Dude, where's my flying car?

We’ve mapped DNA, carry memory sticks with more capacity than the original supercomputer, and it’s decades since those blokes did an open-house inspection of lunar real estate.

So where’s my flying car? The one they promised when I was a kid reading all those articles about what life would be like in the future.  That forecast life bore a strong resemblance to the Jetsons — instant food machines, household robots and flying cars.

Well, we’ve got the microwaves, and the self-propelling vacuum cleaners (and ASIMO, if you’ve got a spare squillion to spend on a midget motorised space suit that can hand you a drink).  But my car’s wheels never leave the ground. Or hardly ever … but that’s another story altogether.

So where are the flying cars? And I’m not the only one who wants to know.  A recent edition of Popular Science asked the same question, and we keep hearing that some propeller-head or another has briefly got a `car’ airborne (which is not such big news to your average Saturday night hoon).

The best-known of the flying car boffins is Dr Paul Moller, who has started taking orders for his M200G Volanter — a saucer-shaped gizmo that can fl y three metres off the ground for 90 minutes.  Moller also built the M400 Skycar that travelled to Australia (sadly, as air freight rather than under its own power) a couple of years ago.

The Skycar was in the annual Neiman Marcus Christmas Catalogue For The Obscenely Over-Indulged, but Moller says the Volantor could be selling for about $100,000 depending on how many orders it gets.  However he has a long history of repeatedly extending commercial delivery dates for his projects.

And clever though they are, neither of Moller’s gadgets are true fl ying cars.  They’re VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) planes that use similar science to hovercraft.

Most of the public’s experience of flying cars has been in books or on the screen, with George Jetson’s animated runabout being part of a long line that includes the Taylor Aerocar in a James Bond film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang — also by Bond creator Ian Fleming — and the time-travelling De Lorean in Back to the Future.

Kids will cite the airborne Ford Anglia in Harry Potter, but using magic is cheating.  But outside fiction, a few flying car projects have got off the ground … so to speak … and some of them as early as the 1930s.

Waldo Waterman’s 1937 Aerobile — a sequel to his wonderfully named tail-less aircraft, the Whatsit — was the first car in the air, and could fl y at 180km/h and drive at 90km/h.  The Aerauto flew in the early 1950s, there was still an example of the 1949 Aerocar buzzing around last year, and there have been others.  Henry Ford had a crack at the market in 1926 with the Sky Flivver, but dropped the idea when the prototype itself dropped, killing the driver.

The Ford Motor Company studied the feasibility of a flying car again in the ’50s, and concluded that it was technically and economically realistic, and would be a cheaper product than the light choppers used by the emergency services and luxury charter companies.

The biggest hurdle was air traffic control, which at the time comprised a few vague lines of information about flight plans, which the pilot scribbled on a notepad in somebody’s desk drawer.  Computerised air traffic control has solved that problem, but there are still nagging doubts about the wisdom of having the sky full of people like …. well, you and me … each in control of their own airborne car.

But one benefit flying cars might bring is to halt the weekend parade of drivers endlessly lapping the cruising strips so that the footpath audience can admire their vehicle.  Because there’s no point in parading your vehicle if people can only see your undercarriage.