Zero Gravity

Terrafugia is working on a flying car, the TF-X.  The carbon-fiber vehicle takes off vertically using an electric-powered rotor blade mounted on each side. Then, once it is in the air, the rotor blades rotate forward and fold in and a rear-mounted gas engine takes over.  It can land with its fully-automated navigation system, and has a backup full-vehicle parachute system in case of emergency.  Looks like a promising development, even though it’ll be a few years before one is ready for consumers.

Watch this intro video to the TF-X flying car from Terrafugia.

The Moller M400 Skycar has always been my favourite skycar, ever since 1st year Mechanical engineering. It’s promising design and unique Rotapower engines looked like Mollar would finally reach his goal. Since then, there hasn’t been much progress published, although I’m still holding out that there will be a new, lighter weight (carbon fiber?) skycar with some of those awesome lightweight battery systems on board. In any case, it is great to learn about Paul Mollar’s moving story of his quest to give the world a skycar.

open.NASA is a great site.  There is a published Data API and code.NASA has been recently made open source.

Very cool!  It would be great if some new insights come about by this public collaborative approach from NASA.

Complaints of the non-existence of flying cars have become nearly idiomatic as expressions of disappointment in the failure of the present to measure up to the optimism of past predictions.

Calvin puts it well.. it’s a new decade, where are the flying cars?