Flying Cars

by Andrew Glass

  Taylor launched an all-out campaign to attract a backer for his newly government-approved Aerocar: an aircraft corporation or, better yet, an automobile manufacturer already geared up for much larger production. He sold three hand-built experimental prototypes for $15,000 each and used the proceeds to begin tooling up Aerocar Co. for mass production. He made public appearances with his creation across the country, including one on the popular television game show I’ve Got a Secret. His secret, of course, was “I flew to New York in this automobile.” But no company stepped forward.

  Mrs. Taylor, out grocery shopping in Aerocar I.

  The Bob Cummings Show, another popular television show in the early 1960s, featured a soaring Aerocar in its opening sequence. Bob Cummings said his new car “could really give you a lift.” Unfortunately, the show’s sponsor, vitamin manufacturer Nutri-Bio, came under investigation for making dubious advertising claims, and Aerocar’s precious national exposure came to an abrupt end. The fortunate sons of a hamburger entrepreneur in Illinois became the proud owners of that particular Aerocar. They drove it back and forth to high school every day—but never flew it.

  For a few years, an Aerocar circled over Portland, Oregon, doing the traffic reports for radio station KISN. “Knows the traffic, ’cause it’s been there!” the announcer boasted. Throughout those years of daily service, the Aerocar required only routine maintenance.

  Taylor’s redesign of the Aerocar was based on a toy Jaguar.

  Impressed with the Aerocar’s performance, a light airplane company in Fort Worth, Texas, offered to begin production in 1961, as soon as Taylor guaranteed five hundred firm orders. The Associated Press announced that a contract had been signed and that it wouldn’t be long before a thousand Aerocars a year were rolling out the door, ready to take off, available for purchase at $8,500 apiece.

  Taylor had long proclaimed, “The public is begging for a flying automobile.” He was on his way to holding up his end of the deal when the company suddenly informed him that the money needed for tooling up the factory was gone. It had been squandered by the sales organization formed to promote and facilitate Aerocar sales even before adapting the factory for production had begun. Colossally disappointed, Taylor watched his best chance collapse.

  But disappointment didn’t stop him. “As for me losing sleep,” he said, “I quit doing that a long time ago. . . . I just keep trying.” When one of the original five hand-built Aerocars was returned to the Aerocar factory, having been badly damaged in a road accident, Taylor and Jess Minnick decided that instead of simply repairing it, they would redesign and update its 1945 styling, using a toy Jaguar as their model. Aerocar III, completed in 1968, looked like a slick European sports car. Its new interior resembled that of the popular Ford Mustang, with “such niceties as bucket seats and soundproofing.” New fender wells accommodated automobile tires that lowered for landing and takeoff, retracted to an intermediate driving position for the road, and pulled up into the fenders to decrease drag and increase air speed in flight. Asked how long it would take to convert the sleek new Aerocar III to a plane, Taylor answered, “Less time than it takes to carry your bags from your car to your airplane.”

  The December 1969 issue of Flying magazine complimented Aerocar III on its sports-car good looks, and added, “It is also quick and comfortable; and when Molt Taylor hurls it across the railroad tracks at 80 mph, holding both hands in the air, you are convinced that it has remarkable handling qualities. It’s not so quiet as a Cadillac, but what sports car is?”

  In the late 1960s, Taylor updated and redesigned the car section of the Aerocar, leaving the flight component essentially unchanged. Aerocar III’s stylish new interior was designed to resemble a Ford Mustang.

  In 1970, the president of Ford Motor Company, Lee Iacocca, ordered a feasibility study of the market potential for a mass-produced Ford Aerocar. The study estimated likely sales of 25,000 a year. This was no surprise to Taylor, whose faith in the Aerocar was unwavering. “Flying automobiles would provide far greater use potential than any other single vehicle,” he’d written of his Aerocar III, “giving door-to-door transportation at a speed and convenience never offered before by making the freeways of the air available to everyone.”

  Aerocar III, flying with retracted wheels.

  But officials at the Department of Transportation were aghast at the notion of thousands of commuters flying over large population centers. Taylor protested that existing air traffic systems could handle small planes as easily as the highways accommodated cars. “The only reason somebody can drive from New York to Florida,” he fumed, “is because some stupid guy walked down the road ahead of you and drew a yellow line in the middle of the road.” He insisted that every plane in the United States, including airliners, could be arranged in the air over Washington State so that no one in any plane would be able to see another airplane. “So don’t tell me that the skies are crowded!”

  Unconvinced, executives at Ford worried that such a bold innovation might become a costly industrial joke at their company’s expense. The engineers claimed that compliance with new government automobile safety regulations would add so much additional bulk to the Aerocar that it would be unable to fly, thus reviving the weight-versus-efficiency argument that had been leveled against flying cars from the beginning.

  America was no longer a wide-open country with few roads braved only by the most intrepid motorists and flown over by visionaries like Glenn Curtiss. The nation had built an efficient system of highways that connected an ever-increasing number of population centers. Most drivers, it turned out, were content to remain make-believe pilots behind the wheel of streamlined airplane-shaped cars, driving at takeoff speed on well-engineered, comfortable roadways. The handsome, efficient Aerocar III, which had made “little if any compromise with either conventional light planes in their weight power class, or automobiles that can’t fly,” landed once and for all in the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

  Taylor had innovated right to the limits of twentieth-century imagination, but it seemed the postwar window of opportunity for flying cars had closed, and even his capacity for reinvention couldn’t reopen it. Levelheaded, sensible officials at the Department of Transportation concluded that there was no such thing as a foolproof flying car and that in any case, it would be wiser not to tempt foolish drivers to fly.

  But Taylor wasn’t quite finished. The small amphibious sport plane he’d set out to build after the war, renamed the Coot, was reborn in 1989 in the form of a “homebuilt”—a do-it-yourself kit. While redesigning the Coot for home assembly, Taylor got to thinking, “If the DOT [Department of Transportation] won’t let us certify our airplane as a car, we’ll approach it from the other direction. We’ll take a car that’s already certified and make it into an airplane!” He designed a similar kit for a self-powered flight component to take advantage of the same federal loophole that allowed hobbyists some legal leeway to experiment with small airplane building. “People go out and buy the car,” explained Molt. “We send them the plans and materials, and they put it together themselves.” He planned to convert a popular Honda CRX for driving the infinite highway of the air.

  Taylor proposed converting a lightweight Honda CRX into a flying car with a powered flight component.

  16

  Into the Future

  In 1959, seventeen-year-old Ed Sweeney got a flying lesson in an Aerocar from Molt Taylor. “It’s easy,” Taylor told him. “It practically flies itself. I’ll tell you what to do as we go along.”

  Ed Sweeney didn’t stop there. In 1988, he bought a 1956 Aerocar prototype. Then, inspired by Taylor’s homebuilt designs, he devised the slick, modular Aerocar 2000. He combined a $30,000 Lotus Elise with a built-on interface for an independent flight component to be constructed by the buyer from a kit consisting of FAA-approved parts. Thus, he abandoned Taylor’s fundamental innovation—towing the wings. This was to take advantage of a legal loophole that allowed flying cars that were 51 percent ho
mebuilt. The entire flying car, including the two-seat roadster, had been projected to sell for $100,000, but flight testing was never completed. Mr. Sweeney and his son reportedly were still flying and driving their Aerocar 1 to air shows at the time of this writing.

  Aerocar 2000.

  The computerized, autonomous navigation technology that will make it possible for anyone to drive or fly is not yet legal or marketable. In the meantime, advocates insist that even using available technology, flying cars would greatly reduce the routine mayhem of automotive travel. They point out that while many small planes are flown safely every day, there are thousands of automotive fatalities every year.

  Terrafugia is a private Massachusetts-based company founded by graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They claim that their two-passenger Transition, which is priced at $287,000, transforms in thirty seconds from a car to an airplane. There is information about reserving your own flying car, with just a $10,000 refundable deposit, on the Terrafugia website.

  The PAL-V ONE, a two-seat hybrid car and gyroplane, is designed to provide door-to-door transportation.

  The three-wheel PAL-V ONE is a sporty two-seat hybrid car and gyroplane that requires very little space for takeoff and landing. It can be driven to the nearest airfield, where the propeller is unfolded for flight. An automatically folding rotor is still in development, but the propeller folds itself on landing. A button lowers the rotor mast into the horizontal position. Gyroplanes characteristically take off and land at low speed, cannot stall, and can be landed safely even if the engine fails because the unpowered rotor keeps rotating. The Dutch company PAL-V Europe NV has successfully conducted test flights.

  Terrafugia Transition, New York International Auto Show, 2011.

  The dual-mode Carplane being developed at the Research Airport in Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, Germany, when this was written, will be a hybrid two-passenger vehicle, designed to convert at the touch of a button from an electric powered road car to an internal combustion–powered plane with a cruising speed of 136 miles per hour.

  The Carplane road/air vehicle is designed to transform from car to plane in fifteen seconds.

  In the early 1950s, the U.S. Army experimented with a revolutionary hovering platform that was propelled by contra-rotating five-foot-wide rotors. These versatile vehicles proved surprisingly stable, but their powerful engines required a great deal of maintenance. The early military prototypes also made slow-moving targets. In the late 1950s, helicopter manufacturer Frank N. Piasecki (1919–2008) developed the Piasecki Air Jeep, which flew with the adaptability of a helicopter and was capable of hovering a few feet off the ground using ducted-fan technology and of rising several hundred feet into the air. The Piasecki Air Jeep’s vertical takeoff and landing technology opened another possible avenue for the development of a flying car, since vehicles with enclosed rotors, unlike those with whirling helicopter blades, could safely be driven in traffic.

  The basic design of the 1958 Piasecki Air Jeep featured two large rotors at the front and back of the craft.

  Paul Moller’s Skycar, in development for more than thirty years, can take off nearly straight up from a driveway. The tradeoff, however, is that eight rotary engines are required to create the nearly 1,000-horsepower force needed (compared with the 143-horsepower engine that powered Taylor’s first Aerocar off a landing strip). According to moller.com, Moller’s Skycar 400, projected to fly at almost 400 miles per hour, was under testing when this book was written.

  LEFT: Paul Moller’s Skycar.

  BELOW: The Transformer TX.

  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has revolutionized the concept of a flying car by creating the Transformer, an unmanned aerial system. Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works is leading a team with Piasecki Aircraft to build autonomous flying wings, configured to attach to an earthbound Humvee and convert it to a GPS-controlled flying car small enough to drive along a single-lane road. The Transformer will be able to make unpiloted trips with supplies into places inaccessible by road. It will have a smaller landing zone than a standard helicopter, thanks to tilting ducted fans, which will also make it faster and safer.

  CityHawk.

  Rafi Yoeli, an Israeli inventor, constructed a 1,200-pound prototype of the two-seater CityHawk flying car in his Tel Aviv living room. After founding Urban Aeronautics Ltd. in 2001, he turned his attention to a hovering vehicle intended for police and rescue use. Even some who doubt the practical viability of a flying car concede the potential of a versatile hybrid urban rescue vehicle or a roadable flying ambulance where roads are scarce or perilous. CityHawk would be able to rescue people trapped inside high-rise buildings by hovering close enough to a window that a person could step onto the platform. Hundreds of tiny adjustable slats at the edge of two encased horizontal fans, each powered by four internal combustion engines, make possible instant directional changes and the flexibility to rise from just inches off the ground to 12,000 feet in the air. It features a ducted fan design requiring no runway; is capable of operating even on a crowded street; and can be used as a taxi, an ambulance, a bridge inspection vehicle, and, eventually, even a family car.

  On April 1, 2007, the Dallas Morning News ran a story about Dr. Vernon Porter, age seventy-two, and Clarence Kissell, age seventy, who were building a flying car with their own hands in a workshop behind Dr. Porter’s house. Several prototypes later, their three-wheel (two wheels in front, one in back) vehicle was constructed of fiberglass and foam, so although it’s as wide as a minivan and as long as an SUV, it weighs only 1,200 pounds—2,000 with gas and a passenger. A GM six-cylinder engine will power it both on the ground and in the air. The wings will fold back neatly into slots for driving.

  Dr. Porter asserts, “It should drive and fly pretty well.”

  And Mr. Kissell remains optimistic. “We think it will work.”

  A recent model.

  INSET: Vernon Porter and Clarence Kissell in their workshop in Murphy, Texas, with a fiberglass mockup of their original GT flyer.

  Author’s Note

  In 2002, I read an article in the Driving section of the New York Times about Molt Taylor’s 1949 Aerocar, a funny-looking but oddly appealing little automobile with a flight-conversion option. Taylor thought that the technology for automatically converting the family car to an airplane could be as simple as raising and lowering a mechanical convertible top with the press of a button.

  The notion of a flying car parked in every garage struck me as the best/worst idea ever. Cars break down and drivers miscalculate and make mistakes that are catastrophic enough even when they don’t happen overhead. Still, think about pressing a button and transforming your car’s trunk to a tail with a spinning propeller . . . about telescoping wings that extend and click into place overhead . . . about pulling back on the steering wheel and driving right into the sky!

  Whether it was a brilliant idea or a colossally bad one, I had discovered that a flying car isn’t just a commuter’s daydream or a rollicking tall tale for the modern age. I saved the article about the heroic little car that seemed to defy common sense and stashed it in my sketchbook.

  By the time I unfolded the yellowed newspaper article about Taylor’s dream car and reread it, I’d discovered that Taylor wasn’t the first inventor to build a flying car. He was one in a still-unfolding long line of visionaries. Their timeline extends back to Gustave Whitehead in 1901 and Trajan Vuia in 1906, and continues forward, with the speed of digital innovation, to prototypes such as the Carplane and PAL-V ONE. Each prototype is a testament to the unfaltering belief that the real compromise is being restricted to driving cars that can’t fly.

  I have tried to convey the enthusiasm of inventors who felt certain that they had devised the right prototype at just the right historical moment to successfully introduce automobile drivers to flying cars. To maintain the story’s momentum, I’ve left out some worthy efforts. One of the most notable was the 1971 AVE (Advanced Vehicle Engineers) Mizar, a
combination Ford Pinto and Cessna Skymaster built by Henry Smolinski and Harold Blake. On September 11, 1973, just months before production was scheduled to begin, the right wing detached and the Pinto plummeted to earth, killing them both. Though the innovative use of a mass-produced automobile was so promising that the Mizar nearly went into production, I decided that the malfunction and resulting deaths unnecessarily repeated the pattern of flying cars as a cautionary tale.

  Despite tragic headlines, rational critics, skeptical insurance companies, and nervous homeowners, flying car inventors and enthusiasts pursue their engineering ideal, pinning their hopes on new computer navigation technology that reacts faster than humans and doesn’t get distracted, sleepy, or intoxicated. An autonomous Toyota Prius developed by Google has reportedly been driving itself safely around San Francisco, with human supervision, since 2010. Autonomous vehicle technology is being developed for flight as well. Once the Pentagon unveils an automated aerial system to convert a Humvee for flight, can a family car transformed for computerized flight be far behind?

  Glossary

  aeronaut aviator; originally referred to a balloonist.

  ailerons tilting surfaces in a plane’s wings that make the plane roll to one side or the other.

  airplane a self-powered heavier-than-air flying machine.