It’s recently been revealed that Larry Page, one of Google’s cofounders, is funding two different companies to build a flying car. Much like Google Glass or Siri, it seems more born of a desire to make the science fiction shows of the past a reality instead of deliver a viable product. And that’s not least because the flying car has a long history of ambitious goals and modest success.
Why A Flying Car?
The roots of the flying car really lie with something that wasn’t a flying car at all. In the 1920s, Ford experimented with the Ford Flivver, an attempt to build a small, storable aircraft not unlike the Model T. Like you might expect from a tiny aircraft engineered in the 1920s, it had quite a few technical problems, but it might have made it to production if a test pilot hadn’t died while flying a prototype. It starkly illustrated to Ford the risks of putting everyone in the air, and the Flivver was abandoned.
Still, it was enough for the idea to take root in pop culture, and Ford never really abandoned the idea entirely. Up to the late ’50s, it was still debuting designs and looking at engineering concerns. And right around the time Ford debuted its Volante Tri-Athodyne, a 3/8ths scale model of a personal aircraft, the US military began investigating the possibility of the “airgeep,” a small aircraft that could navigate over rough terrain in the battlefield. And, by 1962, it had a viable one, the Piasecki 59-K. In theory, the 59-K had everything you could want in a flying car — a powered undercarriage to roll on, two ducted fans to hover on, surprising agility, and passenger seating. But the military decided the “airgeep” was impractical, and focused on developing helicopters instead.
It’s an ongoing theme for the flying car. It’s possible, and in fact it’s been possible for decades. Making it practical, however, is another matter entirely.
The Difficulty Of The Flying Car
There are generally two approaches to the flying car. The first is essentially a personal aircraft, which is less a “car” in the sense that it rolls, and more along the lines of a small personal craft that’s simple to use and easy to land. The second is a literal flying car, AKA the roadable aircraft. While the latter may sound a bit unwieldy, in fact, the Autogiro AC-35 went through successful tests in 1936. There just wasn’t much interest in it at the time.
Both, however, run into the same problems. The first is fuel. Aviation fuel is, of necessity, at a higher grade and better quality than the gasoline you pump into your car, partially to make it easier to introduce additives that lower the chances of explosions or ice in the fuel lines, both of which are obviously bad news when you’re thousands of feet in the air. Getting an engine powerful enough to fly a plane that runs on gasoline is possible, and has even been achieved, but it’s not terribly efficient at the moment. Some get around it simply by having two fuel tanks for the two separate modes.
Another problem is design. Cars and airplanes are more or less aerodynamic opposites — a plane is designed to get as much lift as possible, while in a car, lift forces are very bad things. That leaves designers with the task of deciding which aspect of the vehicle is more important, the plane or the car. For example, the Terrafugia Transition is less a flying car, and more a plane you can store in your garage and drive to the airport so you don’t have to pay hangar fees.
The third, and by far the one that weighs the most on everyone’s mind, is safety. As any amateur pilot can tell you, flying is incredibly dangerous and difficult, and as anybody who’s been on the road can tell you, most human beings probably shouldn’t be trusted with a car in the first place, let alone a flying one. If the airways of the nation suddenly became jammed with amateur pilots, aircraft fatalities would likely go through the roof. So even if we lick the technical challenges, and we’re getting ever closer to doing so, we’ll have to design licensing requirements to ensure flying cars don’t go careening into malls and grade schools across the globe.
Will Cars Ever Take To The Skies?
This isn’t to rule out the idea of a flying car completely, of course. In theory, a flying supercar will be on the road by next year. And the military has never truly lost interest in the idea, as DARPA is developing a “Transformer” that will turn from flying cargo craft to rolling troop transport.
And it’s never smart to decide a technology is done for, when potential breakthroughs are just around the corner. Not so long ago, the idea that we’d have an international communications network we could access from devices in our pockets was science fiction. As late as 1995, there were people insisting the Internet was just a fad and that we’d never want to live in a world where useful data and obnoxious behavior existed side-by-side. And even if we never get a flying car, research into the lighter, more powerful engines and advanced materials we’d need to mass produce such a thing have applications elsewhere. The quest for a flying car may be ever so slightly quixotic, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have a happy ending.
