If you saw a pig flying low over Beverly Hills on Tuesday, don’t bother to get your eyes tested. Hollywood’s best-known pig-fancier George Clooney was rushing Lisa, his prize porker, to a veterinary hospital after a scrap with her housemates left Lisa seriously sliced. Luckily Clooney had his new flying car ready to go. Taking off from a small yard beside his LA mansion, Clooney and his porky co-pilot dodged rush-hour jams on the Santa Monica freeway to reach the vet’s just in time to save Lisa’s bacon. “This vehicle is a fantastic machine,” Clooney told reporters. “We made the journey in minutes. In fact, every driver – and every ER – should have one.” Witnesses say Lisa was unimpressed with Clooney’s driving.
Los Angeles Times, 31 August 2006
PART car, part plane, part chopper, it’s no surprise that personal flying vehicles are seen as just about the most attractive way to travel. In theory, a flying car could give you the true Jetsons lifestyle – complete freedom to rove the skies, lifting off at will from the road or your own driveway, leaving heavy traffic below and travelling hundreds of kilometres in less than an hour. “What could be more appealing than a world where you step into your own flying car and go quickly and safely anywhere you want,” says Paul Moller, aeronautical engineer and aircar pioneer. And now Moller and a handful of other engineers say they are close to bringing the dream to life. But the $64,000 question remains: can flying cars really take off?
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A lot of people are keeping their fingers crossed. In 2001, when MSNBC’s website asked web-surfers whether they’d be in the market for a flying car, over 90 per cent of those who replied gave it a big thumbs up. And fired up with enthusiasm, a handful of engineers have begun building prototypes. There’s Moller’s M400 Skycar, for example. With its four engine pods and smooth, aerodynamic design, it resembles a red batmobile. Then there’s the Cityhawk, built in a living room in Tel Aviv (and, unfortunately, too big to get out through the door). Finally there’s the sleek SkyRider X2R, whose designer has no doubt that sky cars are the future of transport.
Flying cars have come a long way since American eccentric Moulton Taylor built one of the first back in the 1950s, simply by sticking wings and a propeller on a conventional car. Taylor’s AeroCar didn’t just fly, it even earned certification from the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) as a legitimate plane. Unfortunately, says Dick Knapinski, spokesman for the US Experimental Aircraft Association based in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the Aerocar wasn’t the dream machine Taylor had hoped. “It wasn’t a wonderful airplane,” says Knapinski, “and it wasn’t a wonderful car.”
The idea of simply giving a car wings still holds some promise, especially for Taylor’s long-time helper Ed Sweeney. Currently, Sweeney is outfitting a swanky two-seater sports car, the Lotus Elise, with a detachable flight “module” of wings, propeller and engine. Sweeney’s computer model suggests that his craft should fly at 250 kilometres per hour – the same speed the Elise manages on the road.
But if Sweeney’s approach verges on the conventional, then California-based Moller has a very different vision. In the early 1960s, he began building flying-saucer-shaped vehicles designed for vertical take-off and landing. By 1965, Moller had even got one of his craft into the air. In the next two decades, he made more than 200 test flights in a two-seat version to prove his concept. Now Moller wants to build a production model, the vertical take-off and landing M400 Skycar that he claims could make flying to the office a routine experience.
Eventually, Moller says, his M400 will carry four passengers, cruise at 500 kilometres per hour, climb as high as 10,000 metres – equipped with oxygen – and travel 1400 kilometres without refuelling, all powered by regular gasoline. Safety is the major issue, so his vision also includes automated flight controls that will take care of tricky moments such as take-off and landing, and integrate this system with automated satellite navigation so that the craft should look after itself for much of the flight.
It all adds up to an extremely ambitious project. Yet Moller has already built a prototype from a fibre-reinforced plastic frame 3 metres across and 6 metres long. Whirling propeller blades or conventional jet engines that create hot exhaust gases are out, for safety reasons. Instead, the Skycar is powered by four engine nacelles each containing an enclosed fan driven by a pair of motors much like conventional car engines. On take-off, the engines direct their thrust downwards, but once airborne, the engines rotate until they are directed aft, pushing the craft forwards. Vanes inside the engine nacelles direct the flow of air to further control the direction of thrust so that the pilot can manoeuvre the vehicle easily. The Skycar even has an electric motor connected to drive wheels that will propel it at about 50 kilometres per hour on the road.
We have lift-off
Last July, Moller finally flew his Skycar, by remote control in a tethered hover test. Other flights have followed, and Moller says the M400 already flies with ease. “We have hovered and manoeuvred. We’ve even flown it in adverse weather conditions. It is much more like driving a car than like flying a plane. You don’t need any skill. If you leave the controls alone, it will fly itself.” But to make flying as easy as driving a car, Moller plans to develop a simplified control system that will let anyone pilot his craft with a minimum of instruction. And he believes that letting the craft’s on-board computer take care of the engines – balancing thrust, for example, to keep the craft stable – will help improve safety. In one test, even an engine failure did not disrupt the M400’s computer-controlled flight.
The next challenge is to begin flying the craft himself, but first he must upgrade his engines: the current designs lack sufficient power to keep both him and the craft stable should one engine fail. He already has the solution, he says: eight 650-cc Wankel engines – two for each nacelle – which Moller has developed especially for the purpose. These should combine the reliability of aircraft engines with the simplicity of car engines, he calculates. And if the worst comes to the worst, the craft has two parachutes to cushion its fall. The new engines should arrive at Moller’s workshop by September. With these in place, he can at last begin the FAA’s exhaustive certification process that requires him to submit data on the craft’s performance, design and flight tests and which could take up to three years to complete.
Even before its first manned flight, his prototype is proving a hit. So far, 90 budding flyers have paid upwards of $10,000 each as a deposit to be among the first to own one, with delivery scheduled for 2006. The Skycar is also wowing the US military, says Moller. Several organisations – including the US army’s tank and automotive command, rapid equipping force, members of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the combat service support battle labs – have visited him for a glimpse of the machine. Others, including organisations that deliver emergency medical supplies, have expressed an interest in the potential of such vehicles. “They could even be used by UPS or FedEx,” says Norris Luce, president of Macro Industries, a separate company that has built a quarter-scale model of its SkyRider X2R aircar design.
Luce and Moller aren’t the only ones encouraged by the potential of these vehicles. A couple of years ago, Israeli aeronautical engineer Rafi Yoeli started building his own aircar in Tel Aviv. His Cityhawk will take off and land vertically, powered by two enclosed fans, each driven by four 37-horsepower engines. Arranged one in front and one behind the pilot, each fan is equipped with vanes to direct thrust and keep the craft stable.
With limited funds and no work space, Yoeli began construction in his own living room, where, he reasoned, he could work and spend time with his family. By June 2002, he had completed the Cityhawk – and probably driven his family to distraction. The result is an ungainly prototype built to test whether his design can get into the air. Unfortunately, Yoeli’s vehicle was too wide to roll out through his living-room door. Worse, the room was one storey up. Yoeli finally freed the Cityhawk by removing a wall and lowering the craft to the ground down a ramp.
In tests near Ben-Gurion airport earlier this year, Yoeli finally managed to get it half a metre off the ground. “It’s a great feeling,” he says. “I remember pushing the pedals to point the nose and realised it worked very, very well.” Eventually, Yoeli hopes that the Cityhawk will climb to almost 3000 metres and travel at around 160 kilometres per hour.
Despite these first tentative steps, a number of sceptics still say that Yoeli and Moller are barking up the wrong tree. And worse, they warn, the reality of personal flying vehicles almost certainly won’t live up to the hype.
The electricity supply to parts of Monterey CA was cut on Sunday for the third time this month when two low-flying cars collided with power cables near the beachfront at Carmel. Both drivers were killed. The recent spate of flying accidents has left Carmel’s new mayor Macaulay Culkin furious. “It’s raining cars,” he told reporters. “If those damn kids don’t stop gawping and start paying more attention to where they’re driving, we’ll declare our nude beach a no-fly zone.”
San Francisco Chronicle, 12 June 2043
Rolling out prototypes could prove the easiest part of the challenge that aircar designers have set themselves. Even enthusiast Knapinski admits that doing the George Jetson thing is probably some time away. “It’s more complex than putting wings on a car,” he says.
The first thing that a prospective flying car owner will need is deep pockets. Moller expects his first M400s to cost about $500,000 each. He thinks the price could fall tenfold within 10 years, given full-scale production. Luce agrees with his estimate.
But others in the aeronautical industry scoff at such numbers. “With all the costs of safety, instrumentation and communications that are the basic parts of avionics, I think it would be very difficult to get it down to that price,” says Paul Nisbet, an aerospace analyst at JSA Research in Newport, Rhode Island. Thomas A. Bowen, an engineer at Mooney Airplane Company based in Long Beach, California, agrees: “I pay $18,000 for a radio that includes Global Positioning System navigation, and I put two of those in an airplane. Are these vehicles going to have a radio?” he asks. Nor does Bowen see any major economies of scale developing. “The biggest impediment is the fact that everything that you purchase in aviation has rules that it must meet, and that does not lead to good economy at any production rate,” he says. Besides, for the foreseeable future you’ll also need a pilot’s licence to take one into the air, and this requires many tens of hours of flying instruction and costs thousands to complete.
Never mind an arm and a leg, a flying car could cost you your eardrums too: there’s little doubt that these vehicles will be noisy beasts. Hover too low over your neighbour’s garden and if your engine doesn’t deafen them, your downdraft will rip out their washing line and shred their shrubs. And even if your neighbours don’t mind that, you probably won’t be able to fly one out of your garage: “Power lines across most streets will limit taking off out of your driveway,” Knapinski says. In fact, he suggests, “the biggest challenge is regulatory, not engineering or technology.”
Watch where you’re going
Moller admits Knapinski could be right. He suggests that although airports could offer launch pads for flying cars, it’s likely that purpose-built “vertiports” on large parking lots or on top of buildings well away from housing will be the best way to prevent noise becoming a problem. But wherever you lift off, mistakes could still cost dear. On average, 80,000 people die in car accidents in the US and Europe each year. In a personal flying vehicle travelling four times as fast as a car, the smallest error could wreck an entire city block.
Whether Moller’s proposed automatic flight-control system can lead to error-free flight remains to be seen, and we may be in for a wait. Researchers working for the US military, for example, are putting millions of dollars into developing autonomous control for unmanned aircraft, and there will almost certainly be improvements in the technology, but it won’t come cheap. Worse, vertical lift-off demands even more sophisticated computing. “It is at least ten times harder to make autonomous control work in vertical take-off and landing than in a conventional plane,” says NASA engineer Mark Moore.
Moore leads NASA’s Personal Air Vehicle Exploration programme, which is looking to help smooth the road towards personalised air travel. The researchers in this programme are considering a variety of options, including flying cars. “Our goal is to be able to enhance mobility, to help people go faster and farther,” says Moore. Unfortunately, Moore and his team are beginning to suspect that the future of air travel will be rather mundane: small flying “taxis” – conventional 5 or 10-seat planes operating from almost every minor airport could create a public transport system that is cheaper, faster and more versatile than today’s airline network, yet far safer and easier to regulate than a nation let loose to fly plastic boxes at 400 kilometres per hour. The idea is that air taxis could fly in and out of small airports and get people most of the way to their destination. They could then switch to cars. “Instead of trying to make the aircar do everything,” Moore says, “you build an aircraft that can go at 225 knots and have Hertz and Avis at every airfield.” This system could be running in less than 5 years, he suggests.
Even if Moore is wrong, NASA does have one seriously bad piece of news for aircar pioneers. Most small airports lack adequate air traffic control facilities to handle any large increase in air traffic, so NASA and the FAA are working on the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS). The aim is to create a new control system that would handle the increased congestion by helping small planes guide themselves, removing the need for air traffic controllers to oversee everything. One crucial component is the “highway in the sky”, a virtual display system that will give each pilot a string of computer-generated navigational signposts showing a safe flight path.
This, and the other guidance systems that make up SATS, offer the only realistic hope of achieving Moller’s dream of simple, safe personal flight for all. And that’s why flying cars won’t go mainstream for some time: SATS won’t be operational until 2020. Go on George, for Lisa’s sake, find yourself a local vet.