Are we at a crucial turn in Man’s journey ?? I would think so! A four-wheeler, however fancy, is passé” The young generation want to spread their wings out and fly off in their own private coupe. The world transportation today is upward bound.. The rate of technology advancing in the recent years has been tremendous. Today the quest just got a little closer. |
PAL V | . . . The latest news is that PAL –V, has cleared the FAA certification permissions !! It is promising us flying cars by 2014. Wow..that’s just 2 years from now !! I predict that in the next twenty years, personal flying transportation is going to be the standard rather than the speciality that it is now |
Have a look at some of the other serious players in the business of giving us those wings !!
Bi PodThe “BiPod”, a hybrid gasoline-electric flying car. The BiPod features a twin fuselage configuration with a 4-wheeled chassis with two cockpits - the left-hand cockpit used for ground driving and the right-hand cockpit used for flight. There is also a protected storage area for stowing the wings and tail surfaces during ground operations. This unique configuration is enabled through the use of electric power transmission. | designed by Burt Rutan |
Parajet Skycar | . . Parajet has taken a distinctly different approach to the flying car problem, eschewing high speed flight for something much cheaper and arguably safer. The Parajet Skycar is effectively a powered paraglider in the air and a monster dune buggy on the ground. Powered by a ripping 140-horsepower Yamaha R1 engine, it's a hooligan tool on the road or the sand dunes, but when you switch the power over to the large rear fan and deploy the enormous parachute wing, the Parajet can take off within about 500 ft and reach heights of up to 3,000ft. The Parajet Skycar was successfully tested in January 2009 with a 42-day, 9,000km expedition from London down to Mali's Timbuktu and back again. |
Other serious contendersSwitchblade & Skybike Sky bike is flying a 3-wheeled enclosed motorcycle which uses a patent pending telescoping wing design, and the Switchblade, which uses a scissor wing design to retract the wings when you swap the airway for the freeway. The Super Sky Cycle is about as bare-bones as it comes. It rides the highway as a trike, and takes to the sky as a simple gyroplane. It's already road-registered and on sale in the USA for less than 40 grand if you buy it as a kit. It fits happily into the average garage, being around the size and height of a panel van, and it takes just a couple of minutes to whip out the wings, switch the drivetrain over to flight mode, and get yourself in the air. Yeeee-haaaa! | |