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A new, high-tech flying car: Will anybody buy it?

 

While I was at Sun 'n Fun I stopped by the impressive exhibit of Terrafugia, the start up company that's in the process of buliding a flying car or, as they prefer to call it, a "roadable aircraft." If they want to emphasize the aircraft nature of the machine, I'd prefer "drivable airplane." Nobody says "roadable."

Whatever you want to call it, the air/road vehicle made its first flight just the other week out of Plattsburg, New York, and it was a success, in the sense that it flew and the company attracted an enormous amount of publicity, including from the mainstream media. 

Now, as you might know, there were actually a number of flying cars that were buit and, in at least one instance, certified back in the dark ages, that is, before I was born. There were only a handful built, and a couple are still flying. They were built out of sheet metal and used conventional aircraft engines and folding or removeable wings. The best known is Molt Taylor's Aerocar, which came from the year 1949, exactly 60 years ago.

Unlike the Aerocar, the Transition, on the other hand, is made largely out of composites, and the engine is an aircraft engine, a Rotax 912 piston engine. The pilot/driver can choose to drive the prop in back, spun by drive shaft (not my favorite thing in an airplane; has there ever been a successful civilian fixed-wing airplane design with a drive shaft?) And the wings on the Transition, from which it gets its name, are electrically foldable. Carl Dietrich, an MIT grad who founded the company, demonstrated the folding mechanism for me in Lakeland. It works great, takes only a matter of sedonds and seems to put the wings in a position where they're largely out of harm's way for when you're ready to go "roading." There's both a steering wheel and a stick, and the prop is disconnected from power when it's time to hit the road.

I asked Terrafugia's director of business development Dick Gersh to tell me, "why now?" And he rattled off a list of advantages to a carplane--I might like that one best of all--that mostly sounded as though they were right out of a story from the 40s. You can, he told me, drive it from the airport (no need for a rental car), drive it home (no need for a hangar), and drive it home if the weather is bad. The Transition does have a road range of around 600 miles, Gersh told me, so it is a real car, and it can easily drive at highway speeds.

As an LSA, it can be realistically "certified" too. I don't think the FAA would sign off on such a vehicle these days. So will Terrafugia get the Transition to market? I'd bet they will. And is it a very cool idea and a lot of fun? You bet.

Will it be a sales success and create a new niche for GA?

I highly doubt it. The problem with the Transition is that, as a carplane, it won't be optimally designed  to do its best as either a car or a plane. And at an estimated sales price of just under $200,000, it's not cheap either. At that price you could buy a conventional LSA or a really nice used airplane and rent cars and hangars until the cows came home. And while the design is ingenious, and a testimony to the cleverness of the team that created it, it fails to overcome the basic objections to the concept, the main one being, is there a need for this product?

I just don't think that there is. I kind of hope I'm wrong, because, as I said, it's a fun product and it has generated a lot of good press for aviation at a time when we sorely need it.

By Robert Goyer

Sightings of the Bottom: Hopeful Signs or Wishful Thinking?

This has been the most interesting Sun 'n Fun ever, but not in a good way. It is, in fact, very much like that ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." These are interesting times indeed.

Piper CEO Jim Bass said it nicely at the company's launch of the Meridian G1000 at the show. Just last week I'd flown the airplane for a dozen hours and was suitably impressed. Look for that story in the July issue of Flying. So a new product at a down market time--there are worse places to be, said Marketing VP Bob Kromer, And it's true.

But that wasn't what Bass really wanted to talk about. He wanted to talk about his worries for the industry. It was, he said, the scariest times he's seen in a 30 year career in manufacturing. It was, he said, a "gut wrenching experience" to have to lay off friends, and work mates and long time employees, people who'd dedicated much of their careers to making Piper a successful enterprise.

And he worried that the pain might not end soon, that the culture of politicized finger pointing at business people using business airplanes for business uses as being some kind of excess was hypocritical and cynical. Those same politicians, he correctly pointed out, fly those same kinds of airplanes on those same kinds of missions and feel their use is completely justified. The situation, he said, needs to change, and he called on writers like me to get the word out. Well, as you know, I have been. We all have been. But when colleague Bill Garvey, editor in chief of Business and Commercial Aviation wrote an excellent op ed piece for the New York Times (The Mile-High Office), it got buried in back and got very little play. Yet when President Obama questions the use of jets by executives, it's front page news. How can you fight a battle that's being portrayed as only having one side when you're on the invisible side? I hope we find an answer to that question.

NBAA has tried with its No Plane No Gain campaign, but its success has been limited. AOPA, EAA, and GAMA, among many others, are all working at the grass roots and Grass Tops levels to institute a change in attitude. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake, many of those very likely gone, if not for good, then for many years. Which is as good as forever for many of those displaced workers.

And the news on orders that will be out shortly will only seem worse, as it's likely we'll see a 60-70 percent drop in orders for the first quarter of '09 compared to the same period in '08. And orders are still being cancelled. The big hope for the next few quarters is not a complete recovery but a slowdown in the decline.

Some piston companies have been putting a more positive spin on things. Cirrus CEO Brent Wouters said, essentially, that things could be worse, but he, along with Marketing VP Todd Simmons, were clearly worried about the drop in orders following the economic collapse late last year. It effectively canceled its LSA program, though it insisted that the program is not dead, just dormant and likely to emerge at some time in some similar form.

But the goods news is, these companies were at the show. They have been proactive in developing strategies, many of them painful, as Bass pointed out, to keep the doors open while the economy recovers.

And while nibbles and renewed interest in the amazing products continue to keep hope alive, a recovery surely doesn't look to be right around the corner.

The depressed value of used airplanes of every description makes it hard for manufacturers of new airplanes to compete. But even those low-priced, low-time airplanes aren't moving. At least not much.

The downturn probably has created some oopportunities for aftermarket companies, like Aspen with its small, affordable PFD, and those that offer a "right sized alternative," like Embraer with its beautiful lineup of jets, which, it claims, give operators the experience of flying in a bigger airplane than they're actually in, making the use of the jet more defensible in the board room.

These are all signs that bargain hunting and may have begun. We'll know for sure when the sales of used airplanes starts to climb, along with their asking prices.

And even thinking along those lines, and I'm not the only one doing it, is good news. The market has probably hit bottom.

That's good, as there's no way to go but up. The big question now is, how long before we get to begin our climb back out of of this mucky mess?—By Robert Goyer

Incapacitated pilot. An amazing rescue. Who gets the credit?

The story from Southwest Florida was harrowing and tragic. Many of you have read the story, but I'll recap briefly.

When Joe Cabuk, the single-pilot of a King Air departing Marco Island, Florida, lost consciousness shortly after takeoff, a private pilot rated passenger, Doug White, was in the right seat. While White had relatively little experience period, and none in multi-engine airplanes or turboprops, he was able to save himself and his family (his wife and two teenage daughters), landing the airplane after a harrowing hour in the air, at Fort Myers. 

Tragically, as you read, rescuers on the ground were unable to revive Cabuk, who died there.

But lives were saved, and that is surely something to celebrate. 

The controllers handling the flight were heroic in their calm and purposeful demeanor. Without their work, the odds of White landing the King Air Safely were very long indeed.

But when it comes to people to thank for the bad day that could have been a great deal worse, White should think back to his primary instructor, who clearly helped him develop the the kind of fundamental skills that allowed him to step up from a Skyhawk to a King Air, a mighty leap by any standard, and get it right the first time. It was, after all, the only shot he had.

The incident made me think of my primary instructors, Sam Hall and Sy Campbell, two great guys who, despite vastly different levels of experience, both knew that what they were teaching me every lesson out would be the foundation upon which my flying career would be built. They stressed the verymost basic elements of flying, because they knew that those were the skills on which all of my future flying would depend.

Years ago, shortly after  I came to Flying, I tried my hand at landing an airplane in the incapacitated pilot scenaro, but in a Boeing 777 sim at United's Denver Training Center. My instructor put me in the left seat and let me figure things out, finding the proper way to use radios that in no way resembled the KX155s in the airplane I flew in real life. I also had to find my own help. Once I'd contacted the controllers, he played the part of Triple-Seven coach, talking me through the procedures and numbers. I did great, landing the airplane at Dulles in a howling crosswind without scratching the paint. I was pretty proud.

Even then I recognized that while my little exercise was instructive--a single engine private pilot really could be talked through landing a big passenger jet--in reality, we knew it was fun and games. Doug White's experience had nothing to do with fun or games. It was life and death.

Despite that ultimate pressure, White was able to save the day. And something tells me that such composure and presence of mind when the chips are down is something for which he can personally take the credit.

Robert Goyer