Terrafugia Transition Flying Car to Be Flight Tested

The Terrafugia Transition, touted as a concept version of what is hoped to be the first production model flying car, is set for flight testing next month. If successful, the production Terrafugia Transition should be in show rooms in eighteen months.

The Terrafugia company, based in Massachusetts, claims that the Terrafugia Transition can transform itself from a sporty automobile to a personal flying machine in fifteen seconds. The Terrafugia Transition, which has already been road tested up to ninety miles per hour, is said to have a flight range of five hundred miles at a cruising speed of one hundred fifteen miles an hour.

The Terrafugia Transition uses the same engine, fueled with standard unleaded gasoline, for road travel and flight. Folded up in automobile mode, the Terrafugia Transition can fit in any garage.

Now here's the catch. If and when the Terrafugia Transition is available, one will need a drivers license, a pilot's license, access to an airfield as it is illegal to take off from a highway anywhere except Alaska, and two hundred thousand dollars. Air conditioner is not included. Two hundred thousand dollars is rather reasonable for a plane, but in the high end for an automobile, no matter how sporty.

The dream of flying cars, which one can take to the skies high above traffic, has been around for decades. Indeed, Glenn Curtiss, the air craft designer who was the rival of the Wright Brothers, designed a flying car in 1917 which he called the Autoplane. It never flew, though it did manage a few short hops.

More recent attempts at developing a flying car, including the MACRO Industries Skyrider, have used Vertical Takeoff and Landing Technology to try to combine the automobile with the air plane. The Terrafugia Transition, by contrast, uses a standard airplane horizontal takeoff configuration, hence the need for an air field.

If flying cars such as the Terrafugia Transition become practical and become available to more people than just the well heeled and adventurous, some kind of personal aircraft air traffic control system would need to be instituted to manage traffic flow in the sky. NASA has developed a system called Highway in the Sky, which would use satellites and a global positioning system to provide a heads up display for the flying car pilot to use to navigate while flying from place to place.

The flying car has been a symbol of what the future must be like for it to be the future, almost as much as lunar colonies, self aware robots, and interplanetary travel. The Jetsons and Back to the Future suggested a time in which commuting from home to work would take place, not on ribbons of concrete, but in the air.

Of course, given enough flying cars, traffic jams in the air, as in the satirical show Futurama, are almost inevitable.

Source: Flying car test flight on the horizon this winter, Patricia Philips, Examiner, January 11th, 2009

Terrafugia Inc.

Highways in the Sky: Flying Cars and the Future of Travel, Mark R. Whittington, Googabits, September 30th, 2005