It’s 2005. Where’s my flying car?
I grew up watching “The Jetsons.” Consequently, my daily commute along T-REX in a gravity-bound Toyota is one of the many harsh disappointments of my adult life.
Last week, I thumbed through the 2005 Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog. The Dallas-based upscale retailer is offering a flying car, called the M400, for $3.5 million. That’s a bit out of my price range, but I went to the manufacturer’s website anyway: “From your garage to your destination, the M400 Skycar can cruise comfortably at 350+ mph and achieve up to 28 miles per gallon. No traffic, no red lights, no speeding tickets.”
The futuristic vehicle boasts sophisticated vertical takeoff and landing capabilities, yet computer technology enables almost anyone to drive it with a joystick.
Intrigued, I called the manufacturer, Moller International, based in Davis, Calif.
“What you would be buying would be the first Moller Skycar,” said Moller general manager Bruce Calkins. “One that has already flown about 30 or 40 times.”
He said these flights have lasted as long as two or three minutes.
At what altitude?
“I think we’ve maybe been to 50 to 60 feet,” Calkins said.
If I wanted to fly the car myself, its remote ground-control equipment would be included, he added.
You mean I have to control the M400 from the ground? I can’t ride in it?
Not yet, Calkins said.
“So is this a glorified model airplane?”
“Well, yeah, but it’s a little more sophisticated,” Calkins said.
Writers and documentary filmmakers have been spinning stories about Paul Moller since he built his first flying car in his garage in 1963.
The M400 his company is selling through Neiman Marcus has hovered. But without passengers and on a tether.
The company hopes to install more powerful engines in this vehicle later this year or early next year. At that time, the company will have a test pilot demonstrate the craft at a news conference.
Then, in three years or so, Moller hopes to begin selling flying cars for about $1 million each. Meanwhile, NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration are working on plans to direct traffic for all those flying cars Moller expects to sell.
“We make the vehicle,” Calkins said. “We don’t make the highway in the sky. NASA and the FAA have to do that.”
For more perspective, I turned to an article from the May 9 edition of Auto Week: “As a car magazine it’s our duty to have at least one flying car story every 10 to 20 years. The last one was in the Sept. 28, 1992, issue, when the Society of Automotive Engineers held a conference on the subject. Thirteen years ago, conference attendees made it sound like flying cars were just around the corner. They’re barely closer now than they were then.”
Aerospace technology may be full of promise, but it’s also full of bluster.
It’s 2005 and NASA can’t even send people to the moon anymore.
“(The) space shuttle and international space station – nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades – were mistakes,” NASA administrator Michael Griffin told USA Today last week.
I guess we should have kept those 1970s vintage Apollo rockets. Today’s space station and shuttles – all they do is fly around in circles. Maybe NASA could unload them in Neiman Marcus’ next Christmas catalog, as Moller is doing with its flying car.
Neiman Marcus started offering unusual gifts in its 1959 Christmas catalog. Last year, it offered a 230-foot-long zeppelin.
This aviation technology dates back more than 100 years, but unlike the flying car, it can carry 12 passengers for 24 hours at a time.
Nobody bought the zeppelin, a Neiman Marcus spokeswoman told me, and the Skycar is being offered only as a collector’s piece.
“Born too late for the Wright Brothers’ first plane? Missed out on Henry Ford’s Model T? You can still have a great piece of transportation history,” the Neiman Marcus catalog boasts.
So the flying car is being sold as a piece of history. But shouldn’t it make history first?
Al Lewis’ column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Respond to Al at denverpostbloghouse.com/lewis, 303-820-1967, or alewis@denverpost.com.
