Ramblings of a Prophet

Ever since man has had cars, he has dreamed of having flying cars, because, well, we want more.  There have been several semi-successful flying car designs over the years, they were all flops though, due to cost, or reliability, but recently a company by the name of Terrafugia has succeeded where all the others have failed.  The aircraft has taken its maiden flight, all 37 seconds and 3000 feet of it, but it was still a flight.  Before I talk more about this airplane, I’m going to give you some history.

The first experimental with “roadable aircraft”, or flying car if you will, started just after the Wright brothers had invented the airplane,  and the first patent was to F. Longobardi in 1918.  Before the first patten was issued, Glenn Curtiss, the Wright brothers rival, had a design for a flying car.  His design used the wings from his Model L Triplane, with a wingspan of 4 feet, and it used a twin boom rear section with the engine in between them.  He was the first to have a flying car, but his design never flew, and was just abounded.

The first successful flying car was the Arrowbile, made by Waldo Waterman, in 1937.  It had an airspeed of 110 MPH, and a ground speed of 55 MPH, which was respectable back then, but only 6 were ever built, and one is in storage in the Smithsonian, and one more is alleged to still exist.

No flying cars have ever made it to production, but one, the Aerocar, almost made it to production, but when not enough orders came in, the plan was scraped.  the Aerocar was a single seat, high wing pusher, the wings folded and came off, and you would unbolt the propeller and they would go on a trailer behind it.  It was the most practical of all the designs, but being only one seat, and requiring a pilots license killed the potential market for it.

There is, however one more that would be revolutionary, but it has been in the research stage since 2003, and has not made any real progress since then.  It is revolutionary because of its VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) configuration, with 4 computer controlled ducts with 2 fans in each, allowing a stable ride.

Now back to the Terrafugia Transition.  It resembles many low wing aircraft, to an extent, it uses two vertical stabilisers and a pusher configuration, as well as a horizontal stabiliser in  the front.  It has Bi-fold wings that stay attached.  Now you may be thinking, cool, flying car, what does it take to get one, well, it requires a sport pilots licence, which requires approximately 20 hours of flight time, and its going to run you about $200,000, so there not for anyone.  It flies approximately 100 knots, 430 pound load capacity, burns 5 gallons per hour (30 miles per gallon approximately in car configuration) and it has a 20 gallon fuel tank.  It also comes with a modern glass cockpit, meaning that it has a large LCD display with all the information on it, not many little gauges, these on their own can run you $30,000 easy, so if you look at similar airplanes with similar performance and instruments, it actually isn’t too terribly much more.

If you think about how many accidents there are on a 2D road, due to people being distracted, being agressive drivers, being drunk, and so forth, imagin it in 3D.  Its true that there are less plane crashes per day than cars, but also the number op people flying is significanly less, but if everyone who had a car got a flying car the steaks would go up dramatically.  Think about this, if you get in a fender bender on a road, you can pull over and call someone, but in an airplane you cant just pull over.  Im not trying to say every person would be a bad piolet, but you get those people in a rush, and they would ruin it for everyone.

This entry was posted on March 25, 2009 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Flying . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.