My post last month reported that a flying car of the future - the Terrafugia (see top images) - was close to becoming a reality. The Terrafugia prototype completed its first flight on 23 March 2012 and it is now moving closer to being a commercial reality. But what was the history behind the building of the flying car - the best attempts, some of which ended tragically, to realize the dream? The following article relates the story.
Engineers have been trying to build a flying car for a century, but only a few designs ever succeeded in flying through the air and driving on the road. Here are the 10 best tries in a hundred years of tinkering, dreaming, and daredevil test flying.
Since Glenn Curtiss patented a flying car in 1917, perhaps 100 different designs have been analyzed and widely discussed. Only about a dozen concept vehicles flew and drove on roads, and three designers died trying to prove their own concepts. Because of the incredible design, engineering, legal, and licensing challenges of building a flying car, just two designs have ever been certified by the CAA (now FAA) as aircraft - and the Taylor Aerocar of 1959 is the only one that was ever produced. Six Aerocars were built, sold, and flown.
When Taylor was developing the Aerocar more than a half-century ago, flying cars were a popular dream and famously graced the covers and pages of Popular Mechanics. When the interstate highway system was designed in 1956, planners thought flying cars would be part of our future, and runways next to freeways were part of some original proposals. Now, though, only some small ranch roads in the West and the Alcan Highway in Canada and Alaska have adjacent runways, but those are used for aircraft, not flying cars.
Today, the dream of a George Jetson personal flying machine seems like out-dated mid-century futurism. But inventors continue to persevere. There is the clever Terrafugia, the crazy multi-turbine Moller, and the hope that maybe, someday, we'll all have the flying cars we were promised. (No promises on jetpacks, though.) Here are some of the best attempts of the past and present to realize the dream.
1. Curtiss Autoplane
Years Active: 1917
In February 1917, aviator Glenn Curtiss introduced the Model 11 Autoplane at the New York Pan-American Aeronautical Exposition. It featured a fully enclosed aluminium body with plastic windows and could be driven on roads using power from the propeller. The three-seater had the driver/pilot in front and two passengers behind. A front-engine Curtiss motor powered the rear propeller with a driveshaft and pulleys, and the triplane's wings could be removed from the vehicle.
Curtiss wanted an airplane that featured the luxury interior of cars of that era, instead of the bare-bones trim of the airplanes of the time. The Curtiss Autoplane had a heater, and the occupants were fully protected from the elements. But when World War I began, development ended and the Autoplane never flew.
2. Tampier Roadable
Years Active: 1921
Two engines, a 12-cylinder for the air and a four-cylinder for the road, went into this biplane built by René Tampier for the 1921 Paris Air Salon. The wings could be removed while the fuselage rode on four wheels. Tampier marketed the concept to the French military, claiming that it could be carried on ships or driven along the road with cavalry, and the removable wings meant it could be stored in a garage. With space for two, the Roadable featured lightweight components, and the steering linkage for the wheels could be folded up for less drag in the air.
After a short flight to the Paris Air Salon, the Roadable drove around Paris for two hours, reaching 15 mph.
3. Robert Edison Fulton Airphibian
Years Active: 1945
Architect and inventor Robert Edison Fulton Jr. designed a roadable airplane with removable wings and tail, and claimed that one person could complete that process. It had four wheels, although it was intended more as a roadable aircraft rather than a flying car.
The concept won conditional approval from the CAA, and the Airphibian flew successfully - Charles Lindbergh even piloted it. But it never attracted investors, and Fulton never built a production version.
4. Henry Dreyfuss Convaircar
Years Active: 1947
Take a fiberglass car body with four seats and attach a wing and engine module to the roof - that was the idea behind Henry Dreyfuss's Convaircar. It had a 35-foot wingspan and a 190-hp Lycoming aircraft engine; when it was adapted for the road, the fiberglass car was powered by a small Crosley 25-hp engine, and the wing and aircraft engine module could be removed and towed behind the car.
Dreyfuss was a famous industrial designer and the man behind such items as the Twentieth-Century Limited locomotive and Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera, so he attracted customers and investors to the flying Convaircar. But a test flight crash killed the pilot and doomed Dreyfuss's dream.
5. Taylor Aerocar
Years Active: 1949
Inspired by the early detachable-wing Airphibian airplane/auto, designed in 1945 by motorcycle adventurer and inventor Robert E. Fulton Jr., Moulton Taylor built a folding-wing four-wheel flying car - the Aerocar - in 1949. It was a two-seater with a body shaped like that of the tiny Crosley Hotshot. It had a single engine powering a pusher propeller that the operators would remove before driving the Aerocar on the road. The wings could be folded back in an advertised five minutes.
With the wings extended, Taylor's creation had a wingspan of 34 feet and was 21 feet long. Powered by a 150-hp Lycoming engine that also drove the front wheels through a conventional manual gearbox, the Aerocar had a steering wheel and a hand throttle. The price in the 1950s was about $25,000, although restored examples have been listed for sale for more than $2 million. In 1956, the Civil Aeronautics Administration certified the Aerocar as an aircraft, which had a road speed of 60 mph and an airspeed of between 100 and 117 mph depending upon the engine version. Altitude was limited to 12,000 feet.
6. Dewey Bryan Autoplane
Years Active: 1953
A Buick technician at General Motors' Milford Proving Grounds in Michigan created this folding-wing airplane powered by a Continental engine with a pusher propeller configuration. Leland D. (Dewey) Bryan built three versions of his metal-bodied Autoplane, which had a wingspan of just 22 feet. The wings were designed to fold in two places and form a protective cage around the propeller, which was also the power source for the Autoplane when driven on the road.
Bryan drove all three versions more than 1000 miles on the road, with a top speed of about 60 mph, and flew the second version for 65 hours. However, he died in a crash of his third version in 1974, reportedly because a warning light did not alert him to the fact that one wing had not been locked in place for flight.
7. Henry Smolinski Mizar
Years Active: 1971
The Mizar used a Cessna Skymaster wing and engine assembly attached to a Ford Pinto. The Cessna parts were removable, but unlike the Convaircar, the Mizar had no provision for towing the plane parts behind the Pinto when it was on the road.
The entire Mizar was intended for production and expected to sell for less than $19,000. But designer Henry Smolinski and pilot Harold Blake died in a test flight crash.
8. Jesse James Panoz Esperante
Years Active: 2006
For a 2006 stunt for his reality television show Monster Garage, motorcycle builder Jesse James attached wings, a tail, and an engine to a Panoz Esperante. He then took the creation to an airstrip near Kitty Hawk, N.C., where the Wright Brothers first flew. On his first test flight, James was able to get the 305-hp, Ford V-8-powered Esperante airborne at 80 mph and flew the car for 3 seconds, which translates to about 350 feet of airborne distance. That distance is three times farther than the Wright Brothers flew 108 years ago.
9. Moller Skycar
Years Active: Current
The Moller Skycar is called a personal vertical take-off and landing vehicle, and it is not intended for moving on roads. Developed by Paul Moller, a Canadian engineer and university professor who created the Supertrapp exhaust popular with motorcyclists, the Skycar uses four turbine engines for lift and propulsion and has very short wings. Performance of the Skycar (should it ever fly) has been promised at 275 mph cruising speed and a top speed of 375 mph.
But building the Skycar has been an excruciatingly slow process. It has been in testing for several decades, beginning with a full-size-model test flight in 1967. The company was fined $50,000 in 2003 for "making unsubstantiated claims" about the Skycar, and a demonstration flight scheduled for October 2011 was cancelled: "As Moller International moves forward with our new marketing and public relations campaigns, we find ourselves up against compounding deadlines," the company said. "We have been working very hard to balance the needs and desires of our shareholders, potential sponsors, the FAA, and the media." A future demonstration flight has not been scheduled, as the company awaits final approvals from the FAA.
10. Terrafugia Transition
Years Active: Current
On 6 April 2012, the Terrafugia Transition - "the first practical street-legal airplane to the world," Terrafugia chief operating officer Anna Mracek Dietrich says - was on display at the New York International Auto Show (NYIAS). The company promised then wing-folding demonstrations and videos of the Transition on test flights.
The four-wheel carbon-fibre airplane's wings stow and deploy electrically. The Transition is able to reach 62 mph on the road, with its rear wheels driven by a horizontally opposed four-cylinder Rotax 100-hp engine. The price is expected to be about $230,000. The name Terrafugia is Latin for "escape the earth," the company says, and 100 customers have already placed $10,000 deposits for production versions. As we reported last year, Terrafugia has cleared some of the many hurdles involved in certifying a flying car, so perhaps those early adopters will actually get one.
Top image: The Terrafugia Transition. Left photo credit: LotPro Cars. Right photo credit: Diana Beato.
I think they will have a better luck if building heli-car instead. Plane needs plenty of space to land(& take off) which heli don't need..
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