Guy Leitch
There is a hoary old adage – that you can fool most of the people most of the time. And that’s enough to raise lots of money for screwball ideas. The Pegasus, a VTOL business jet that is nothing more than a computer graphic comes to mind.
Another classic is the idea of a flying car – or a roadable plane.
People have been hoping for a practical flying car for 100 years. So it’s an easy way to raise money on the bullshit baffles brains principle.
The latest flying car to do this is Alef Aeronautics, a startup backed by Tim Draper, a key SpaceX investor to give it credibility, even if he has only invested a paltry U$ 3 million. Amazingly, Alef claims to have almost 3,000 pre-orders for its $300,000 electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOL)
Alef Aeronautics CEO Jim Dukhovny boasts that since he began taking orders in October 2022, his Model A is “the best-selling aircraft in history, more than Boeing, Airbus, Joby Aviation, and most of the eVTOLs combined.”
Alef began flying car work in 2015 and first flew a prototype in 2019. In October 2022 it unveiled its full-sized sports car model, along with two working full-size technology demonstrator vehicles. Subscale prototypes (i.e. models) were successfully flown by the company in 2016 and a full-size prototype was first flown in 2019.
It’s two-seater Model A has an unimpressive maximum speed of 40 km/h on land, — but flies at a claimed 170 km/h. (I would like to quote speeds in KTAS but will stick to km/h for the flying cars.) The range in the air is a terrible 117 km and the ground range is 322 km, but that’s a long slow drive.
In July 2023 the FAA gave it a Limited Special Airworthiness Certificate, and Alef says it hopes to have the Model A on the road and in the skies by “next year” – i.e. 2025.
The final Model A production vehicle is planned to be piloted at first and then have autonomous piloting ‘when it becomes available’. Alef sees their eVTOL as a ‘hop vehicle’ so the passengers use it to drive when traffic is flowing freely. And then, when they hit a traffic jam, it just transforms into a flying thing – and flies over the stuck earthlings.
What makes this latest car/plane interesting is that it doesn’t look like it has wings, either fixed or rotating, and this makes it easier to drive. Its wingless car size allows it to park in a standard parking space or domestic garage.
To fly it turns into a kind of a biplane. The Model A has eight electric motors and propellers. The top (dorsal) of the aircraft has a mesh grill for keeping people and stuff from being sucked into the props. The bottom is open.
In flight, the vehicle’s big trick is to rotate the car body perpendicularly to the cockpit, which is gimballed to keep the passengers stable during flight. This means that one side of the car’s body becomes the top wing and the other side becomes the bottom wing. In forward flight it transforms into a box-wing biplane.
For non-pilots flying in VFR airspace the plane/car has “detect and avoid technology”. Safety is naturally important, so it has redundancy in all key components. It also has a whole aircraft emergency parachute.
Naturally, Alef says it is also open to hybrid-electric power using hydrogen to create the electricity for the propellers and road wheels which would extend the flight and surface range of the vehicle.
Alef’s Model A may be a clever 21st century transformer, but it’s still just the latest in a long, long line of failed attempts to make flying cars.
Perhaps the most successful was Molt Taylors series of Aerocars. Taylor was a former US Navy pilot and missile engineer. He began building his flying car in the 1940s and it is a tall sided vehicle whose wings and engine bolt on to the back of the car.
As can be seen from the many pictures of it flying, it was reasonably successful, both as a plane and car. As a plane one was flown by a Portland radio station for traffic reporting. and as a car one was purchased by a Chicago hamburger chain owner, whose sons drove it to school every day.
The very first Aerocar is in the EAA Museum in Oshkosh. Taylor made it work by having all the plane parts fold up into a structure that could be towed behind the car, or left behind entirely if you did not feel like flying that day.
Another flying car which achieved notoriety, in the absence of success, was the AVE Mizar, a Cessna 337/Ford Pinto mating by Henry Smolinski in 1974. It fatally crashed when a wing strut broke off its car attachment point – but it formed the basis for the Jame Bond movie, The Man with the Golden Gun. In the movie the villain Scaramanga’s AMC Matador does a similar mating trick with a wing and engine assembly that looks something like a Cessna 337 with a jet engine.
Peter Garrison bought the unneeded front engine from Smolinski’s 337 and is still using it fifty years later. He says; “Smolinski must have hoped that a few successful flights would whip up additional investment so he could work out a happy marriage between two machines that were, in engineering terms, natural enemies.”
This last sentence is key as it contains the two conflicting concepts: On the one hand they are a fundamentally unhappy marriage between cars and planes. On the other hand, they are great at creating excitement that can be turned into money for the latest design.
Modifying my opening statement: if the latest flying car is novel/cool enough, you can use it to fool enough of the people enough of the time to part them from a small fortune.
The bottom line is that planes and cars are two different animals that cannot be combined. The best result that can be hoped for is a bad plane and a bad car. That’s particularly true of current fad for eVTOL Urban Mobility Aircraft. Joby’s eVTOL has much shorter range than a light plane, but still features a 38-foot wingspan – not exactly something you can park at the local Pick n Pay.
What has also brought flying cars to the forefront is the new rage for Urban mobility. This has led to a flood of yet more money, with the net result that billions of dollars have been invested over the past decade. If the breathless pressers are to be believed, eVTOL and flying cars will soon be everywhere. Gullible investors, who probably think those sceptical pilots are dull dolts, say that the only limitation thus far has been technological, and those problems are quickly being solved.
But the eVTOL financial failures happen just as inevitably as the flying cars did 50 years earlier. Some of the more prominent ones are Kitty Hawk, which was backed by Google’s Larry Page, (they claim to be redirecting efforts to another project). Another is Uber Elevate, which was supposed to launch in 2020 but instead was sold off as a part of Uber’s ‘right sizing’.
There are some survivors, and three in particular seem to get most of the press these days. EHang, a Chinese drone manufacturer, is flying a prototype and even planning to build a vertiport in Italy. Germany’s Lilium promises a new era of “all-electric regional air mobility” with its sleek VTOL Jet that features 36 ducted fans. It is aiming to fly four passengers at 160 knots for up to an hour.
But the leader of the pack, at least in terms of press coverage, is Joby. This California company has raised almost $1 billion and is going public. Uber is also an investor, as part of their deal to sell their Elevate programme to Joby.
A key reality which most of the dreamers who pump money into these things seem to forget is that planes are harder to use than cars. And too many people do a really bad job of driving. If just 10% of American drivers flew flying cars, we’d have twenty million flying cars. Twenty million flying cars flying 100 hours each annually is a total of 2 billion flight hours. If the world’s safest helicopter today is lost at a rate of 2 per million flight hours, can our industry tolerate 4000 videos of moms not making it home? In the age of YouTube, UAM or flying car failures of this magnitude will not be tolerable.
Here’s another think; in the USA less than 0.3% of drivers have a pilot’s license. So here’s the question: just as I have said in the past that general aviation is a solution looking for a problem, maybe flying cars also don’t solve a problem for most people?