Why Airborne Cars Won’t Fly

1 ANSWERS

1. revathi
   

   “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads,” Doc Brown tells Marty McFly as they load into the time-traveling DeLorean in the final minutes of Back to the Future. Sure enough, when they arrive in 2015, the skies of Hill Valley are teeming with cars.
   
   From The Jetsons to Blade Runner, flying cars are a sort of film and television shorthand signifying that what you are seeing takes place in the future. It is assumed that our civilization will, in due course, cut the tethers that tie personal locomotion to an earthbound grid. In cars one can only move in two dimensions. In flying cars one can freely move in three. What course of progress could be more obvious?
   
   Like Marty McFly, we’re all going to 2015—we’re almost there, in fact—and we still need roads. We don’t have flying cars yet. Why?
   
   It’s not for lack of effort.
   
   In the early years of the 20th century, the Wright brothers demonstrated the potential of heavier-than-air flying machines and Henry Ford proved that assembly-line production could make vehicles for the masses—and revolutionized personal mobility—with the Model T. To someone living in the 1910s or 1920s, the idea that a flying machine would eventually supplant the car must have seemed obvious. And though engineers and entrepreneurs embraced the challenge—usually with a determination that carried them through decades of mostly fruitless work—the monstrosities of transportation that they created fell surprisingly short of their promise.
   
   The 1917 Autoplane, designed by the aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss, is usually cited as the world’s first flying car. It had three wings, a boxy, car-like cabin, and four large wheels. The motor drove a propeller that was located, unlike on most planes, in the rear.
   
   In functional terms, the Autoplane was much more “auto” than “plane.” It could do 45 miles per hour on the road (with wings removed) but it never flew. Some describe it as having “hopped” pretty successfully.
   
   But the idea of the flying car was taking off on its own. In 1926, Popular Science ran an article titled “Latest Planes Herald New Era of Safety: With Inventors’ Producing Foolproof, Nonsmashable Aircraft, Experts Say We’ll All Fly Our Own Machines Soon.”
   
   That same year, Henry Ford himself unveiled a flying machine, the Sky Flivver. The Sky Flivver was, in essence, a tiny plane (its fuselage was only 15 feet long) that could, with the addition of one wheel, be driven on roads. Ford hoped it would be his second revolutionary design of the century. It flew, but when a pilot died in a test flight, the project was abandoned. The vision persisted. “Mark my word,” Ford said in 1940, “a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile. But it will come.”

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