If producing a flying car in series seems utopian, perhaps you don’t know the Aerocar, a model that years ago was the real flying car dreamed of by Henry Ford: it really worked, here’s how.
History pioneer Henry Ford once said this: “It may sound absurd, but one day, the worlds of cars and airplanes will unite and cars will fly”. Perhaps the entrepreneur who invented the Ford T was blatantly wrong it was early on the times of too many years? Not even by chance. Here is the story of the first true flying car built in series and sold on the civilian market.
Dream big
If the history of recent human technology has taught us anything, it’s that to our own species would love to being able to do something that animals such as birds, insects and some mammals do regularly and without even thinking about it. Fly. Flight is perhaps the only thing missing for human beings to complete their evolution that began hundreds of thousands of years ago.
In a certain sense, we really managed to fly: today we have airplanes, helicopters and anything else even if one thing still remains utopian or the possibility of doing it regularly and at will. Simply put, man lacks flying cars. Yes, the only means that would allow the common man to take off whenever he wants, perhaps even avoiding traffic. You know something like this already exists right?
The flying car
In fact, the flying car envisioned by Henry Ford in 1940 it came in earnest few years after this prediction: in 1949, just about ten years after the pioneer of mass production had uttered these words, an American inventor managed to get the very first flying car to lift off the ground for the first time, working and sure that it was never seen on the planet.
The name of this car was Aerocar and its inventor Moulton Taylor he went down in history as the first man to create a flying car, although few remember him today. Being an aeronautical engineer by profession, Taylor stumbled upon the idea of creating a car capable of moving both on land and in the sky until he succeeded and produced several specimens of the vehicle which unfortunately did not have the desired success.
Broken wings
The small Aerocar built by Taylor and his team which included several aeronautical experts was tested for a long time until it completed its first flight safely and precisely: sure, the vehicle was expensive and it was not a great car or an excellent airplane, but he could serve both roles without problems provided the pilot was obviously able to land and take off the vehicle correctly.
The Aerocar carried the wings and the aeronautical propeller in a trailer disassembled and, if necessary, the pilot could quickly assemble everything by connecting the car’s transmission and mechanical parts with the Lycoming O-320 aeronautical engine, a small propeller widely used on superlight aircraft of the time. in flight, the vehicle exceeded 170 kilometers per hour while on the ground, it went under one hundred.
The dizzying cost of the Aerocar both on the market and to produce the specimens and the fact that Taylor and his team never managed to reach the 500 orders necessary to obtain financing from investors condemned the project to failure after just six specimens – to be noted by all working – built in everything. To date, an original Aerocar may be worth over 2 million Euros notwithstanding its fiasco on the market. But in the future, we are sure, things will change and cars will really fly!
