Beijing bought the company, takes the guts back to China, closes the US operations, makes the product for 20 cents on the dollar and sells it back to the US market. Nothing new here. In fact, I am surprised they bought the company, though. Their usual MO is to just steal it.

Beijing bought the company, takes the guts back to China, closes the US operations, makes the product for 20 cents on the dollar and sells it back to the US market. Nothing new here. In fact, I am surprised they bought the company, though. Their usual MO is to just steal it.

Beijing bought the company, takes the guts back to China, closes the US operations, makes the product for 20 cents on the dollar and sells it back to the US market. Nothing new here. In fact, I am surprised they bought the company, though. Their usual MO is to just steal it.

Beijing bought the company, takes the guts back to China, closes the US operations, makes the product for 20 cents on the dollar and sells it back to the US market. Nothing new here. In fact, I am surprised they bought the company, though. Their usual MO is to just steal it.

The currently insurmountable problem of a flying car, is that they don't do either function well. It's a crappy car, and a slow, two person airplane.

When someone figures out how to make an Cadillac Escalade fly at 200+ knots, then we'll have a viable product.

The currently insurmountable problem of a flying car, is that they don't do either function well. It's a crappy car, and a slow, two person airplane.

When someone figures out how to make an Cadillac Escalade fly at 200+ knots, then we'll have a viable product.

My electronic mailbag recently included yet another pitch for a “flying car.” If, in the last 60 years or so, you’ve read more than a few sequential issues of Popular Science, you know what I’m talking about. These contraptions appear on the cover of guy, tool-tinkering magazines about as often as Britney Spears gets top billing at People. (And no, I never thought I’d have occasion to include Britney in my blog. But maybe my Google hits will soar.)

Blade Runner, Jetsons cartoons, and “Welcome to Tomorrow” exhibits at world’s fairs and Disney theme parks aside, the honor of inventing the car/airplane hybrid usually goes to Moulton (Molt) B. Taylor. He created the AEROCAR in 1949. (The first patent for a drive-fly vehicle seems to belong to Felix Longobardi, who proposed the idea in 1918.)

Taylor’s design apparently had something of Robert E. Fulton, Jr.’s “Airphibian” in its genes. It worked, after a fashion, but Taylor spent the rest of his life trying to persuade someone to mass-produce it. When I was the editor of the Western Flyer (now the General Aviation News) in the mid-1980s, Taylor called me about once a month. While I held the phone a safe distance from my ear, Molt declaimed against the airspace-grabbing FAA, short-sighted manufacturers, and all the other obstacles that had kept him from filling the skies (and roads) with Aerocars. You can read an affectionate and detailed telling of Molt’s story in A Drive in the Clouds by Jake Schultz. Or talk to my friend Hal Bryan, who knows more about–and revels in–odd aircraft more than anyone I’ve known, except maybe Pete Bowers.

The fact that someone paid money for the company is the only theft I can think of. Reminds me of the Moller flying thing that the guy made a career out of.