Wings on the wheels

  • By Allison Linn / Associated Press
  • Friday, August 27, 2004 9:00pm
  • Business

SEATTLE – It’s a frustrated commuter’s fantasy: lifting your car off a clogged highway and soaring through the skies, landing just in time to motor into your driveway.

Researchers say that dream – an affordable, easy-to-use vehicle that would allow regular people to fly 200 miles to a meeting or drive 15 miles to the mall – is still probably decades away.

But engineers at NASA, the Boeing Co. and elsewhere say the basis for a flying car is already here. People have been building, or trying to build, such vehicles for a long time.

The problem is that those ideas have required both a lot of money and the skills of a trained pilot. And melding cars and planes hasn’t always been very successful.

“When you try to combine them, you get the worst of both worlds – a very heavy, slow, expensive vehicle that’s hard to use,” said Mark Moore, who heads the personal air vehicle division at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

The goal isn’t just to create a neat gizmo. Such vehicles certainly will become more appealing and necessary as highways and airport hubs grow more clogged, and commutes become ever more distant.

At NASA, the first goal is to transform small airplane travel. Right now, really small airplanes are generally costly, uncomfortable, loud and require months of training and lots of money to operate. That makes flying to work impractical.

Within five years, NASA researchers hope to develop technology for a small airplane that can fly out of regional airports, costs less than $100,000, is as quiet as a motorcycle and as simple to operate as a car. Although it wouldn’t have any road-driving capabilities, it would give people the ability to fly short distances.

To make flying simpler, NASA is working on technologies that would automate more pilot functions.

In 10 years, NASA hopes to have created technology for going door-to-door. These still wouldn’t be full-fledged flying cars but small planes that can drive very short distances on side streets after landing at an airport.

In 15 years, they hope to have the technology for larger vehicles, seating as many as four passengers, and the ability to make vertical takeoffs.

It will probably take years after these technologies are developed before such vehicles are actually on the market. And Moore says it will take about 25 years to get to anything remotely “Jetsons-like,” a reference to the futuristic cartoon that fed many flying car fantasies.

Researchers at Boeing in Seattle are already thinking that far ahead. They’ve created a miniature model of a sporty red helicopter and car hybrid that is helping the aerospace giant understand what it would take to make flying cars a reality.

Lynne Wenberg, senior manager on the project, said the goal is to make a flying car that costs the same as a luxury vehicle, is quiet and fuel-efficient, and easy to fly and maintain.

Boeing is especially interested in the broader problem of figuring out how to police the airways – and prevent total pandemonium – if thousands of flying cars enter the skies. No one wants to be cut off, tailgated or buzzed a little too closely by a student driver at 1,000 feet.

“The neat, gee-whiz part is thinking about what would the vehicle itself looks like, but we’re trying to think through all the ramifications of what would it take to deploy a fleet of these,” said Dick Paul, a vice president with Phantom Works, Boeing’s research arm.

Associated Press

Lynne Wenberg, senior manager of a Boeing group that is developing a flying car, holds a model of a remote-controlled helicopter and car hybrid at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

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