Flying Car

"Little Endian" wrote in message
...
Quite interesting.. this sort of machine can bridge the gap between GA
and the practicality of using small airplanes for commuting.

"Either way, it boils down to this: You sit down behind the steering
wheel, drive to the runway, unfold two wings and take off. You can fly
500 miles on a tank of gas -- regular unleaded -- and when you land,
you simply fold up the wings and drive where you want to go. At the
end of the day, you fly back, drive home and park inside your garage."

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/0...lying-car.html


I'm just waiting for them to be able to put a hover conversion kit on my
DeLorean.

wrote in
:

On Jan 24, 3:55*pm, VOR-DME wrote:
In article ,
says...





Little Endian wrote:

Quite interesting.. this sort of machine can bridge the gap
between GA and the practicality of using small airplanes for
commuting.

"Either way, it boils down to this: You sit down behind the
steering wheel, drive to the runway, unfold two wings and take
off. You can fly 500 miles on a tank of gas -- regular unleaded --
and when you land, you simply fold up the wings and drive where
you want to go. At the end of the day, you fly back, drive home
and park inside your garage."

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/0...lying-car.html

"A Boston-area company plans to begin flight tests this year of a
two-se
ater
airplane that moonlights as a car."

Has the timetable slipped? *Wasn't the proof-of-concept vehicle
suppos
ed to
fly in 2008?

It's slipped more than that! POC was set for 1947, and again in 1958,
the
n in
1965,71,78,85,91 etc etc. . .

I figure at any given moment there must be a half dozen car-planes in
var
ious
prototype stages around the world, each seeming to claim they have
invent
ed
something no one ever thought of before. When a slow news day comes
along
,
journalists have a shortcut key "CTRL-SHFT-CP" or something and out
pops
a
fully developed story about the new invention.

In reality, as the years go by this "invention" becomes less and less
via
ble,
because of increasing regulatory environment and liability concerns.
Now
we've
added fuel prices and "green" politics to all that! It "almost" could
hav
e been
possible for a limited production run for some of the post-war
versions,
when
you could pretty much do what you wanted if you could afford it, but
toda
y it
is completely impossible. Hard to imagine how or why any developer
would
waste
time and resources on an inherently non-viable concept.

Here's another one:
http://blog.aopa.org/blog/?p=669&WT....WT.mc_sect=gan

Tell me: How could the wing be a hollow telescoping affair
and still have spars in it?


It's ben done. There were several experiments in varible geometry wings
that telescoped in the thirties. They weren't really worth it..



Bertie

On Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:41:57 -0800, Sylvain wrote:

How does it work these days when you drop in with an aircraft on a trailer?

For instance, a more practical way to fold / unfold wings than is available
with sailplanes (which more often than not require heavy lifting by several
very patient and skilled participants...); something that would make it
possible for one person to easily store into a trailer (to take home, or
park at the local airport far cheaper than in a hangar) and back to a
flyable condition, could be quite a neat thing.

My airplane (a Kolb) is stored, wings folded, in an enclosed trailer
all the time. During the warm weather I keep the trailer at the
airport for convenience, for the same price as outdoor tiedown (about
1/4 the cost of a hangar); in the winter I keep it at home and tow it
to the airport when I want to fly. All the local pilots, even those
who don't keep their planes there, know the gate combination.

Unfolding and preflighting the plane takes about 15 minutes, and I can
do it alone.

The other local airport, which sadly just closed, didn't even have a
gate.

-Dana
--
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.-- Albert Einstein