Picture it. You're on the way to an important meeting, but a tractor trailer has crashed, spilling smoked salmon, oil, and debris all over the highway. Traffic screeches to a halt. Emergency crews deploy. As much as you'd love to sit there experiencing this smelly mess, you'd rather get on with your life.
Minutes later, you deploy the folding propeller mechanism stowed in your car's roof, and you're floating above it all.
Sure, this is a great fantasy. It's not exactly the scenario PAL-V, the Netherlands-based flying car developer, has in mind for its PAL-V One. An airstrip of at least 200 meters is required for safety – but hovering above urban traffic could soon be a reality.
PAL-V claims it is on target to deliver a two-passenger vehicle to clients in 2018. So far, there are 90 orders worldwide for the flying car, a three-wheeled hybrid automobile and gyroplane.
The PAL-V One has a maximum weight of 660 kg, or 1,455 pounds; a 110 mile per hour airspeed; and can reach 60 miles per hour in less than 10 seconds on the ground. The flying range is 250 miles. It can land in 180 meters and landing roll is 10 meters, almost a vertical stop. Fuel economy in the air is 28 liters per hour, and it should get 28 miles per gallon on land, according to PAL-V chief executive officer and co-founder Robert Dingemanse, who spoke with Product Design and Development about his company's gyroplane/car combo.
Dingemanse's company has been working on a viable flying car design since 1999, but it wasn't until Holland's Delft University of Technology engineers developed a tilting vehicle suspension system in 2005 that a feasible design took form.
"This was one of the early challenges, finding a stable suspension system," Dingemanse said in an interview.
When this system was developed, the company moved to concept in 2008, obtaining patents and investor backing. The company ordered parts for the first trial tests in 2011.
Propeller is Self-Contained
The PAL-V One has a self-contained propeller that is foldable and stowed in the roof. It rests on a hinge so the operator can unfold it and unfurl the props automatically.
The design itself is intended to avoid pilot-induced oscillation by providing an accurate center of gravity on the thrust, balancing fuel placement and passenger weight.
The power system is a 220 horsepower double-redundant drive train that provides 50 percent power in the event of a 50 percent power loss for emergency landing situations.
"You can land on the proverbial postage stamp," Dingemanse said.
Mark Jennings-Bates, PAL-V's vice president of North American sales, pointed out that the vehicle can be used door-to-door, and it is even easy to park in an urban environment or parking garage, due to its relatively small frame and its foldable propeller system.
VR Showroom Prevents Espionage
PAL-V has already received about 90 orders from clients around the world, Jennings-Bates said. These clients can take a look at their vehicle in a virtual reality showroom that allows them to walk around the PAL-V One and experience it before committing to an order.
This showroom allows for a certain amount of privacy in a world in which industrial espionage is not beyond the realm of possibility.
The concern is real. The competition to launch a flying car is stiff.
Slovakia's AeroMobil released a prototype back in 2014. The company's website indicates advanced orders may be accepted later this year with the aim to release a model in the next two or three years.
Terrafugia, the Woburn, Mass.-based brainchild of five MIT grads, received the green light in June from the Federal Aviation Administration to certify its Transition street-legal airplane as a Light Sport Aircraft with a maximum takeoff weight of 1,800 pounds.
Airbus has taken the flying car dream a step further to flying taxis. If this is all starting to sound like something out of the Jetsons, that wonder-world of tomorrow might be closer than you think. Airbus hopes to take a prototype out for a test flight in 2017.
Can we really be two or three years away from gliding over rush-hour traffic? Who will be flying these contraptions while the rest of us honk and fume, trapped behind yet another belching city bus?
Time will tell. The future might not be right now, but it may only be a few years away.
Source: Soaring Above Traffic: Flying Car Dreams May Soon Be a Reality
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