It’s always amusing when the hardworking daily press gets wind of an aviation-related story that’s trending out there where the busses don’t run. Such was the case Thursday when several outlets picked up the announcement from Terrafugia that its flying car had been approved for test flights in the U.S.
“The FAA Just Approved Test Flights for a Flying Car in U.S. Airspace,” shouted Slate’s headline. If you’d been following Terrafugia’s testing of its Transition LSA, you’d naturally say, “Huh?” They’ve been flying it for a while now. We’ve covered it. Further down in the story, the evidently impressed author let slip that what they’ve been approved to fly is a 10-percent-scale test article of the Terrafugia TF-X, a tilt-rotor hybrid that’s a follow-on to the a-long-way-from-market Terrafugia Transition. In other words, it’s a drone and not too dissimilar in aerodynamic concept from the more sophisticated RC models out there.
Another site, Futurism, got it exactly right: “Terrafugia Gets Approval to Test Drone Version of its Flying Car.” Neither story noted that the Transition continues to be the flying car that you can’t buy yet, if ever. Leave that to a nattering nabob of negativism like me to point out. (And an AVweb hat to the first person to correctly identify the source of that phrase. Extra points for the indictment particulars.)
Flying cars are an evergreen story for the general press because they’re just so much damn fun to do. History is replete with failed flying car efforts and any reporter paying attention would leap on that as a means of not asking too many technical questions related to, you know, basic plausibility. I saw a silly story a couple of months ago that gushed that the Icon A5 amphibian was the closest thing yet to a flying car. Well, yeah, as long as you already own a car to tow it. All those owners in Europe tugging their microlights on trailers from the garage to the flying field might be shocked to learn how close they are to flying cardom.
Setting aside the usual and necessary cynicism, does this TF-X have a prayer of getting beyond the impressive artist’s rendering video that Terrafugia produced? Probably not, but I’d argue that the chances are now better than ever, at least on paper. The reason has to do with all the drones and electric cars and airplanes we’ve been writing about. Some interesting technologies are coming together, specifically lightweight and powerful direct-drive DC motors, battery technology capable of short bursts of high power and hybrid generation technology and the associated control hardware and software. This is pretty much what e-volo is doing with its Volocopter, less the hybrid drive, which neither Terrafugia nor e-volo has yet.
The TF-X would also be a hybrid with batteries for burst power for takeoff and a 300-HP engine driving a generator to power rotors driven by DC motors. (It claims a megawatt—1300 HP—of burst power.)It’s a tilt-rotor design intended for near vertical takeoff transitioning to forward flight. It would have automatic flight stability and autonomous landing capability in the event that the pilot can’t do his thing. If all of these things aren’t quite off-the-shelf hardware at the moment, you can see them on the horizon. Better battery technology will also help. With 200 MPH promised and four seats, Terrafugia probably overstates the potential performance and payload by a wide margin, but doesn’t everyone?
The reason the whole project is likely to turn to a heap of cool but useless hardware is the same reason that most airplane projects do. Building a commercially successful airplane is a fragile construct of controlled money burn and certification hoop-jumping measured against a final product that’s affordable enough for enough people to buy before the company goes under. (Eclipse ring a bell?) Terrafugia doesn’t give the weight of the TF-X, but with four seats, it won’t be an LSA and U.S. LSA rules don’t allow rotorcraft anyway. Maybe in the future, they might or in our wildest wet dreams, the Part 23 revision will make certifying something like this vastly cheaper. I’ll concede my own imagination deficit in seeing how the economics would come together before the project sucks up all the money in the known universe even if the technical challenges appear surmountable eventually. Which they do, for discrete aircraft if not an airplane/car combination.
Terrafugia says the price of the TF-X would be comparable to high-end luxury cars. But which one? The $100,000 Mercedes S-Class or a $2.2 million Veyron? Something in between, I’m sure. But with the exception of business jets, light aircraft prices have always been low-balled because the start-ups who build them have no clue what the real costs are and they assume vastly more volume than the market can absorb. Recall that when Cessna announced the restart Skyhawks in 1996, the price was a paltry $124,500. And Cessna did have a clue about real costs. So despite the bubbling of the daily press, the size of a potential flying car market is an unknown. We can only speculate that it’s robust enough for a start-up to claw its way out of a sea of red ink before investors step in and shut down the money bleed.
Even if Terrafugia doesn’t bring the TF-X to market, buried in the concept is a different kind of flying that seems, to me at least, to be likely in the not-too-distant future. It’s stabilized autoflight using distributed electric power to DC motors. This is essentially what those millions of drones we’re all so terrified of are all about and the technology is readily scalable. With a GPS-aided autopilot and stabilization, it fundamentally changes the nature of flying and the skill set required to do it, so much so that the largest barrier may be the FAA figuring out how to rate a pilot who can be trained to fly something like this in a couple of hours, if not 20 minutes. If you doubt this, I urge you to get your hands on a $500 drone and fly it around. You’d have to be as thick as a mud fence not to see the possibilities. Practical aircraft like this may be a decade away, but my bet is they’re coming eventually.
They may come from the experimental segment first. Our sister publication, KITPLANES, has a terrific cartoonist named Robert Chambers. He’s got a great eye and ear for the technical foibles aircraft builders frequently confront and a wonderful drawing style reminiscent of the classic cartoons of the 1940s.
As I was contemplating this essay, he sent in this cartoon, meant to be a humorous take on the very subject we’re discussing. That leads quite naturally to the manned quadcopter concept and the reality is that we’re not too far from being able to do this very thing. I’m pretty sure some amateur builder somewhere has sketched out this very idea and is doing the calcs on payload and endurance. The motors are there; the batteries are getting there. It might fly for only five minutes, but someone, somewhere, sometime will see that as a good start.
Interesting times.
