World's first flying car readying for take off

While it may seem like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, the flying car might soon become a reality.

A Massachusetts company founded four years ago by graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is getting ready to take its flying car - or drivable aircraft - on its first test flight either later this month or early in February. Richard Gersh, a vice president at Terrafugia, told Computerworld Tuesday that the company is preparing to take a prototype of the vehicle, dubbed The Transition, to an airport in upstate New York for its initial flight.

"We are very excited," said Gersh. "We are all very energized. To actually have it fly is a dream come true. I'm not sure it's up there with the Wright brothers but it's awfully close."

The two-seater vehicle fits into the light sport aircraft category and has an anticipated price of US$148,000. Gersh said that the company so far has received more than 40 orders for The Transition. He hopes the first one will be in a customer's hands by next year.

Gersh noted that in the last several months the vehicle has been driven under its own power, undergoing on-road and taxi testing at the Lawrence Municipal Airport. Then in December, The Transition was transported to upstate New York where it underwent high-speed taxi testing, meaning that it was driven at higher speeds by its own propeller.

Now, Terrafugia said he has a test pilot lined up for the initial flight.

"We're not going to have a flying car, as people think of it, for a while," said Anna Dietrich, chief operating officer of Terrafugia, in a previous interview. "I would never say it's not going to happen, but today the infrastructure is not there, nor is the training, nor are the avionics that would make the training unnecessary. What makes sense right now is a roadable aircraft."

Dietrich said the idea of a such a vehicle is what fired up their imaginations and pushed them to found the company. The problem, however, is that the US doesn't have the infrastructure in place to make roadable planes a viable alternative yet. There are roads, not runways, in front of houses, grocery stores and office buildings. And a sky filled with people who don't have pilot's licenses could be problematic at the least.

"You have to be a pilot to fly The Transition," said Dietrich. "And we just really don't have the technology to have an autopilot built in so people can just get in it and say, 'Fly me to the grocery store.' It's an airplane designed to be flown by a pilot in the infrastructure we already have, which is the airports."

She added that there are about 6,000 public airports in the US, and most people are, on average, within 20 miles of one. The idea, she said, is to take advantage of this underutilized infrastructure. A pilot can fly into a small airport, and instead of getting a rental car or waiting for a taxi to drive out to a rather remote spot, he can fold up the wings on the aircraft and simply drive off.

Foldable wings, though, may not make some passengers feel safe in the sky. Dietrich said making sure the wings stay erect while in flight was one of their biggest engineering challenges.

"We tackled that one first," she added. "There are a number of interlocks in place, some electrical, some mechanical. To activate the mechanism that folds or deploys the wings, you have to be on the ground."

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