Flying Car Ready for Takeoff?
by tour93 | February 16th, 2006
This summer, graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology will try to get an idea aloft that has intrigued people for
decades: the flying car.
Terrafugia, a start-up created by Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winner
Carl Dietrich and colleagues at MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and
Astronautics, is aiming to show off what it calls the Transition
Personal Air Vehicle, an SUV with retractable wings, to the EAA
AirVenture Conference in Oshkosh, Wis., at the end of July.
The Transition is
designed for 100- to 500-mile jumps. It will carry two people and
luggage on a single tank of premium unleaded gas. It will also come
with an electric calculator (to help fine-tune weight distribution),
airbags, aerodynamic bumpers and of course a GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation unit.
The company hopes to eventually have the vehicle classified so that it can be piloted with a light sport aircraft license.
No complete prototype exists yet, but the company has a one-fifth scale
wind tunnel model (along with computer simulations) and will use the
$30,000 from the Lemelson prize to build something to show off at the
Oshkosh show. A fully operational prototype is expected to come out in
2008 or earlier, according to the company, while Transition vehicles
are expected to hit the road, and the sky, by 2009 or 2010.
"We have a lot of confidence that if the interest is there, we can
deliver this product," Dietrich said. "There is a huge amount of
general interest, but the question is, is there a market for it?"
Building retractable wings won’t be the major challenge: F-18s and even
some World War II era planes have folding wings. Instead, one of the
biggest challenges will be creating enough cargo room to satisfy
customers. The planes, which will cruise up to 12,000 feet, will
probably use an off-the-shelf engine, he added.
In the past few years, the skies have become a new frontier for
entrepreneurs and academics. The chase for the X prize led entrepreneur
Richard Branson and others to begin to contemplate space tourism. PayPal founder Elon Musk, meanwhile, has started SpaceX, a private company that hopes to launch rockets for satellite deployment, similar to the more heavily funded Sea Launch venture. Stanford University professors teach a course on do-it-yourself satellites.
Related posts:
