![]() ![]() Unfortunately, that sober approach doesn’t make their task any easier. If you’re stuck in traffic, you’ll remain stuck. You’ll be able to take off only from a runway, and you’ll need a pilot’s license to do so. The Transition will meet Federal Aviation Administration standards in airplane mode and satisfy National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and Environmental Protection Agency regulations on the road. They perfected the design in software simulators and are using materials proven in earlier vehicles. He and his team are instead building a single-engine, rear-propeller airplane that just happens to be street-legal. You won’t find any ducted fans or references to antigravity. Marc Stiller sands a component while Carl Dietrich (kneeling) and Andrew Heafitz look on.ĭietrich’s company isn’t hinging its plans on out-of-reach technology or infrastructure. But he couldn’t sign up enough customers to turn it into a business. In the 1950s, Molt Taylor, a former Navy pilot, flew a few versions of his Aerocar, an plane/car hybrid that attached to a separate, towable set of wings and a tail. ![]() Scores of garage inventors have spent their lives creating detailed designs, scale models, even working prototypes. The flying car has been a mainstay of our imagined transportation future for as long as there have been automobiles and airplanes: fanciful vehicles that promise to have us commuting like George Jetson. The Transition is a “roadable aircraft.” The team makes this distinction clear in conversation, on Terrafugia T-shirts, and in big, blue letters on the side of the trailer outside their shop. And when the engineers at Terrafugia in Woburn, Massachusetts, let me sit inside their just-finished proof-of-concept vehicle and grab the steering wheel, it’s easy to imagine piloting this thing up and out of traffic, into the open skies.īut we’re not talking about a flying car. It will have four wheels, Formula One–style suspension, and a pair of 10-foot-wide wings that fold up when it switches from air to asphalt. The vehicle, set to go on sale next year, will cruise smoothly on the road and through the sky. ![]() In Terrafugia’s Transition driving airplane, the canard wing doubles as the front bumper. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |