AEROCAR

Inching our way through traffic choked streets and freeways, who among us hasn’t dreamed of getting above it all. If we are of a certain age our thoughts might drift back to that 1960s Saturday morning cartoon classic, The Jetsons, where George Jetson and the gang zipped about their 22nd Century city in the clouds in fanciful flying cars. As it turns out, the futuristic George Jetson was way behind the times. Centuries earlier, drivers could take to the sky in an AEROCAR.

A Brief History of Flying Cars

The dream of a flying car is as nearly as old as the automobile and the airplane. The first known attempt to build one came barely a dozen years after the Wright Brothers made history at Kitty Hawk. The Curtiss Autoplane of 1917 was built to generate interest for a government defense contract. And although there is no record of the Autoplane ever actually flying, according to reports, it could hop along the ground pretty well. 

It would be almost 20 years before a flying car was documentted as actually flying anywhere. That was be when Waldo Waterman of San Diego CA, began work on a contraption called the Arrowbile. It was on his third try in 1937, that Waterman’s drivable airplane took to the air. The Arrowbile was powered by a Studebaker 6-cylinder engine, modified for high compression aircraft use. Brimming with possibilities, Waterman convinced Studebaker to offer the Arrowbile through its dealer network (Ah, the days before product liability litigation) Three more prototypes were built that year. According to period accounts, the Arrowbile performed quite adequately in test flights. There is no account of its roadability but we can guess. In fact, the only crash an Arrowbile was ever involved in was of the economic variety. The economy had been on an upswing since The U.S. economy hit bottom in 1933. But in late ‘37, the New Deal-fueled surge ran out of gas. Coming on the heels of the Great Depression, this reversal was frightening. Funding for flights of fancy like the Waterman Arowbile dried up.

In the end, this may not have been a bad thing for Waldo Waterman. As it turns out, each of his flying cars, the ones Studebaker had agreed to sell for $3,000 apiece, cost him $7,000 to build!

The next serious attempt to get a car in the air, or a plane on the road, was the 1946 ConvAircar. Conceived by Ted Hall, and built by Convair Corp of San Diego, CA, the ConvAircar was designed as two separate modules, one for the road and the other for the sky. The road-going unit was a small car powered by a lightweight Crosley copper braised 4-cyl engine. The airborne portion had a 40 ft. wingspan and a Lycoming 190hp aircraft mill. The seperate airframe could be stored at the airfield and attached to the car in about 30 minutes. Conviar Corporation reportedly invested $800,000 in the project, before a minor crash gave them the excuse to pull the plug.

IMuch later there was was a later effort based on the CovAircar’s concept of plane and car as seperatable units. The AVE (Advanced Vehicle Engineers) Mizar made its first appearence in late 1971. The Mizar, named after one of the twin stars in the Big Dipper, was the brainchild of a couple aviators named Henry Smolinski and Hal Blake. The Mizar consisted of the wing and tail section of a Cessna 337 Skymaster, powered by a single 210 hp Continental IO-360-C engine, attthced to a ‘71 Ford Pinto, which at the time was America’s lightest car. Over 40 modifications were made to the Pinto to make it compatible for flying duty.

As it turned out, it could have used a few more.

On September 11, 1973, Smolinski and Blake took off on a promotional flight from Ventura County airport north of Los Angeles. They were airborne for a little more than 2 minutes before several welds failed. This caused the Cessna above and Pinto below to go their separate ways. As a result, the two entrepreneurs were left 1200 feet in the air in a wingless 2000lb Pinto. They perished in the fiery crash that ensued.

The irony can’t be overlooked that at the time of the crash the NHTSA was investigating land bound Pintos for their incendiary tendencies. Their findings would would probably not have saved the Mizar’s makers, nor AVE. Only two Mizars were ever built. The fate of the second one is not known.

The AEROCAR

Between ConvAircar and Mizar came the AEROCAR. Designed by Moulton Taylor, an aeronautical engineer from Longview, WA, the AEROCAR first flew in 1949. While other efforts to combine a car with an airplane would produce uneasy compromises like the ConvAircar and Mizar, the AEROCAR was designed from the start as a single unit.

And it worked! The AEROCAR was the first, and thus far the only vehicle ever to preform adequately both on the road and in the sky. 

The car portion of the AEROCAR is a bit smaller a 1950s Volkswagen Beetle. It has an aluminum space frame and fiberglass composite body. The wings and tail section are also made of aluminum which with some practice can be affixed or detatched in under 30 minutes. When not needed for flight, they are folded together to form a lightweight trailer that could be pulled home and stored in a standard sized garage. 

One of the significant problems with both the CovAircar and the Mizar had been that they used separate engines for driving and for flight. If weight is the enemy of flight, then carrying around two different engines could be considered an act of war. What made Taylor’s design far superior to those other efforts was that it has a single engine for both modes of operation. The first AEROCARs used a 320 cu in Lycoming H4 engine mounted in the rear. When in “Car mode,” the engine’s 150hp is directed forward to the front wheels through a 3-speed manual transmission. When switched to “Aircraft mode,” power is sent aft to rotate a giant Hartzell 2-blade propeller. 

As an airplane, the AEROCAR has a maximum range of 300 miles, with a serviceable ceiling of 12,000 feet. Cruising speed is listed as 97mph, with a top speed of 117mph. As a car, it could do 60mph while towing its wings and airframe.

The AEROCAR does require a bit of podiatric dexterity. There are not 2, nor 3, but 4 peddles. Flanking the normal brake and clutch are two more that operate the rudders. It could have been worse. On land or in the air, throttle speed is controlled via a dash mounted knob. 

Also different from other attempts at a flying car is that we speak of the AEROCAR’s performance in the present tense. That is because all five AEROCARs Molt Taylor built are still present and accounted for. 

The first (Vehicle I.D.# N499P) appeared in 1949. It is not clear for how long, how far or how high it flew, but it was enough to generate financial interest. Taylor was able to raise a total of $750,000 for further development from 300 investors. AEROCAR #1 currently resides at the EAA Air Venture Museum in Oshkosh, WI. 

Another AEROCAR (#N101D) was built in 1954. It became the first American automobile ever to receive full FAA certification. It has been maintained for flight, though hasn’t been airborne recently. This one sold for $275,000 just last weekend (1/21/20) at the Barrett-Jackson auctions in Scottsdale, AZ.  Several of the pictures in this piece are of that car.

AEROCAR #N102D was built in 1956, and it really got around. Legend has it that Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul, once flew in it. It is not clear, however, how or why the brother of a dedicated communist dictator was flying around in a product of capitalist America’s crass entrepreneurial exuberance. Nevertheless, it was repatriated (presumably before Bay of Pigs), and eventually made its way to Oregon. There it served traffic reporting duty for KISN in Portland during the early 1960s. The AEROCAR proved itself more than worthy as an aircraft in 1962 when pilot Ruth Wikander, an active member of the international order of woman pilots founded by Amilia Earhart called The Ninety-Nines, managed to land it safely in 100mph winds during the great Columbus Day storm. At last report it resides in a storage facility in Colorado.

The last AEROCAR (#N103D) came in 1960. This one ended up having a decent little career in television. It had a co-starring role in The New Bob Cummings Show, among other Hollywood cameos. It is retired from show business now, but at last check was still doing a bit of flying. When on the ground, it resides at the Kissimmee Air Museum in central Florida.  

Retired but not forgotten. This particular AEROCAR was likely the inspiration for Franz von Fliegenhosen, one of the animated airplanes in the 2013 Disney movie, Planes. Planes was a spin-off of Cars, the 2006 Pixar classic (and every car-guy dad with a toddler’s favorite movie!) Just as all the wide eyed anthropomorphic cars in Cars were all loosely based on actual cars, the same goes for the planes in Planes. For instance, the movie’s hero, Dusty Crophopper, springs to life from an Air Tractor AT-502 crop duster, and Leadbottom, the bi-plane, is a characterized Boeing-Stearman Model 75. It is Franz von Fliegenhosen who finds his animating spirit from an AEROCAR (albeit with a German accent and looking a bit like a mashup of a VW, a Messerschmitt and a Lloyd) He is the only character in the movie who crosses over between plane and car…and he has the correspondingly split personality to show for it. Franz is a meek little car who barely has voice. But when he dons wings, he becomes the swaggering, bombastic von Fliegenhosen. This little guy shines brightest in the air… just like the real thing. But in the end, it takes two to be an AEROCAR.

While that immortalized 1960 model was the last AEROCAR to be built, it was not Molt Taylor’s last AEROCAR. He built one more in the early 1950s (#N100D) This one would demonstrate that if the AEROCAR had a flaw, it was that the minimal mass that made it such a good airplane, also made it a pretty flimsy car. The original owner was involved in a road accident in the early 1960s. It was a minor collision, but it severely damaged the car body. Taylor bought it back from the customer, and set about turning it into a more modern 1968 AEROCAR III (He also made an AEROCAR II in the mid-60s but this was designed solely as a light aircraft) While the AEROCAR III addressed several issues of the earlier cars, no more investors could be found. It resides now in the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

Since the AEROCAR, besides the ill-fated Mizar, there have been numerous other attempts at building a flying car. Most have been Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) vehicles, cars for the sky only and not roadable. Few of these appear to have actually flown. Recently, though, some interesting contraptions coming out of Europe have been in the news. A search of the internet yields super cool videos showing computer generated images of these machines tooling though the countryside in road mode. Then they stop to unfold wings (or rotors) and tail sections, seemingly at the touch of a button, before taking to the air, high above congested cities or over road-less wildernesses. There are no shots, however, of actual vehicles actually flying. The videos proudly proclaim that their products are designed to meet FAA or EU certification standards, but don’t seem to say if they actually are certified. No matter, deposits are being taken. Delivery dates seem to change from year to year, extending further and further into the future.

When was it The Jetsons was supposed to take place? Perhaps by then - whenever then is - some of these amazing conveyances will be flying, and driving. Until then, we have the AEROCAR. 

copyright@2020 by Mal Pearson