What could be more appropriate for the Monday after Independence Day than a flying car? Roll up the garage door, drive a few miles to the local airstrip, flip a switch to transform your car into an airplane, then take to the skies! Imagine the freedom! Imagine the thrill! Imagine the flaming air-car wreckage raining down!
Well, that's always been one big problem with the dream of the "roadable airplane," personal helicopter, jet pack, or whatever other air-transport-for-everyman solution that's been proposed since 1903. While terrestrial road travel can be a lowest common denominator endeavor, you can't just pull over after a fender bender at 5,000 feet and piloting has always demanded a higher standard of skill and attentiveness than driving. The latest company to try to combine cars and planes is
Terrafugia, and their Transition Roadable Light Sport Aircraft has just passed a major hurdle on the road to production, gaining a special exemption from the FAA to allow a higher maximum takeoff weight of 1430 pounds (110 more than normal for a Light Sport Aircraft).
The added weight was necessary in order to have sufficient structure in the vehicle to meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and still allow a useful load of people and fuel, and it's easy to see why - an Ariel Atom, about as minimal as a street-legal car can get, weighs in at just over a thousand pounds empty, and it doesn't have to carry around the extra burden of airplane bits like a propeller, wings, and control surfaces.
The target specs for the Terrafugia are 450 mile range at 115mph in the air, transformation from plane to car in 30 seconds, and a price tag of (read for it?) $194,000 for the two-seater. The LSA designation is significant, because it requires less training than a 'standard' single-engine pilot's license, but puts stringent limits on the weight and speed of the aircraft. While the price tag will weed out the yahoos who might turn it into the flying equivalent of a clapped-out Chevy Cavalier, rich people crash expensive cars all the time, and it might be better to require the full-monty pilot's license for this particular trust-fund toy.
The two previous attempts at a roadable airplane that came closest to practicality were the
ConVairCar, which was developed in 1947 and abandoned after two prototypes were built (and one was destroyed in a testing crash), and the 1949 Taylor Aerocar, which had triple the production run (6 total) of the ConVairCar, and had a far more successful history, relatively speaking.
The Taylor Aerocar - like a Jaguar E-Type gone horribly wrong...
While the Aerocar was a true convertible plane/car hybrid, the ConVairCar was more like a dinky 4-passenger car slung beneath a detachable airframe, which would be left behind at the airfield while the pilot/driver tooled around on the ground.
The ConVairCar, brought to you by the makers of the Mach 2 B-58 Hustler.
We'll keep an eye on the progress of the Terrafugia Transition as it moves from a one-off experiment to (hopefully) production status.
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