I’ll admit to being one of those boys who dreamed of walking out the front door, strapping on a jetpack, and flying loop-the-loops over the neighborhood
Or if not a jetpack, then perhaps a flying car, maybe a bubble-topped model like George Jetson’s; or, at the very least, if high flight wasn’t in the cards, a hovering landspeeder, a la Star Wars.
Much has been made of America’s love affair with the automobile. But even as the first Model T was rolling off the assembly line, a parallel fantasy was emerging in the national consciousness: the dream of a flying car.
In fact, Henry Ford hoped to make air travel as affordable for the average citizen as he’d made road travel. In 1927, he introduced the Ford Flivver, a single-seater with a tiny wingspan. He called it the “Model T of the air.”
Ford didn’t intend the Flivver to be driven on the highway; he simply envisioned a future where flying was as common a mode of personal transportation as driving.
The Flivver was designed to be inexpensive to manufacture and easy to maintain. Unfortunately, it was a terrible airplane. Charles Lindbergh, who flew a prototype on a visit to Ford field, described it as “one of the worst aircraft I ever flew.”
The Flivver project was shut down in 1928, after a crash killed the chief test pilot, but the dream of an affordable airplane persisted, and even flowered into something grander and more complex: a “roadable” airplane that wouldn’t have to be hangared, but could be pulled out of a suburban garage and driven to the airport.
In other words, a flying commuter vehicle.
This turned out to be a lot harder than anyone imagined. Airplanes are highly specialized vehicles, with very different design demands from cars. Key characteristics of a good airplane — a gossamer structure; a wide wingspan; and ease of lift-off — are liabilities on the highway. Conversely, key characteristics of a good car — spaciousness; road-hugging ability; a beefy, collision-resistant body — are liabilities in the air.
In the decades since the Flivver, there have been few successful prototypes of a true flying car. Waldo Waterman’s Arrowbile, which used a Studebaker engine on the ground and in the air, made test flights in 1937. The Taylor Aerocar was certified for production by the Civil Aeronautics Administration in 1956, but never caught on commercially.
Lately, with the advent of powerful, lightweight engines; computer-aided design; and composite materials — not to mention a concentration of wealth among “One Percenters” that makes the idea of a $300,000 toy commercially feasible — there’s been a resurgence of interest in roadable aircraft. Last month at the New York auto show, a company called Terrafugia unveiled the Transition, an airplane with wings that deploy and retract at the press of a button, thus making it possible to land at an airport, fold away the wings, drive home, and park in a normal garage.
The Transition, like any would-be flying car, has had to walk a regulatory tightrope. On the one hand, it’s a bona fide light sport aircraft, and thus subject to FAA approval. On the other, it’s meant to be driven on the highway, and thus has to be certified roadworthy by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
If the FAA’s flight certification testing goes well, the Transition will be available for purchase in a year or so. The price is predicted to be about $280,000. A rival design from the Netherlands, a gyroplane/motorcycle hybrid called the PAL-V, is running neck and neck with the Transition, both in terms of cost and speed of regulatory approval.
These are real vehicles, designed by serious people, but there’s nevertheless an aspect of fantasy-land to them, even beyond the eye-popping sticker price — for instance, the severe restrictions on sport pilots, whose abbreviated training only certifies them for daytime flight in good weather conditions. Then there are practical considerations: what if a minor fender-bender clips the vehicle’s wings, turning it into the world’s slowest and geekiest supercar?
Perhaps a flying car isn’t the answer. If arriving at a particular destination isn’t a requirement, and safety isn’t even a remote concern, there’s always the example of Larry Walters, a truck driver in San Pedro, California, who took to the air on July 2nd, 1982, in a flying machine of his own invention: a patio chair tethered to 45 helium-filled weather balloons. He called it the Inspiration I.
Mr. Walters’s answer to altitude control was a pellet gun, which he carried to shoot balloons as necessary. Also in his kit that day were sandwiches, a CB radio, and some cold beer.
He quickly rose from his back yard to an altitude of 15,000 feet, then drifted into the primary approach corridor of Long Beach Airport, where he was sighted by other aircraft, including at least one commercial jet.
Larry Walters’s story has an unhappy ending. He committed suicide in 1993 at the age of 44. You could argue that his balloon adventure a decade earlier was merely an unsuccessful attempt.
I remember thinking of Larry Walters as a kind of homespun hero back in 1982, and being crushed years later when I learned of his sad fate. The story of Icarus came to mind.
The dream of individual flight is powerful, but history has argued against it. Aviation is a field where commercial planes and professional pilots almost always make for a safer combination than experimental aircraft and private pilots.
Nevertheless, the dream persists.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 12 May 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
