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February 15, 2006 12:41 PM PST
Flying car ready for takeoff?
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Terrafugia, a start-up created by Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winner Carl Dietrich and colleagues at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, is aiming to show off what it calls the Transition "personal air vehicle," a vehicle resembling an SUV with retractable wings, to the EAA AirVenture Conference in Oshkosh, Wis., at the end of July.
The Transition is designed for 100- to 500-mile jumps. It will carry two people and luggage on a single tank of premium unleaded gas. It will also come with an electric calculator (to help fine-tune weight distribution), airbags, aerodynamic bumpers and of course a GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation unit.
The company hopes to eventually have the vehicle classified so that it can be piloted with a light sport aircraft license.
No complete prototype exists yet, but the company has a one-fifth scale wind tunnel model (along with computer simulations) and will use the $30,000 from the Lemelson prize to build something to show off at the Oshkosh show. A fully operational prototype is expected to come out in 2008 or earlier, according to the company, while Transition vehicles are expected to hit the road, and the sky, by 2009 or 2010.
"We have a lot of confidence that if the interest is there, we can deliver this product," Dietrich said. "There is a huge amount of general interest, but the question is, is there a market for it?"
Building retractable wings won't be the major challenge: F-18s and even some World War II era planes have folding wings. Instead, one of the biggest challenges will be creating enough cargo room to satisfy customers. The planes, which will cruise up to 12,000 feet, will probably use an off-the-shelf engine, he added.
Carl Dietrich
In the past few years, the skies have become a new frontier for entrepreneurs and academics. The chase for the X Prize led entrepreneur Richard Branson and others to begin to contemplate space tourism. PayPal founder Elon Musk, meanwhile, has started SpaceX, a private company that hopes to launch rockets for satellite deployment, similar to the more heavily funded Sea Launch venture. Stanford University professors teach a course on do-it-yourself satellites.
Short-range aircraft and flight start-ups have sprung up as well. Citrix founder Ed Iacobucci has launched DayJet, which plans on buying a fleet of Eclipse planes for on-demand travel between regional hubs. People Airlines founder has a similar company based on the small, lightweight Eclipse. (Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is an investor in Eclipse.)
And for backyard adventurers, Elwood "Woody" Norris has the AirScooter, a personal helicopter. Graduate students at Stanford also have hatched a secretive start-up geared at recreational flyers, according to sources familiar with their plans.
Flying cars are technically feasible; Terrafugia points out that inventor Molt Taylor built prototypes in the 1950s and 1960s--but they haven't been practical from an economic perspective.
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"roadable" and plastered it all over...
socks off you twice a day. No one pays any attention to traffics
laws. And the word is that the local police don't enforce traffic laws
because any traffic fine money goes to the state not the city.
whatever the reason why, the laws aren't enforced.
Now you want to let these same idiots get airborne?
It's a hotrod single place turbine engined helicopter. The kit and
engine cost $32,500. It's too much fun not to seriously want, at
least for me.
I have a nice design for a roadable aircraft, which I always wanted
because airports are often a long walk from where I was actually
going. If I ever finish it, you'll see it at Oshkosh, b'gosh.
The limitations of the sport pilot license negates the usefulness of the car/aircraft in many major cities where your faced with airspace in which a sport pilots license forbids you to enter (without a 'logbook entry'), and flying at night (to name a few restrictions). Those two alone kill the use of the car as a commuter in 'aircraft mode'. If you live outside a major city, you might be okay.
You could weave your way through the airspace, but try explaining to your boss that you have to leave early because you can't fly home after dusk. Night, defined by the FAA is "One hour after evening civil twilight and one hour before morning civil twilight", so it can still be light outside but still illegal to fly.
to add to that, most airports (all the ones I've visited) are protected by some kind of gate/fence to limit access. Utually access is granted via a key card. Can't just go up and drive on the field to take off...
It will be interesting to see what happens.
so many things they'll need to rethink, but they are thinking
towards a solution we may all like. Their web site is better than
their actual design, but their next version will likely be better.
They fly regular airplanes. That helps them keep their dreaming
grounded in reality. Everyone says you can't do stuff until you
do. Stephen Pitcairn made a good functional roadable autogyro
in 1937 and landed it on the White House lawn, the day Hitler
invaded Czechoslovakia. It didn't make the news that day. I saw
it in the Washington Air and Space Museum. If I could buy one
today, I would. Hey you Terra folks, check it out! It really
worked much bettewr than Molt Taylor's Aerocar, which I saw fly.
It was a hopeless flyer, barely able to climb out of ground effect.
It had front wheel drive and with the wings as a trailer, could not
be driven uphill. You find stuff like that out After you build your
dream. Lessons abound. Learn them, and make us our Flying
Car! Thanks.
going. He's got the "SkyCar" now, which appears to be ready for
production (and has for quite some time now). Vertical takeoff and
landing eliminates the need for a runway, it's got three wheels so it
can be registered with the DMV as a motorcycle. If I had the money
I'd buy one!
The author might have meant F-14 or F-111 which both have "variable geometery" wings as the biz call so-called "folding" wings.
Show me something that looks more like a car, takes off and lands vertically, carry a better pay load than this sport plane, then I can call it a flying car. Until then, it's a PLANE.
I think that most of us were banking on that to be the standard for personal flying vehicles.
I believe that if flying cars are to become a true standard for transportation its roots will have to originate from outside the US.
I don't believe the FAA will support personal flying vehicles this without major pressure from consumers.
That?s just the way I see it.
Having some idea of what it takes to learn to fly, and how easy it can be in some areas to get a sport aircraft license.. well, I sincerely hope *that* process doesn't get simplified. There are plenty of people on the roads who can barely drive within the limits of traffic laws, for instance - I hope to doG they're kept out of the air.
Also, sport aircraft tend to be purely mechanical. Cars these days tend to be more electronic/microcontrolled and power-assisted; will they build the redundancy systems into these that fly-by-wire aircraft have, or will there be a return to purely mechanical driving, or a hybrid of power-assisted [steering and brakes] for example while driving with mechanical control of flight surfaces? Safety in the air is vastly different from safety on the ground, and what happens if, say, the dashboard computer suddenly gacks [as happens with modern vehicles] because of humidity, cold/hot extremes, &c.? I have actually seen recently-built vehicles' "crash", i.e. the entire dashboard suddenly dies because the computer quit, meaning there is no speedometer, odometer, tachometer, or even for that matter turn signal indicators or working radio.
Lastly, can anyone say "consumer cruise missile"?
sets of double runways once each had their own radio frequency,
and you'd be like Number 12 Downwind for Landing, every time.
Now, 30 years later, the skies are empty. I never have to wait for
the fuel truck and that's nice, but I wonder why none of you seem
to want to aviate, like I always did.
Signed
Elroy and his hot sister Judy
And could you imagine one of these things being stolen? The cops might be chasing the driver down I-95 and then... take-off time! Now the guy's up in the air flying over the trees! It would give "took off in a stolen car" literal meaning.
tell it you want to go. Modern planes can pretty much do that
today too; you have to know how to program your autopilot. But
hey, the smallest thing goes wrong, and all of a sudden you get
to see if you have The Right Stuff.
Mostly there are too many variables to keep aware of. If a gauge
reads anomolously and you fail to notice, you could be dead and
take lots of people with you. Pilot licenses are hard to get for
very good reason.
Those of you who are born to fly, will persist and prevail. The
sky is ours. They can fight over the ground but the sky belongs
to us.
As with most aviation reporting, it's sloppy and uninformed.
- Know-nothing Gen-Yers chiming in...
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by 203129769353146603573853850462
February 16, 2006 7:32 PM PST
- ...who nothing about aviation. Wonderful.
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