There! On
EBay ! The everlasting dream of a flying car. Moulton B.
Taylor’s good old N103D. Mine for the buying. No waiting.
No problems. Buy it – fly it.
Amazingly all six prototypes
of the Aerocar survived to this day. One of course is on
display at the EAA AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin,
another is on view at the Golden Wings Museum at Blane, Minnesota
and still another, in flying condition, is at the Kissimmee
Air Museum. Florida. Aerocar 3 (shown here) can be seen on
display at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.
Great. But where is mine? I’m going to Las
Vegas this weekend and want to drive by the local airport,
take off for McCarren Field, land and drive to the hotel.
I’ve been waiting since around 1905 or so.
I’ve
had a lot of proposals. A fella named Logan said I’d
be flying and driving in a year. That was 1917. I’m
still waiting on him.
Gustave Berman of
Holyoke, Massachusetts promised ‘no problem’ and
patented this design for a flying car in 1929.
Years went by. Lots of promises. Most never get off the
page, let alone off the ground. The few that got built
suffered from impracticality and lack of funds brought
on by limited appeal. Seems not everyone wants a flying
car.
Convair offered Brian Wang’s removable wing/tail
configuration.
And Chrysler tried one, the flying jeep, but
didn’t pursue it.
The Si
Fi guys jumped in with their ideas
Even the Russian Si Fi guys contributed.
The venerable Ford Pinto was pressed in to service
as fuselage, drive and powerplant to form the Ave-Mizar.
Seen flying successfully around Van Nuy’s California
for a time, AVE Mizar was a project by a former Northrop
engineer. It consisted of a Cessna Skymaster rear attached
to the Ford Pinto and planed to sell for $25,000. The
project didn’t
survive the untimely crash of the prototype.
How hard can
it be? Jesse James (yes he’s a relative
and namesake – and married to Sandra Bullock) built
a flying car in a week for the Discovery Channel’s
program Monster Garage. He then successfully drove it down
the runway and got it airborne at Kitty Hawk, N.C. on March
3, 2005.
Lately my longing has been reawakened
by news of the Terrafugia. In Massachusetts, Carl Dietrich
claims Terrafugia is the first design where the wings fold
up automatically and are part of one vehicle. No need to
trailer your wings and tail parts.
Then
suddenly there was what seemed to me to be a REAL flying
carpet. Vertical take off and land. Fly from anywhere. Two
seater. Attractive. Practical. All carbon fiber and Kevlar.
Even sexy looking. The Sky Commuter. To me this was a workable
approach. Designers, entrepreneurs and dreamers have labored
since cars and airplanes came on the scene, yet none made
such an impression on me as did this ”Sky Commuter”.
The name said it all. Finally I thought, after eighty years
of waiting (no one is more patient than I) a flying carpet.
Begun in the 1980s, I’ve been told
there were as many as sixty investors. Rumor has it that
Boeing was some how involved and that engineers from that
company in Arlington, Washington were at the heart of the
project. Who knows for sure, but it’s not important
anymore for once again another ‘flying car’ is
gone. The project appears to have produced three concept
aircraft before being closed down for reasons unknown.
Expenses, reportedly $6 million spent bringing
The Sky Commuter to fruition, were too much, and not only
was all work stopped, but it seems two of the prototypes
were destroyed along with their molds and tooling. One
prototype escaped destruction and found its way to, where
else? EBAY.
But fret not. There are MANY projects afoot
to bring us our flying car. Success is just around the
corner. We’ll
all have flying cars in no time. Pick your favorite. If
not a Jetson-like M200X 2-passenger VTOL from the venerable
Moller stable, then perhaps a CellCraft G440 from Gizo
Designs will capture your heart, as it has mine. As soon
as I find out where to put down my next deposit.
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