Will it flock to the skies in droves? Automologist MAC shares his thoughts.
It would seem that after a short hiatus, flying cars are back in the news. AirCar, which is capable of flying at speeds of over 160kph above 2500 metres, which makes it a real plane, has been issued with a certificate of airworthiness by the Slovak Transport Authority.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it ugly?!
The car-aircraft is powered by a BMW engine and runs on normal petrol, the likes of which we put into our own cars, and takes but two minutes to transform from a car into a plane and then back into a car. Frankly, as a plane or a car, it is not what you would call pretty. But the new certificates does actually mean that sometime real soon, you may actually see one in your neighbourhood and be able to make up your own mind about its looks.
To get certified, the AirCar had to undergo more than 200 take-offs and landings and flew for a thirty-minute duration trip between Bratislava and Nitra, both in Slovakia. The company has announced that the next flight apparently will be between London and Paris. The inventor and creator, Professor Stefan Klein, enthused that this marked a milestone along the road to changing “mid-distance travel forever” but I guess that will all depend on the final price of the beastie.
Due to FAA rules, the vehicle is classified as a plane and thus there will be a need to have a pilot’s license to be able to pilot your personal version of the AirCar and, of course, this will probably become a bit of a barrier to mass ownership.
There is a number of companies developing road vehicles that can fly. The truth is, though, they all look very ungainly on the road and do not appear to fly much better either. The three-wheeled PAL-V Liberty, which is essentially a gyrocopter in flight, is already road legal in Europe but has a way to go before the European Union Aviation Safety Agency will certify it.
Will this be the start of the move to the days when we all have personal flying vehicles? Nah, I don’t think so. Almost by definition they are very niche and the market will be minuscule, but of course to some of us, this will always be an interesting niche. Much more likely will be air-taxis that do not need a runway like the AirCar does, and thus vertical take-off and landing technology will probably dominate the future.
I see a time when getting from an airport or from the centre of town to a train station will be done using a small autonomous VTOL craft, booked much in the same way that you would order an Uber or Grab. Boeing would seem to agree with me – they have just invested USD500 million into WISK, a California based air-taxi company that is trying to use autonomous ‘drones’ for this purpose.
