Flying Cars

by Andrew Glass

  Finally, on March 19, 1906, at three o’clock in the afternoon, before an audience of local gentry, fellow inventors, and journalists, Vuia drove his airplane-automobile about 50 meters (164 feet), ascended into the air to a height of about 1 meter (3.28 feet), and powered ahead for 12 meters (39.5 feet) before the engine fizzled, which caused the propeller to stop turning. The aéroplane-automobile tilted to the left and landed hard, damaging the left front wheel. But Vuia, unhurt, considered it a triumph. It wasn’t a long flight, nor had the vehicle attained an impressive altitude, but Vuia was publicly acknowledged to have succeeded in driving, taking off, flying, and landing again in a fully functional airplane-automobile. No one doubted that the machine had accomplished what its inventor had set out to do. It was no fantasy—it was reality. A New York Herald headline announced, “Vuia Airplane Makes a Successful Flight.”

  Airborne! Vuia’s trial run has been widely acknowledged as the first unaided takeoff in aviation history and the first flight of an airplane-automobile.

  A hard landing.

  An announcement of Trajan Vuia’s success appeared in the New York Herald. A lithographer “repaired” the damaged wheel for the engraving.

  But was the vehicle an airplane, as the New York Herald headline suggested, or a flying car, as its name suggested? Though it looked like a horseless carriage with wings, its wheeled frame could also be considered the revolutionary undercarriage for a primitive airplane. LAèrophile, the official journal of L’Aero-Club de France, seems to have agreed with the Herald. After witnessing a preliminary trial, a columnist declared that Mr. Vuia was the first person in France to have attempted, with a machine able to carry a man, the direct takeoff of an airplane.

  The aéroplane-automobile’s propeller might have given people the idea that it was indeed meant to be an airplane, since a car driven by whirling propeller blades would, at the very least, create a havoc of flying hats and umbrellas, litter, and dust along the boulevard, and likely put pedestrians at serious risk. However, in spite of the obvious disadvantages and safety hazards, there weren’t any legal restrictions against a propeller-driven car. (Vuia’s airplane-automobile wasn’t the only one of its kind. In 1922, Marcel Leyat, a French aircraft builder, attempted to market the Helica. Though derived from the new airplane technology, the Helica was designed as a propeller-driven automobile, not a flying machine.)

  The aéroplane-automobile’s four rubber tires weren’t standard equipment on experimental flying machines in those days, and neither were the folding wings on the redesigned Vuia 2. Both innovations suggest that the inventor intended to build a new type of transportation machine, one that would function as a practical flying machine and also as an automobile. One published authority puts the Vuia’s squarely in the flying car category, at the top of his chronology: “1906 Trajan Vuia tests flying auto near Paris, France.” Another aircraft historian reports having gathered substantive proof, including the inventor’s notes to that effect, that Vuia’s airplane-automobile was unequivocally meant as a flying car.

  In 1906, flying machines and driving machines were not yet understood to be separate transportation technologies. But the difficulty of actually constructing a flying/driving vehicle led most pioneering aeronautical engineers to abandon the idea of a unified machine and to pursue the airplane as a separate mechanical entity with its own aerodynamic requirements. Rugged horseless carriages were left to evolve into bulky, comfortable passenger cars without wings.

  Marcel Leyat claimed to have received six hundred orders for his propeller-driven Helica.

  Vuia flew his folding-wing airplane-automobile successfully throughout 1907. Though he never flew farther than 24 meters (79 feet), he felt confident in declaring that the problem of flight had been solved. What remained was to industrialize aviation—an important mission, he admitted, but not to be confused with creation of the new machine.

  Vuia with his folding-wing aéroplane-automobile, which looks as if it was designed to be both driven and flown.

  Following the crash of a folding-wing prototype, Vuia moved on to experimental helicopters, but not before Wilbur Wright had witnessed a demonstration of the airplane-automobile during a visit he made to France in 1908. Soon after, the Wright brothers abandoned their track-assisted takeoff in favor of wheels for taking off and landing.

  4

  Glenn Curtiss’s Autoplane

  With few exceptions, anyone driving beyond the city limits anywhere in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century could expect to encounter not paved roads but muddy horse trails full of bone-jarring ruts. Faced with such harsh driving conditions, pioneer motorists must have longed for some sort of airplane-automobile. Glenn Hammond Curtiss (1878–1930) actually built one.

  Glenn Curtiss’s motorcycle feat earned him the title “Fastest Man on Earth.”

  Curtiss was born in Hammondsport, New York. His family moved to New York City, where he completed the eighth grade. He worked as a Western Union bike messenger and then opened his own bicycle shop. He converted a bicycle to a one-cylinder motorcycle (with a carburetor made from a tomato can) and went into the motorcycle business. In 1907, astride a spindly motorcycle of his own design with a 40-horsepower V8 engine and no brakes, he traveled at the record-breaking, extremely precarious speed of 136 miles per hour.

  Curtiss’s success in building superior lightweight motors brought him to the attention of Alexander Graham Bell, renowned inventor of the telephone. Bell, together with his wife, Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, was pursuing other avenues of scientific inquiry, including flight. Convinced that a heavier-than-air vehicle could be designed to fly, Hubbard provided the inspiration and financing to establish the Aerial Experiment Association, with a mandate to construct “a practical flying aerodrome or flying machine driven through the air by its own power and carrying a man.”

  Curtiss became Director of Experiments at the Aerial Experiment Association. On July 4, 1908, their prototype airplane, June Bug, took the Scientific American Trophy in the distance competition by flying nearly a mile. On May 29, 1910, after nearly two years of developing his prototype, Curtiss completed a 150-mile flight along the Hudson River from Albany, New York, to Manhattan. This was by far the longest flight yet attempted in the United States, ushering in the age of modern air travel. Hailed as a phenomenal technological accomplishment, Curtiss’s unprecedented achievement received six full pages of text and photos in the New York Times—the most space the newspaper had ever allotted to a single news event.

  June Bug won the Scientific American Trophy, the first aeronautical prize to be awarded in the United States.

  That same year, Curtiss moved his operation to San Diego and founded the Curtiss Aeroplane Company. In 1911, he was issued the first pilot’s license, Aviator’s License number one, by the Aero Club of America. His company, which was renamed the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company in 1916, built a plane for the navy that could take off from a ship. The Curtiss Triad was the first “hydroaeroplane.” It was a multiuse airplane capable of taking off from and landing in the water as well as on solid ground.

  The first-ever official pilot’s license, issued to Glen Curtiss by the Aero Club of America on June 8, 1911.

  After Curtiss successfully landed the Triad on North Island near San Diego, a boy named Waldo overheard him saying, “Now if we could just take the wings off and drive this down the road, we’d really have something!” Waldo took the remark to heart. Meanwhile, Curtiss got his team busy designing a flying car.

  Predictors of early twentieth-century technology had already imagined that just as the horse-drawn carriage was already being replaced on the road by the horseless carriage, earthbound automobiles would soon be replaced by flying machines designed for personal transportation. Horseless carriages (automobiles), like those introduced to the United States in 1896, were not very different from pioneering aircraft. Both were made possible by the invention of an efficient internal combustion engine: an explosion (fuel ignited b
y a spark) pushed a piston in a cylinder, which turned a driveshaft connected to a rear axle, which turned the wheels of the automobile, or turned a crankshaft that rotated the airplane’s propeller. To function as practical personal transportation, both the automobile and the airplane required a fuel tank, some sort of steering device, a passenger cabin, a baggage compartment, at least three wheels, a battery, an engine, and a way to direct power from the engine to the propeller or wheels.

  Early promotion for the Autoplane.

  In addition, an airplane needed wings, a rudder, ailerons, a propeller, a horizontal stabilizer, and a vertical tail, none of which are required by an automobile. An automobile, on the other hand, needed a durable suspension system to absorb the shocks and jolts resulting from driving on an irregular road surface and to help the car maintain contact with the road, and bumpers with enough strength and resistance to deal with ordinary bumps and bangs. It could also include such conveniences as mirrors, movable windows, and glove boxes. So from the beginning, the challenge facing a would-be flying car inventor was to build an automobile durable and stable enough to withstand the ruts, bumps, and uncertainties of driving, yet also light and aerodynamic enough to fly smoothly through the air. And from the beginning, critics insisted that engineering compromises necessary to meet that challenge would make a truly practical flying car a technological impossibility.

  Flying in the face of such down-to-earth engineering wisdom, Glenn Curtiss introduced the Curtiss Autoplane at the 1917 Pan-American Aeronautic Exposition in New York City. The 27-foot-long all-aluminum triple-winged airplane could be disassembled and driven down the street. Later, the chauffeur/pilot could attach the one-piece tail and the 40-foot wing section, and switch the chain-and-gear mechanism from the wheels to the four-blade wooden pusher propeller, mounted behind the cabin. Then the Autoplane would take off and soar through the clouds (and over the ruts and the muck) at a steady 65 miles per hour while two passengers relaxed in the comfort of its posh leather-lined, velvet-curtained compartment.

  RIGHT: The Autoplane’s windshield and windows were made of celluloid, an early form of plastic. BELOW: This photo of the Autoplane without its flight component was taken on June 5, 1917. It appeared in a brochure for the 1917 Pan-American Aeronautic Exposition.

  In 1921, a French inventor, René Tampier, built a spindly in-line two-seater vehicle with hinged wings that folded along its sides. L’Avion-Automobile (airplane-motorcar) was a fully functioning flying machine, designed so that when the French countryside was enshrouded in fog, the craft could be landed safely and then driven to its destination. It was powered by a second motor attached to its removable back wheels. A prototype was photographed lumbering tail-first down a Parisian boulevard at 15 miles per hour.

  This photograph of the Curtiss Autoplane with wings attached was retouched for the cover of the 1917 exposition brochure.

  After a short flight to the seventh annual Salon de l’aviation (aviation conference) in Paris, the Avion-Automobile drove around the city backwards for two hours, reaching a speed of 15 miles per hour.

  L’Avion-Automobile functioned as a “roadable” airplane, meaning it was primarily an airplane but was also practical and legal to drive, though not necessarily intended for extensive use on the street, like a car. The Curtiss Autoplane (also called the Flying Limousine), once disengaged from its removable fuselage, wings, and tail component, transported its high-toned passengers down the street in what was unquestionably a chauffeured motorcar, not an awkward folding airplane on temporary wheels. This made it the first unambiguous flying car, even though it may never have actually flown well or very far . . . or possibly even at all. And though admittedly an odd-looking automobile, it would not have been the only peculiar vehicle on the road in 1917.

  World War I (1914–18) greatly increased the demand for military aircraft, and the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company’s enthusiasm for its flying limo was replaced by the more pressing quest to build a military training plane that was both easy to fly and easy to maintain. The result was the JN-4, nicknamed the Jenny. It was the first mass-produced American airplane, and thousands of military pilots and pioneering birdmen (and -women, too) learned to fly in one. After the war, surplus Curtiss Jennys became the plane of choice for daredevil stunt pilots, who were called barnstormers because of their tendency to fly low over farm buildings as a way of advertising their flying shows. Barnstormers flew around the country, performing aerial acrobatics and selling rides, often in a used Jenny bought at auction. During the 1920s, plenty of eager Americans took their first airplane ride with a barnstormer in a simple, reliable Curtiss Jenny.

  The one and only Autoplane prototype was dismantled and its parts used to build an experimental flying boat for the military. In 1921, Glenn Curtiss merged his company with its former competitor, Wright Aeronautical, forming the Curtiss-Wright Company. He became a successful real estate developer in Florida and died in 1930 following appendix surgery.

  This advertising poster for a flying circus depicts barnstormers performing an aerial feat in Curtiss Jennys.

  5

  Felix Longobardi’s Combination Vehicle

  The aluminum Curtiss Autoplane is widely credited with being the first flying car, but the first U.S. government patent for a flying car was awarded to Felix Longobardi, on December 3, 1918.

  Longobardi proposed a “combination vehicle” that could be driven overland on four wheels, powered through water by propellers, and flown through the air while held aloft by retractable wings and powered by the same dual propellers in the stern (rear) that pushed it forward through water. Longobardi’s dream vehicle also came fully equipped with the latest in radio antennas and four cannons. Not surprisingly, this remarkable vehicle never existed, except on paper.

  Seventy-six official U.S. patent applications for flying cars have been chronicled, beginning with Longobardi’s. However, a leading expert claims to have found nearly 1,800 patents for flying cars and roadable aircraft, and has identified more than 2,300 such projects overall. Three hundred may have actually flown. No one knows how many drawings, fanciful models, and unworkable prototypes were hammered together in backyards by tinkerers who never applied for a patent. In the words of one aviation historian, “There are dozens of roadables that never left the paper stage and remain drawings of dreams of the designers who were unable to build them.”

  Drawings of Felix Longobardi’s combination vehicle showing wheels, wings, underside propellers, and cannons.

  6

  Henry Ford’s Flying Flivver

  Henry Ford (1863–1947) is famous for his idea of having each factory worker perform a single repetitive task. Organizing work in this manner made mass production possible and efficient. It was Ford’s intention to turn out a 20-horsepower five-passenger automobile that would suit the wallet of the assembly line worker who built it. The first Model T Ford automobile rattled off the assembly line on October 1, 1908. But at $850, while less than a third of the price of other automobiles, it was still beyond the reach of the well-paid Ford workers, who made five dollars a day. Most factory workers earned half that much. Nonetheless, the mass-produced Ford Model T (nicknamed the Tin Lizzie) set in motion the idea that any go-getter might aspire to own and drive a shiny symbol of the new twentieth-century American dream of independence: the freedom of the open road.

  Unfortunately for even the fortunate few who could afford an automobile, there weren’t many open roads or road signs back then, and road maps didn’t become available until 1924. Mules still had the right of way, refueling stations were oddities, and cantankerous farmers complained that the cacophonous backfiring of jalopies caused distemper in their cows.

  But further improvements in assembly-line production brought the price of a new Ford down to less than $300, and the motoring public’s ever-growing passion for affordable, mass-produced cars led to a profusion of road-building projects. By the 1920s, new smoothly paved highways allowed automobiles to evolve from rug
ged horseless carriages such as Ford’s Model T—which could even be used to power farm machinery when not bumping along the muddy country roads for which it was built—to comfortable, even luxurious family transportation sporting newfangled comforts such as automatic starters, motor-driven windshield wipers, headlights, and roll-down windows. An automobile—generally a Ford of some sort and popularly called a flivver, presumably a reference to the sound of the engine—was finally within the purchasing power of factory workers and farmers. Upwards of 30,000 flivvers soon clogged the newly paved roadways.

  Pioneering aviators were just as passionate about their airplanes as early motorists were about their automobiles. They firmly believed that if airplanes could be made easier and safer to fly, drivers would take to the sky in automobile-sized airplanes. Charles Lindbergh became an international sensation in 1927 as the first birdman to fly an airplane alone across the Atlantic. Lindbergh’s phenomenal celebrity inspired an enthusiastic rush to manufacture just such an easy-to-fly airplane. But even before that, back in 1925, Henry Ford ordered his engineers to build a prototype for an affordable little airplane. How little? they asked. “Small enough to fit inside my office,” Ford answered.