infinitely safer and much more efficient. it depends on which of these technologies or fuel efficiencies or bureaucratic and depending on which one of those occurs, i think we will have our transportation future going in one direction or the other. host: rob is from georgia, good morning. caller: good morning. i'm a pilot instructor my question is more about licensing or the ability of the. pilot.

i'm an instructor in savannah, georgia. i'm wondering when the computer who will beg, flying this airplane? the ability of the person with the controls -- you are talking about computers running this thing. working,computer stops does the pilot have to be able to manipulate the controls? guest: yes, that's everyone's first thought. if you talk to the flying car innovators, one of the guys i who is creating a flying car called a switchblade, it has switchblade wings so they talk under the car. under the car and it's very appealing looking. after the pilot issue, the safety question that many people think about is dealt with by

redundancy. technology progresses as quickly as we wanted to, you will end up with a kind of plane or flying car that has redundant system so that if anyone of these sensor systems fails, the other systems will step in and take over. what that question really gets to is about autonomy. the autonomy of the pilot flying car.the on ourlity to get transportation device and the in command -- and be in command.

that was very important. what you are watching with a lot of this technology is the technology is taking the control from us inch by inch and that is happening in the cars you are driving right now. many people are not aware that the cars they drive have smart raking systems. the car is breaking before your foot actually gets to the pedal in a crisis situation. accustomed to cruise control but now there is smart for his controller you get on a highway and turn on smart cruise control when the radar in the car sees the car in front of you and the car behind you and monitors the white lines and ands the car in the lane keeps it speeding up or slowing down depending on the momentum of traffic. that already exists. we are giving away that control constantly and you find a younger drivers -- my children's

have no a lot of them interest in learning how to drive. that whole question of autonomy, the desire to be in the drivers seat, that is changing. as driver apathy increases and technological efficiency increases, we may well get to the point where people don't want to drive a car. haveu could hit an app and a car drive you two hours to a location than you can spend that time sitting in the backseat like in a limo reading or talking or watching a movie. would that be more appealing than having the autonomous power of controlling the vehicle? that's the question. the next couple of years we will answer that. caller: host: if you go to the pages of smithsonian, there are drawings and illustrations of

the flying car concepts. jackk hitt is talking about it. alexandria, virginia, democrats line, hello. caller: there are two aspects of what you are missing. one is the design aspect and engineering. the things that make a car stable and sturdy and safe on a highway are not necessarily the things that make them efficient and lightweight and able to perform well in the air. it's a standard engineering trade-off. the other aspect is the financial peace of it or you when you look at what it cost to have certified equipment on a certified aircraft in the u.s., it costs an order of magnitude as if it were onyx bar mental aircraft. you're talking about an electronic flight display on an airplane that would the $5,000

then would turn into $50,000. guest: there is also godwin's law. and in accessible technology tenures ago and now teenagers flight of them around and try to peak in windows. occurschnological curve with any technology and that will happen certainly with pilot technology and airplanes. the other question about design is key. i heard about it constantly. to be a stable car and what it takes to be a smooth flying airplane are two very different features. one of the executives from detroit that i spoke with said that problem with the flying car is that you end up with a crummy car and a lousy airplane once you marry the two. that is actually the

technological and design issues you see being worked through in these hangers which i visited where these guys are inventing the next generation of flying cars. switchblade is a stable three wheeled car that is very cool to look at and has a very nice wing design. the problem with the earlier cars that the wings had to fold up for the head to telescope in and the problem is every time you mess with the smooth design of the wing, you are interfering with the efficiency of the plane. the nice thing about the switchblade is that you have a fully designed smooth wing tucked under the car so when it comes out, you get a much better plane and a much better car but that design question is key. that's what everybody is working on. switchblade design is

illustrated in the pages of the magazine and the website. honolulu, hawaii, independent line, good morning. caller: i would like to comment. we are all thinking about the future of flying cars from a personal perspective. i think we are missing the bigger picture. adopters and sometimes the most important adopters will be essential services like ambulances. think about the countless number of lives that would be saved from ambulances that don't have to sit in traffic waiting for cars to get out of the way. these ambulances can bypass the traffic entirely and go to the hospital without anything in their way. the potential for this and other services in other industries is a magnitude greater to save lives. that is my comment. true. that is so we like to think that revolutions happen like the

american revolution that all of a sudden everyone takes up arms in a reading changes overnight. most revolutions are incremental. people mention that aspect3 . it's probably the first use of the flying car, the pilotless flying car would be an ambulance. imagine if there is a car wreck on a road in an ambulance could beive and the injured could put in this flying car and airlifted immediately to the nearest hospital. that will be very appealing and people want that. the technology and bureaucracy will shift in order to make it happen because we all wanted to happen. car,rms of the driverless you will not see these on the road overnight but what you may see -- one of the driverless car engineers was telling me that their first thought was to try to put these in retirement villages in florida where there

is not a lot of people wandering the streets and things move very slowly and it would follow routines that the driverless cars couldn't he mapped out that way. -- could be mapped out that way. these inventions will have an incremental sort of presence in our lives. it's the same way the combustion engine happened. that's the way it crept into american life. it did not happen over night. it happened over decades. go back to the 1890's and you could stand on a street corner in manhattan as hydrogen cars or steam powered cars, electric cars, combustion engine cars are in for a while there in the 1890's, 1910's, i don't know the exact year, but the almost entire fleet of new york taxis were electric cars. that was in part because even drove aroundc cars

for a while and ran out of energy and would come back and recharge. it's only when we created longer highways and farther driving distances that we sort of went with the combustion engine car because that was the most adaptable to long-term driving and it still is. this is one of the problems that people still talk about with electric cars, range anxiety. 10/ tesla is trying to change that with our stations. if lithium or a new version of lithium increases the efficiency so you can get 1000 miles on a charge, that would completely alter the market and the electric car would become a completely different and far more appealing vehicle. each one of these roads out of our current transportation or twois blocked by one or three or four of these technologies or bureaucracies or energy efficiency questions.

in this frenzy we are in now, those of the questions that are being dealt with and answered by inventors and car companies and flying car companies and everybody else. host: our guest is contributed to smithsonian magazine but also the new york times magazine, harpers and radio. did you first become interested in this flying car idea? in new haven, connecticut and i was having a coffee with a professor of energy at gateway community college which is a school that teaches all kinds of things. argument.ot into this i asked how hard it would need for me to take a combustion engine,ar tear out the put in a battery-powered motor

and batteries and then charge that off of a solar panel on my house? is,question i wanted to ask could i build a car that runs entirely off of sunshine. he was like yes, that technology is here. that is totally possible. i thought about it for a while. i took him up on his suggestion. he and i spent about a year of weekends in his backyard with my and will wagon cabrio ripped the engine out and install the three-phase motor with lithium-ion batteries. i get about 70 miles on a charge. it's a small car. if i did it all over again, i would probably choose a different car. i have that car once i get the panels up, i will have a vehicle that runs entirely off of sunshine. i did that to find out how much that would cost. could i build a car that was

roughly the cost of regular car question mark that car cost me about $23,000 to build from buying the car to driving it out of the driveway. i have had it for three years. i never bought a tank of gas in that time. one of the nice things about electric cars is that most of the problems in a combustion engine car comes from fluid dynamics. we know to change our oil. the reason is junk gets in there and breaks things down. it gets stuck in places. an electric motor is just wires. the in -- my entire cars just wires. there are no fluids. nothing is flowing anywhere. except electrons on wires. it does not really break down. if anything breaks down, it body of the car itself. i have a problem with the driver door because someone smacked it

but that has nothing to do with the electrical construction. that is what got me interested in this. i wanted to participate hands-on and see what it was like to jump into this inventive frenzy we are in now and see how that feels and whether i could pull this off. in time, i bumped into people inventing electric icicles or bicycles that are powered -- when you go downhill, you paddle and store that energy and you redeploying it later. there are all kinds of technologies people are playing with. i think it's because we are at this juncture in terms of technology and energy. it's a great time for invention. it's a great time for creativity. it's a great time for going into your garage to figure out what the next big thing is. host: nashville, tennessee, hi. one and i, i want

have to be one of the first people on my block to have one of these. how much is a cost and when can aget one and two you have driver sharing life form in your future? you: when you see one, do mean a flying car or a caller: driverless car or an electric car? caller:a flying car. does: the one that exists require a pilot's license. are you a pilot? caller: not yet. guest: well, getting a pilot's is not as long a process or as difficult as you might think. it is a process. becausese than the dmv of the time commitment but you can do it. switchbladeand the -- yes, this june or july, he will be flying the first test

run on the car he is designing an oregon. -- in oregon. motivation he told me was not unlike what you were talking about witches when he flew in his private plane, he has a plane, youassenger get to the airport and you're stuck there. you either take a cab or you hang out at the airport. his thought was -- can i build a car that would allow me to have this ease of movement and land at an airport and fold of the wings and go to my appointment. that is the dream. all of these innovations really roll back to the sense of freedom that we americans feel in our bones. driven inc car was part when we were having these conversations about my desire to be free of the gas powered car.

i just wanted to be liberated from the mechanical breakdowns, the constant purchases of gas. can i break free from that? you can. that appeal is really strong, the flying car, the driverless car where you sit in the back and read a book or watch a movie -- ford just recently filed a patent for an onboard movie car, theat in a future screen would come down where the windshield this and the windows would darken. you would be in a moving movie theater going to your next appointment. you wouldn't even be able to see out the windows, what is the point? host: how high can these vehicles go and are there concerns about involvement with other air-traffic? air the department of

transportation say you can only go so high? guest: yes, those are technical questions that i cannot honestly answer, but they are being deliberated right now at the faa. the kind of height we are talking about for flying cars a different height and commercial airliners -- than commercial airliners. the second issue is drones. you've all seen the videos on youtube of drones being attacked by eagles or hawks. just saw one the other day of a drone near a commercial airliner and it clipped the side wing. dronesese radioshack proliferate even more, there's

going to have to be some kind of regulation by some entity to control that airspace. if amazon wants to use them to deliver packages come all that regulation will have to be worked out. you could just imagine -- that kind of bureaucratic wrestling match will be super intense and far more complicated than the bureaucratic wrestling match about putting driverless cars on the ground. we will see how that plays out in the end. the metaphor i use, or technology now, our transportation world is in one of these roundabouts. there's a number of different exits off that roundabout. which one we end up taking depends on which breakthrough happens at which point as we circle around getting out of our combustion engine system.

that is the world we've lived in for 100 years. that world is changing. we will see shifts in the way we come in waysars that are unthinkable right now. when the combustion engine cars between 1900 and the 1920's, the horse was still the main mode of transportation in cities, old bureaus were devoted to cleaning up horse dung. most streets were just mud baths. the sun would come up and there were dry fecal canals. the car was seen as a massive hygienic improvement. switch a long time to from all the infrastructure of the horse that was in place.

there was no infrastructure for the combustion engine car. the use of the horse as a transportation device has now been thoroughly eliminated and the horse has been put out to pasture as an elegant sort of writing animal that people take lessons for -- riding animal that people take lessons for. so rich kids can take you dressage. you can keep your beautiful old ,ntique car in these garages they look just like stables. farms,re carparks, car number of them in l.a., one

outside of chicago -- well-to-do people keep their mid-condition old, beautiful cars in these garages and they come and visit the car and get in it and drive around. racetracksed, go on and amble about and go back and park your car and have a lunch. host: california. here is ed. ed from chino hills. asler: i'm curious as far the patents and how long these companies have had these patents. it seems like there's a lot of suppression of new technology. bike from china and i'm having a hard time finding a battery.

i've been on amazon and all these places and i can't find a battery. i heard airships are making a big comeback. it seems like these companies want to sit on the technology ait long enough or people to forget about it and then come back and act like they invented it. host: patent laws are unbelievably complicated and way beyond my pay grade. i don't know about people sitting on patents. , some parthear this of me just feels like maybe that is a little more conspiratorial thinking than it should be. there are patents, there are controls on some of these devices and technologies. calling around and talking to people involved in actually trying to create something new, other companies holding patents is not what is holding them back.

what is holding them back is , thatard-core reality they have not figured out the x.chnology to do as they have not miniaturized a computer system to put it on board a plane. that's what these companies are worried about, not the bottling up great ideas and waiting for the market to develop. most of these people are galloping to the market as fast as they can. right now, we are in this frenzy of invention. --t is fun is to go to these i went to the new england electric car association. were all these self invented, wonderful all-american crackpots gather with their homemade cars and talk about what did you do to solve this problem and that

problem. it is that kind of fermentation of thinking that i love. that you are seeing in all these different zones of transportation. host: arlington heights, illinois. robert, good morning. in regards to the self driving cars and that technology -- that technology and the sensors have been around for a long time. developed a lot of these sensors and had research and development, trying to hash out these sensors in terms of what they- that is are trying to figure out right now. due to the regulations and , is it comingds sooner than later or do you think due to all that stuff, it will be a while?

guest: it is kind of already here and we just don't know it yet. on current your models, you can get smart breaking, automatic and adaptive cruise control or smart cruise control. if you've seen this automatic parking feature, it is the amazing. -- pretty amazing. i surprised myself with parallel parking. i made sure my daughters could parallel park a car. now, that is gone. i've been in cars were you just will up next to the space and you press a button and the car figures out where it is and just as the geometry and moves right in. it is a beautiful thing to see.