When cars did fly

Published 1:29 pm Tuesday, September 2, 2008

“When cars fly!” could almost substitute for the old saying “When pigs fly!” — a fanciful retort meant to discredit someone’s presumably outlandish idea, such as flying cars.

Today, pigs are still waiting to fly, but cars have flown — Aerocars. Five of them, in fact, were created and built in Washington state. At one time, a pair of them flew in formation over the rural fields around Longview more than 57 years ago.

Yet, despite growing public and corporate support, efforts to launch large-scale production of the Aerocar — a blend of motor vehicle and airplane — never got off the ground. All of the original Aerocars still can be found today, parceled out among private owners and aviation museums, including one at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

Now Jake Schultz, a technical analyst on Boeing’s 787 program in Everett, has written the first book ever published about the Aerocar, going where hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and numerous television programs about the car-plane have never gone.He has revealed the untold story of how the amazing vehicle was designed, built and flown; how it captured people’s imaginations; and how the entire project became the victim of federal regulation. Ironically, the restrictive standards that grounded the Aerocar weren’t for aircraft but for automobiles.

Drawing on intense research and rare interviews with the inventor, the late Molt Taylor of Longview, Schultz documents the history, the people and the technology surrounding the Aerocar. To round out the story, he also explores other inventors’ efforts to create hybrid flying cars that perform as well in the sky as on the road.

Taking a drive in the clouds

Being the first writer to have access to Taylor’s original drawings, photos and correspondence, Schultz’s colorful book — “A Drive in the Clouds” — offers pictures, anecdotes, the inventor’s intentions and new insight into one of the most intriguing segments of American civil aviation history. Taylor’s pioneering efforts led to his induction into the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Hall of Fame a few days before his death in 1995.

“I first met Molt Taylor in 1992 when I wanted to purchase plans for building one of his homebuilt plane kits that he began designing after the Aerocar didn’t materialize,” Schultz said. “Since he lived so close, I decided to drive down to pick up the plans. Later, I made other trips to get an extra canopy and other parts and got to know him well.”

During one of his visits to Longview, when he helped Taylor sort through the inventor’s archives to prepare his shop building for sale, Schultz realized the importance of the material he was seeing.

“I became keenly aware that all of his records were there in one place and that someone should do something. I carefully considered for a few weeks if I wanted to step up to the daunting task of writing a book. Then, on one of those visits, I offered to do that on his behalf. He said, ‘Oh, would you do that?’ — and then we began our work,” Schultz said, knowing the book was to be a big step beyond the dozens of magazine articles he was used to writing. Taylor immediately went to a closet and began bringing out his drawings, handwritten notes, photos, negatives, Kodachrome slides and correspondence.

“I felt a real responsibility to tell his story before all of that material was scattered and lost. I wanted to present Taylor’s dream about the Aerocar but also portray the kind of man and inventor he was. He had so much energy, so many ideas and so much humor,” Schultz said.

Molt Taylor’s legacy preserved

For more than 13 years, including Taylor’s last three years before his death in 1995, Schultz worked on the Aerocar story, along with exploring the whole concept of flying vehicles that many other inventors had spent much of their lives pursuing. During the course of his work, he developed an even greater respect for Taylor’s vision and perseverance.

Another admirer of Taylor’s work was Paul Poberezny, founder and chairman of the board of the Experimental Aircraft Association in Oshkosh, Wis. He wrote in the book’s foreword that Molt Taylor was a skilled engineer with a love for flying, a true experimenter who had provided inspirations for future generations of inventors. Today, Taylor’s Aerocar prototype is prominently displayed at the EAA’s AirVenture

Museum.

In the introduction to “A Drive in the Clouds,” Taylor wrote that he had spent the majority of his professional life and much of his personal resources, plus stockholders’ capital, trying to introduce the concept of a flying automobile. “I now feel,” he wrote, “that we can at least give a good accounting for the reasons we were not successful in our original objectives and suggest a possible future for the concept.”

For Taylor, an engineer and Navy pilot who also designed military drone aircraft and worked on developing early versions of air-launched cruise missiles, his dream began in the mid-1940s. That’s when he first thought about a sky full of automobiles that also could fly as conventional aircraft, then quickly be converted back into cars at their destination and drive off, towing their fuselage and wings behind them.

First designed in 1945, then tested in the University of Washington’s wind tunnel, Taylor’s Aerocar prototype first flew over Longview on Dec. 8, 1949. As his test flights continued, local people began to notice — and talk. A few months and a few flights later, newsreel cameras began lining the runway to record the soaring of the Aerocar, its flights over the airfield and its perfect four-point landings.

Aerocar’s media blitz

Soon its inventor, Taylor, was demonstrating his flying car on one of the most popular television shows of the 1950s, “You Asked For It,” with host Art Baker.

Driving the Aerocar onto the stage, Taylor showed off its carlike interior, the padded bench-seat equipped with two seat belts, and a standard car steering wheel. On the dashboard were two sets of instruments, including a speedometer and gas gauge for driving and an altimeter and compass for flying. Hooked to the rear of the car like a trailer were the folded wings and fuselage, with an inverted tail for the rudder.

Taylor told the television audience that the car’s four-cylinder, pressure air-cooled aircraft engine at the rear of the car also powered the Aerocar in flight. Unfolding and connecting the wings and tail took about five minutes, Taylor said. With the propeller at the rear of the plane, cockpit visibility was improved, and it was less likely anyone would walk into the blade. As an automobile, the Aerocar would easily do 60 miles per hour. As an airplane, it would cruise at around 100 miles per hour and fly as high as 12,000 feet, Taylor said.

Then the television cameras focused on a studio screen showing a recent film of Baker and Taylor at the local airport, attaching the fuselage and wings to the Aerocar in minutes to convert it for flight, taxiing down the runway, taking off, flying past the camera, then landing and converting it back into a land motor vehicle.

Taylor believed his vision of building and marketing an automobile that could fly above traffic jams on the nation’s two-lane highways, then return to the roadway to continue to its destination, would promote aviation in an entirely new light, reaching people who never dreamed of learning to fly.

Photos of the Aerocar in flight generated extensive media coverage for Taylor. The plane was featured in scores of magazines, including a cover story in Popular Mechanics in 1961. From “You Asked For It” to the “Tonight” show, promotion of the Aerocar seemed to be everywhere. In the early 1960s, television star Bob Cummings bought and flew one, even working it into the scripts of his comedy show.

Aerial traffic reports from a car

One of the most successful promotions for the Aerocar, also in the early 1960s, was a Portland, Ore., radio station’s use of the flying car for a year for Operation Air Watch. The station’s promotion slogan was that the Aerocar knew the traffic because it had been there. Radio station KISN logged 1,300 hours with the Aerocar, including memorable hours when it was airborne for traffic reporting during the sudden 1962 Columbus Day windstorm.

The high winds that devastated the Pacific Northwest that day blew the Aerocar backward as it flew crosswind of the storm, heading for Hillsboro Airport 14 miles away. The pilot watched roofs below him ripped off buildings by the 100-mile-per-hour winds. While landing in 70-mile-per-hour ground winds, the Aerocar’s airspeed wavered between 0 and 120 mph as gusts reversed its course. Suddenly, a downdraft plunged the plane toward the runway then calmed to allow the plane to pull out only 150 feet above the airport. Coming down at full throttle for an almost vertical landing, the Aerocar’s four wheels came to an abrupt halt in the wet dirt and grass adjacent to the runway.

After the storm, a tally found 56 light aircraft were heavily damaged at the airport; 16 protected planes were blown out of their hangars; a twin-engine Beech was thrown across the field and became a pile of rubble on the runway. The Aerocar, however, suffered no damage or structural stress, either in the air or on the ground. The next morning the plane was flying its usual traffic-spotting mission.

Despite many successful efforts to sell and promote the Aerocar, Taylor’s dream of thousands of cars across the country being able to fly above traffic jams and park in private garages instead of hangars never came to be, Schultz said.

Large-scale production slipped away

At one time, he came close to having Texas aircraft manufacturer Ling-Temco produce 1,000 Aerocars. But orders fell short of the number needed to start production. Several years later, while Lee Iacocca was chief executive of Ford Motor Co., he assigned senior representatives of Ford’s product development staff to review the flying-car concept and estimate its popularity in the market place. The company’s survey found a potential for selling 25,000 Aerocars a year through its 4,000 Ford dealerships.

To further a deal with Ford, Taylor approached federal transportation authorities for certification of the Aerocar. But they insisted he comply with all of the new environmental regulations being levied on the auto industry that same year.

Certifying the Aerocar as a plane already had been accomplished. Adding the prohibitive cost and complexity of meeting the new federal standards for noise, air pollution, fuel economy, mufflers and windshields cooled the ardor Ford officials had once had for the car-plane concept, and that venture ended. Afterward, a disappointed Taylor turned to designing sport aviation aircraft, though he never gave up on promoting the Aerocar concept whenever he could.

Like others who saw it, drove in it and flew in it, Schultz, too, was intrigued by the Aerocar concept. He had his chance to fly an Aerocar out of Boeing Field during the years he was researching his book on Taylor’s engineering dream.

“I loved it. I was grinning ear-to-ear. There wasn’t a lot of muffling on the engine, so it was a little loud. The first one also was underpowered, but later models were more refined. The concept, though, was great, that you could drive it around like a normal car, attach the wings and tail if you wanted to fly somewhere, then land and drive again. It’s the most successful flying car ever built,” he said.