AirCar Prototype flies
[youtube]https://youtu.be/QAnIjwwzupI[/youtube]

This one looks incredibly cool, like a toy I would have had in the 80s.

Maybe by making it look like a super car, they stand a chance of selling them.

All these flying cars seem to me like a solution desperately seeking a problem.

Rental cars and rideshares are pretty readily available. I don't see any situation in which I'd want to fly somewhere and then put my airplane at risk by driving it all around some town many hundreds of miles away from home where a minor fender bender might leave it unairworthy.

Couple that with the extra weight needed to meet both road and airplane use cases and I think you end up with a terrible airplane mixed with a pretty bad car.

The only benefit I can see concretely is that I could garage it at home more cheaply than I could hangar it at the airport.

Am I missing some fundamental use case to which flying cars are a great solution?

Ride share and ground transport from small airports isn't as ubiquitous as lots of folks seem to believe. It's bitten me on a couple of trips recently.

Now, the flying cars they've managed to make aren't really solutions to the problem (and passenger drones are probably going to solve it much sooner), but having your own flying transformer is still pretty cool.

It would be interesting to see a compilation of the total capital raised to fund these dream vehicles vs the capital spent, i.e., how much went into the pockets of the purveyors.

It’s always cool to see the innovation.

As to the problem comment, here’s a scenario where this would have fit great for me. I used to have a job where I would have same-day or one-night trips to visit customer sites. These were typically between 1-3 hour drive times. My home is 5 minutes from a GA airport. The ease of driving to the airport, flying a leg, and driving to the customer would have been wonderful. Flying to work without ever switching vehicles.

Now I could have never afforded what these will ultimately sell for, but this seems like a nice option for a situation like that.

I learned to fly at Evergreen, in Vancouver WA. One favorite destination was to Kelso and hang with Molt Taylor, who always enjoyed the company!



https://www.historylink.org/File/20930

With what a Cirrus costs there is no way I would want to put a $900k flying car up against some of the idiots out there on the road.

Have any of the manufacturers of these things never been behind a semi-truck that seems to have just gone down a gravel road before merging onto the highway?

Most of the airports I fly to in the western US do not have rideshare or rental cars available. About half are unattended all together.

But a problem with the flying car would be getting access to the runway. It seems that most of the airports I visit have locked gates that prevent entry, or just as problematic, exit.

I’ve always been curious about who is going to fix these when in car mode...A&P or ASE mechanic? If a car mechanic fixes it, does it become unairworthy when back into airplane mode?

Do you have to call in an A&P for an offsite downtown to fix a flat?

Jeff

I can see it now.....Kids, do not touch that button!!!!

Shorts and tee-shirt for a test flight in a prototype?

A whole lot of moving, folding, sliding critical parts. Wonder what the rigging guide will look like?

The sight of the flying car is a cool realization of science fiction, but the practical application of it is almost nonexistent. Much more practical to use airplanes for flying and cars for ground transport. Blending an airplane into a car creates more problems than it solves. I can't imagine trying to obtain insurance on one of those things. I'll bet it would create some good comments from the underwriters.

Molt Taylor made the AirCar a reality long ago, and the market proved it did not have a reason to exist.

I followed the Terrafugia development for years, just as an interesting startup. It was a 120kt LSA, VFR only. On the road, roughly like driving a Winnebago, a somewhat large and fragile craft.

As I got my IR and started flying trips it quickly occurred to me that I’d much rather have a fast IFR ship like a Cirrus or Bonanza to get from city to city at 170 kts, then have an Enterprise rental car waiting at the FBO. The airplane was a better plane, and the car was a better car.

I sorta liked the Cirrus STC for a cargo pod underneath that held a motorcycle. You got a real Cirrus to fly and a reasonable economy street bike for ground transportation. If you need to land in east Tumbleweed and get 15 miles into town, that would work. But every place I’ve needed to do business and every wife-acceptable vacation spot had rental cars easily available.