Flights of fancy

Flights of fancy
Jul 3rd 2009
From Economist.com
Why airborne automobiles will never take off

Terrafugia




WHAT is it about “flying cars” that makes otherwise sensible engineers lose touch with reality? Ever since Glenn Curtiss, a seaplane pioneer, racing legend and the Wright brothers’ rival, tried to make a flying car early in the last century, tinkerers have dreamed of having an automobile sprout wings, soar above the traffic, then land and tuck its wings away ready for a short trip into town. Flying cars of one sort or another have dominated the pages of schoolboy comics ever since.
Enthusiasm for flying cars reached a peak in the 1950s when the Ford Motor Company almost started mass-producing one. Studies done at the time showed such a vehicle was technically feasible, was fairly easy to manufacture and had commercial appeal. The markets identified for it included the police, ambulance and other emergency services plus the armed forces and wealthy individuals.
The problems then, as now, were more regulatory than technical or economic. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was aghast at the volume of additional air traffic Ford had in mind. The air-traffic control systems of the day would have been overwhelmed. Ford promptly abandoned the idea, even though its flying car would have been cheaper to build and operate than the helicopters that subsequently took over most of their intended roles.
Since then, a number of diehards and dreamers have laboured on. Some have hitched small cars to paragliders or gyrocopters. Others have attached wings and control surfaces to motorbikes and tricycles. More recently, the trend has been towards designing vehicles that are more like “roadable planes” than “flyable cars”—with wings that fold back or are detached and left at the landing strip for short trips into town.
Then there are those who believe the best—though, technically, the most challenging—way to build a flying car is to adopt a vertical take-off and landing approach. One enthusiast, Canadian-born Paul Moller of Davis, California, has spent an estimated $250m of his own and other people’s money over the past 45 years trying get his fan-powered Skycar off the ground. So far, none of his vertical take-off and landing prototypes has risen much more than a few feet