Kinda looks like a terrible car and a terrible airplane.

Interesting landing gear though. I've been sitting here all morning pondering the quad gear, and how it would perform. Especially with real steering and brakes.

Gump

Gump wrote

Interesting landing gear though. I've been sitting here all morning pondering the quad gear, and how it would perform. Especially with real steering and brakes.

Gump

Looking at the video....ummm.. will I need to get a second tail wheel endorsement ??

Need to raise the front end up in airplane mode to give that thing some take off angle..... Those flaps are huge....

Brian...

For the last 100 years "they" have been trying to market the flying car idea.

I don't see anything different this time that will make this thing marketable. This vehicle looks so fragile that driving it on any of the roads in this area would certainly destroy it.

it's the Batmobile!

Brian-StevesAircraft wrote:Need to raise the front end up in airplane mode to give that thing some take off angle..... Those flaps are huge....

Brian...

Looks like they can control the wing angle of incidence to get around the low fuse angle. Pretty crazy.

Flying car is a pretty difficult challenge, even for the very best of engineers. Although I don't even remotely fit into that category, my feeling is that they're trying to make the vehicle too small, in an effort to save weight.

A small car saddles you with small wings, and small wings saddle you with a marginal airplane no matter how nicely the wings fold up into the glove compartment with one push of a button.

IMHO, the configuration needs to be a flying van not a car. Not because a van might carry a bunch of cargo... it won't. It's because a boxy flying van means you can have four decent size wing panels stowed in the boxy part.

I noticed in the OP's linked video that parts of the car were fabric covered. Good. That's smart. Now take that a little further. Have a steel or composite tube box that's fabric covered. Nice and light. Reasonably large wing panels, and a reasonable tail, can fold up and fit into the fabric covered box. If the wings and tails are light, then their weight in the box will not require the rear axle to be too far aft, which means that (when in airplane mode) the thing can rotate for takeoff. That seems to be a big problem with all flying car layouts.

It also seems to me that way way too much effort is being put into pushing one button and having the vehicle unfold into an airplane like a child's "Transformer" toy. That is not reality, it's too many engineers that were raised on the Transformer movies. Spending five or ten minutes attaching the wings and tail with genuine cadmium plated AN hardware and !($#*ing Cotter Pins would take out hundreds of pounds worth of Rube Goldberg mechanisms and actuators, and eliminate moving a lot of control surfaces that should not be moved around.

EZ Flap,

John Boyd, the Fighter Pilot who Changed the Art of War, would agree with you on the swing wing mechanism but not on the bigger size. His aircraft evaluation formula proved all swing wings to be the least capable fighters. He also proved the faIicy of big fuselages for bigger radar antenna. I think he would leave the wings at the airport until time to attach them and keep the rest of the project small.

He did, however, believe in destruction as fundamental in the process of creation.

I think Robert Reser would agree with Boyd saying, "The design of the airplane is to fly." I think he would allow the car part to be much, much, more marginal.

Jim

Friend of mine did the test flying on a motorcycle/gyrocopter. http://pal-v.com/. It had some issues.

For the cost I didn't see the point. For the same money you could buy 4 Super Cubs and 4 expensive Ducati's (or Harleys for you blue-blooded Americans), have change left over, and plant each in the airport or field of your choice, and not compromise.

I have always thought that most can't navigate in two dimensions well, and many bend stuff, so we do not need to add a third. It would be a disaster.

Ed Sweeny, a guy I knew in the ultralight days, had a Molt Taylor AeroCar, I believe the very same one that was featured in the Bob Cummings TV show. Though he really appreciated it's uniqueness, I remember him saying once it wasn't much of an airplane, or much of a car. Way too many compromises, why not make it amphibious while you're at it? The continuing pursuit of this dream is a testament to the human spirit, or something like that. Pretty impressive engineering to get it that far along.

Looks better handling in the air than the Terrafugia...saw that fly at Oshkosh and was shocked at how sluggish and twitchy it was in the air...compared to that this flying car doesn't look THAT bad.

Save yourself the money and buy a nice used airplane, a nice used car, and still have money left to satisfy the wife!

Av8r3400 wrote:For the last 100 years "they" have been trying to market the flying car idea.

I don't see anything different this time that will make this thing marketable. This vehicle looks so fragile that driving it on any of the roads in this area would certainly destroy it.

We have a winner!

In the midst of endless discussions on this topic over at the Homebuilt forum, nobody seems to know where the viable market share is.

Only the top 0.01% of people choose to afford the cost of personal air transport, let alone some crazy-looking impractical vehicle. I mean, if to take-off, this thing has to drive to an airport anyway....

It will take brand new technology to crack this one, not a new take on existing technology.