Age-old dream of flying cars close to reality

By Stefan Weissenborn Nov 30, 2011, 3:06 GMT

Berlin - Ever since the first motor car was born, mankind has had the dream of avoiding obstacles such as a traffic jams ahead and just taking to the sky. Now several manufacturers hope to have such vehicles ready in the next few years.

The first flying car made its debut in Paris in 1911 but even today numerous inventors and engineers are working on a car that could just as well be used as an airplane.

Australian-born John Brown, who works for the northern German firm Carplane, has for years been pursuing the dream of building a vehicle uniting the qualities of a car and a plane. There are several reasons why real flying are not yet available on the market.

According to Brown, most such vehicles are 'either buggies with a parachute or aeroplanes that have wheels attached onto them that can also be used for normal roads.'

Engineers have been faced with the problem of weight distribution. While an aircraft needs to dip onto the rear axle for take-off and landings a car needs equal weight distribution on both axles to stay on the road. If used as a car the vehicle needs to stay on the road at high speed while as an aircraft the exact opposite is needed.

Carplane hopes to have a flying car on the market by 2015. It measures 7.6 metres in length and has a 97 kW/130 hp Subaru engine that gives it a top speed of 120 knots (about 220 km/h) in the air and 176 km/h on land.

Carplane has not revealed a price for the flying car but it is aiming for around 100,000 euros (135,000 dollars). Meanwhile Terrafugio in the United States, which was founded in 2006 by a group of pilots and aircraft engineers, hopes to have its flying car, the Transition, available by the end of next year for a price of 279,000 dollars (about 200,000 euros).

The Transition, which looks similar to a Cessna plane, has foldable wings and a maximum speed of 185 km/h in the air and 105 km/h on the road.

Brown makes a point of stating the Carplane is not building vehicles for the cities of tomorrow but for the typical businessman of today who has to travel between 350 and 1,200 kilometres a day. The most intensive efforts to build so-called roadable aircraft or Multi-Mode-Vehicles are in the United States where manufacturers such as Mollter International hope to have a Skycar ready by the year 2014. Milner Motors unveiled at the New York Motor Show in 2008 the prototype of a four-seater AirCar.

Many issues such as the type of pilot license still need to be clarified. John Brown suggests that apart from the driver's license, the operator of such a vehicle would also need a license for a light sport aircraft.