Flying Cars

by Andrew Glass

  Hall’s ideas continued to develop, and he explained his new concept in his 1947 patent application for “Automotive Vehicles Adapted to Become Airborne by a Novel Form of Flight Component.” The design called for “complete independency of the flight component and its controls from the automotive unit” because “the interdependency of the control units in prior designs complicates the conversion of the vehicle from an airplane to an automobile and vice versa and obviously increases the possibility of failure and accidents due to improper rigging and malfunctioning of the controls.” In other words, an independent flight module attached to a fully functional automobile would eliminate the problems that were caused by the complicated engineering adjustments necessary to combine an airplane with an automobile.

  Back at Convair, executives and engineers were convinced that Hall’s convertible car-airplane was exactly the postwar flying car they had been searching for. Convair agreed to invest in Hall’s peculiar-looking vehicle and even fast-tracked further development at their main plant at Lindbergh field near San Diego. That made the newly renamed ConvAirCar the best-funded flying car venture ever undertaken.

  In 1946, Ted Hall built a prototype of his own design for a flying car, with an independent flight component and four wheels.

  Hall anticipated that flying car owners would drive their vehicles extensively on the roads, and so he equipped his new prototype with four wheels, not three. Meanwhile, Convair anticipated that Americans, with their love of glittering chrome and steel automobiles, were unlikely to be satisfied with a car that looked like a sheet-metal marshmallow, even one that could fly. So the company turned to the renowned designer Henry Dreyfuss (1904–1972).

  ABOVE: With a slick redesign, the ConvAirCar 118 seemed a perfect fit for postwar suburban garages. INSET: Independent flight component controls were designed to fit through the roof.

  Dreyfuss, once a student of famed streamliner Norman Bel Geddes, was responsible for the modern look of many products from the 1930s to the 1960s, including the grand railroad train called the Twentieth Century Limited and the modest but ubiquitous Big Ben alarm clock. Dreyfuss, generally known as a practical thinker, agreed that a well-designed flying car would perfectly meet the modern expectations and transportation needs of affluent postwar suburban families. In that spirit, he designed a stylish yet respectable two-door, four-passenger family sedan to be priced at $1,500, about the same as an earth-bound top-of-the-line Ford. Constructed of plastic impregnated with fiberglass, the new ConvAirCar weighed only 725 pounds and achieved an amazing 45 miles per gallon with a 24.5-horsepower Crosley engine.

  The separate flight module consisted of a 190-horsepower engine, a single wing measuring 34.5 feet, a tail, a fuel tank, a propeller, and an instrument panel, all mounted on a spindly collapsible armature that attached right through the roof of the car.

  Convair planned to rent the flight modules to ConvAirCar owners at airports. The flight controls and gauges dropped cleverly into place over the pilot’s head. The armature was then stowed neatly in wingtip access panels. On the ground at an airport or landing strip, the flight module could be detached from the automobile and jacked back onto its armature, and the ConvAirCar could be driven away, leaving the flight module behind. Traveling salesmen were considered the most likely customers. In the morning, a salesman could leave home, drive to the nearest airport, rent a flight module, fly hundreds of miles, land, remove the flight module, and drive to a business meeting in his prestigious-looking ConvAirCar. At the end of the day, he could return to the airport, reattach the flight module, fly back to his home airport, remove the flight module and return it to Convair, drive to his house, and park in the family garage.

  LEFT: Securing the flight component for takeoff . . .

  CENTER: Taxiing . . .

  BOTTOM: Airborne!

  Convair executives projected impressive sales for the new ConvAirCar. They were confident that their revolutionary vehicle would appeal to a wide market: military pilots returning to civilian life as well as business travelers and weekend flyers. A ConvAirCar in the garage would be like having a car and an airplane, but without the storage and maintenance problems of owning two separate machines. “The market for this flying automobile will be far greater than any other conventional light plane,” Convair announced confidently, “because a purchaser can obtain daily use from the car and get more from his investment.” On November 17, 1947, the New York Times reported that a flying car had circled San Diego for an hour and eighteen minutes.

  Hall had it right this time—the right styling and technology and also the right organization to put it into mass production. The ConvAirCar was a go!

  But a few days later, on a routine test flight, something went wrong. Afterward, several explanations were offered: a gauge was broken, or a switch that should have been on was mysteriously turned off, or the test pilot mistakenly checked the ConvAirCar’s gas gauge (which indicated adequately full) instead of the Convair flight module’s aero fuel gauge (which was warning bone-dry empty). Whatever the reason, the ConvAirCar ran out of gas in midair. The test pilot managed to crash-land on a dirt road, but he shaved the wings off and totaled the fragile fiberglass automobile. Happily, he walked away. Sadly, he left more than just pieces of the handsome prototype strewn in the dust.

  Some consider that the scattered auto and airplane parts near San Diego marked the end for flying cars. Even though the remaining prototype flew successfully, it was indeed the final act for Hall’s marvelous ConvAirCar. Bad publicity after the crash wiped out Convair’s corporate enthusiasm for flying cars, and the firm returned to the more predictably lucrative production of military planes. By 1948, after a quest lasting more than two decades, the most promising venture yet to mass-produce a flying automobile designed to meet the needs of a sprawling suburban postwar America had folded. The beautifully designed and functional ConvAirCar served instead as a cautionary tale, warning of the potential for calamity should ordinary drivers take to the sky in extraordinary cars.

  In 1978, a fire at the San Diego Aerospace Museum destroyed the remaining prototype, but several scale models survive at the museum.

  The test pilot survived this crash, but Convair withdrew its support from ConvAirCar.

  13

  Robert Fulton’s Airphibian

  Twelve-year-old Robert Edison Fulton Jr. (1909–2004) was aboard the first scheduled airplane flight between Miami and Havana, Cuba, in 1920. Two years later, he was in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt when King Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened. In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, while Waldo Waterman, Robert Pitcairn, and Bill Stout grappled with the difficulties of designing an easy-to-fly airplane, Robert E. Fulton Jr., fresh from architecture studies at the University of Vienna, was attending fashionable dinner parties in London.

  Over the clink of glasses and amid the cheery laughter one evening, “a pretty lady with toffee-colored hair” asked him if he would be sailing for home soon. Returning to New York by ship was his intention, so the answer he gave her took Fulton himself by surprise. “No,” he said suavely. “I’m going around the world on a motorcycle!” Later he wrote, “I knew I’d done something inexplicably peculiar.”

  Also seated at the table that evening was Kenton Redgrave, the owner of Douglass Motorcycles, who chimed in, “I say there, that sounds grand. How about letting me furnish it?”

  A few weeks later, Fulton was humming down the road astride a black Douglass Twin with gold stripes, a two-cylinder, six-horsepower engine tricked out with two gas tanks, standard automobile tires (for easy replacement), a tool kit, and a hidden compartment containing a movie camera and film. After ferrying across the English Channel, Fulton rode through France, Germany, and Austria and on to Yugoslavia, where he discarded the formal evening clothes considered proper traveling gear for any respectable young gentleman.

  In 1932, Fulton began his trip around the world on a Douglass motorcycle tricked out for documentary filmmaking.

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bsp; Border guards frequently detained him, judging his intention to ride a motorcycle around the world as either crazy or just plain suspicious. But he persevered, charming his way past each checkpoint, and rode on. In Damascus, Syria, he was warned against attempting to cross the Blue Desert, some five hundred miles of sand and rock, alone. Unable to find a caravan that would allow him to ride along for safety, he loaded his motorcycle with all the extra water and gas it would carry. He drove the last ten miles of paved road to a weather-beaten sign reading BAGHDAD, with an arrow pointing across the open desert.

  Fulton survived the crossing, but he spent seven weeks in a Baghdad hospital recovering from jaundice, locally referred to as “a desert chill on the liver.” Once restored to health, he motorcycled on through Afghanistan, India, Vietnam, and China. In Malaysia, he was offered a tiger cub. Even though assured that tigers make wonderful pets, he politely refused, explaining that “a motorcycle is no place for a baby tiger.” From Japan he boarded a ship bound for San Francisco, then motorcycled eastward, arriving in New York City on Christmas Eve, 1933. Fulton claimed that his adventure gave him the courage to try many things and succeed.

  He learned to fly a seaplane and became a successful aerial photographer. As war began to seem inevitable, he invented a much-needed training device to prepare aircraft gunners for modern air-to-air combat. His Gunairinstructor projected panoramic views of the sky based on movie footage he’d shot from the top of the Empire State Building. Sound effects simulated combat flying conditions. He enlisted other pilot trainers to fly to far-flung bases and teach military personnel how to best utilize the Gunairinstructor.

  Fulton and his field instructors frequently found themselves stranded in desolate locations where local taxi drivers often refused to deplete their precious wartime gas rations by shuttling them to a remote military base and back again. “I’d end up kicking my airplane and saying, why the %$@*& can’t you take me down the road?” Fulton wrote later. His Stinson Reliant had all the necessary equipment—wheels, brakes, steering wheel, and engine—to drive to his destination, but without a way for him to separate the automobile parts from the airplane, he was stuck.

  Fulton began working to solve the problem in the Washington, D.C., basement where he had developed the Gunairinstructor. Unobserved, he and nine associates welded, pounded, and wrapped fabric over steel tubes for more than eleven months. The airplane car they built was designed to leave its highset wings and tail behind at an airfield, allowing the pilot to drive a road vehicle to his real destination. Once their craft was completed, they test-flew it in the dark near Middleburg, Virginia.

  After the war, they secretly moved their project to Danbury, Connecticut, to a fifteen-acre plot next to the airport. Fearful that some shrewd aircraft manufacturer would steal his brainchild, Fulton test-drove the narrow two-seater convertible on deserted country lanes and flight-tested it at night, landing on a dark runway, rather than risk discovery. Finally, in 1946, Fulton’s team publicly unveiled the Airphibian, to the praise of enthusiastic engineers and readers of Popular Mechanics magazine. Two years later, they perfected a production prototype, suitable for presenting to the American driving public.

  The versatility of the Airphibian, an airplane that could leave its airplane parts behind to be driven like a car, was first demonstrated for the press in 1946.

  Life magazine featured photos of Robert and his wife, Florence, on an evening trip to the theater in New York City in their Airphibian. They flew at 110 miles per hour from Connecticut to LaGuar-dia Airport in Queens. There, Fulton himself detached the fuselage and the tapered wings and stored them in the airport hangar, and unbolted the propeller with a built-in wrench, all in less than five minutes. The right and left rudder pedals converted automatically to brake pedal and clutch. Fulton drove the convertible proudly into Manhattan at a breezy 55 miles per hour. The couple cruised down Broadway on four wide-set airplane tires and parked neatly outside the theater to attend a performance of the hit musical Kiss Me, Kate.

  After the show, Fulton drove to the airport and backed the car up to the airplane flight component. He leveled the tail and wings to the proper height and cranked the supporting wheels into their storage position. Then he removed the prop spinner and the propeller from a bracket on the side and screwed the propeller into place with the built-in wrench. He secured the fittings, automatically engaging the instruments and electrical connections, and locked them with three levers that held large pins in the fittings. The 150-horsepower, six-cylinder engine would not turn over for flight until every fitting was secured, but Fulton checked the warning light, just to be sure. The four-step conversion from automobile back to airplane took only five minutes, and the Fultons were soon on their way home to Connecticut through the clouds.

  Life magazine featured a photo-essay about the Fultons’ trip to New York City for an evening at the theater.

  Ready to go . . .

  Attaching the propeller . . .

  TOP: Approaching Manhattan . . .

  BOTTOM RIGHT: Parking at the theater.

  Eight production-model Airphibians were tested under different climatic conditions and in different geographical locations. Fulton drove and flew an Airphibian across the United States, Mexico, and Canada. His son Robert III, who often went along for the ride, learned to fly his father’s car long before he could legally drive it. In response to the criticism that his car was too fragile, Fulton replied that no ordinary car was a match for his Airphibian’s sturdy stability on the highway.

  We had to test it until we beat it to death. A comment I have heard so often that it seems a cliché is that an airphibious vehicle can be “neither a good automobile nor a good airplane. It’s a compromise.” The argument is plausible but no more so than the fact that an ordinary automobile is also a compromise—it can’t fly. An airplane likewise can’t drive down the road. In terms of pure transportation— a vehicle which will carry one the fastest the straightest, with the minimum of effort and expense yet with the maximum freedom of action and utility—the Airphibian is decidedly less of a compromise than any other vehicle.

  Fulton and his son Robert III, age three.

  In 1950, Fulton flew his production prototype Airphibian to Washington, D.C., and landed at National Airport. From there he drove it directly to the headquarters of the Civil Aeronautics Administration (later known as the Federal Aeronautics Administration) to claim the first official certification to begin production of a flying car in the United States. With more than 100,000 miles flown and 6,000 conversions successfully accomplished, the Airphibian was technically a great success. “This was a simple airplane,” Fulton insisted, as well as “a simple little car that did the job very nicely.”

  However, Fulton’s financial backers had become discouraged with the seemingly endless expense of meeting government production standards, and they withdrew their support. Unable to finance mass production himself, Fulton was forced to entrust a controlling interest in his project to a light-plane manufacturer, a situation he could not tolerate. Ironically, after all the secrecy to protect his invention from being stolen, the company that acquired the Airphibian decided that the much-anticipated postwar demand for personal airplanes wasn’t materializing, and so it shelved the project. “At the time I felt very badly about it,” Fulton wrote later, “but there is no use being unhappy about things; you simply accept the facts as they are.”

  Fulton filled his adventurous life with art, writing (including poetry and a pop-up book), and some seventy patented inventions. At the age of ninety-five, he still had the Douglass motorcycle, refurbished and ready to roll, parked in his garage.

  The Airphibian is on view at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

  14

  Daniel Zuck’s Plane-Mobile

  The Vidal Safety Airplane Competition of the 1930s failed to produce the sort of flying flivver that many believed would lure millions of drivers into becoming pilots. And even when inex
pensive secondhand planes—like the reliable, easy-to-fly Ercoupe—appeared on the market following World War II, few returning pilots or would-be weekend pilots rushed to buy them as predicted. Although inventor/engineers such as Hall and Fulton had successfully built prototype hybrid vehicles that eliminated the inefficiency of multivehicle travel, the inopportune crash of the sleek ConvAirCar and the commercial collapse of the marvelously functional Airphibian seemed to have ended any hope for a practical flying car.

  Even so, aeronautical engineer Daniel Zuck (1911–1992) and his partner Stanley Whitaker offered another solution in the form of a roadable, garage-sized airplane that stored its wings, insect-like, on top, which allowed it to be driven on the road like a car. Their Plane-Mobile (sometimes called a Plane-Auto), introduced in 1946, was begun in a San Diego workshop and later moved to Whitaker’s garage in Los Angeles. It was designed with a push-pull steering wheel to control movement up and down as well as from side to side—like driving a car in three dimensions. “Two-control flying,” as Zuck called it, coordinated rudder and ailerons, making safe turning automatic.