HAVE YOU SEEN FLYING CARS?? WHAT ARE THEY?!!
Sitting amidst a sea of cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic on an endless expressway, have you ever daydreamed about your car taking off and flying over the road? Imagine if you could just flip a switch and unshackle yourself from the asphalt!
Traffic jams are the bane of any commuter. Many of us spend an hour or so stuck in traffic every week. The growing population is partly to blame for our congested roads, but the main problem is that we are not expanding our transportation systems fast enough to meet ever increasing demands.
One solution is to create a new type of transportation that doesn't rely on roads, which could one day make traffic jams a 20th century relic. To do this, we must look to the sky.
In the last century, airplanes and mass-produced cars have changed the way we live. Cars, which became affordable for the general population, have allowed us to move farther away from cities, and planes have cut travel time to faraway destinations considerably.
At the beginning of a new century, we may see the realization of a century-old dream -- the merging of cars and planes into roadable aircraft, or flying cars. You've probably heard promises about flying cars before, and the technology to make them safe and easy to fly may finally be here.
In this article, we will take a look back at some of the attempts to build a flying car, and examine some of the flying vehicles that you may be able to park in your garage in the next decade!. WWW.HOWSTUFFW
A flying car is envisioned to be an aircraft that can provide practical, personal transportation to destinations that are not near airports. Ideally, its operation would be simplified, such that the required skill does not greatly exceed that of driving an automobile.
A roadable aircraft is an aircraft that can also travel on roads.
In science-fiction scenarios, VTOL flying cars can land on any horizontal surface and are not necessarily roadable.[1] A real-world flying car would have to be roadable to some degree.
Assuming that large numbers of conveniently-located landing pads are constructed, a VTOL flying car would only need to be minimally roadable (in order to drive from a landing pad to a nearby parking space or garage).
Glenn Curtiss, the chief rival of the Wright brothers, was the first to design a flying car. His large, three-wing Curtiss Autoplane was able to hop, not fly.[2]
In 1926, Henry Ford displayed an experimental single-seat aeroplane that he called the "sky flivver". The project was abandoned two years later when a distance-record attempt flight crashed, killing the pilot.[3] The Flivver was not a flying car at all, but it did get press attention at the time, exciting the public that they would have a mass-produced affordable airplane product that would be made, marketed, sold, and maintained just like an automobile. The airplane was to be as commonplace in the future as the Model T of the time.
The first flying car to actually fly was built by Waldo Waterman. Waterman was associated with Curtiss while Curtiss was pioneering naval aviator on North Island on San Diego Bay in the 1910s. On March 21, 1937, Waterman's Arrowbile first took to the air.[4] The Arrowbile was a development of Waterman's tailless aircraft, the Whatsit.[5] It had a wingspan of 38 feet (11 m) and a length of 20 feet 6 inches (6.25 m). On the ground and in the air it was powered by a Studebaker engine. It could fly at 112 mph (180 km/h) and drive at 56 mph (90 km/h).
ADAPTED FROM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car_(aircraft)
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