The Next Step: Cars that Fly

It would look right at home on the set of Bladerunner or the latest Star Wars film, but the Moller M400 Skycar - a versatile, economical, safe, environmentally-responsible Flying Car - is definitely for real. Opening up the next frontier in automotive personal transport, the SkyCar is a VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing) vehicle with a cruising speed of 600kmh, a range of more than 1400km, runs on almost any fuel from diesel to natural gas and achieves better fuel efficiency than many sports cars (15mpg or 19 litres per 100km).

Dr Paul Moller has been working for more than 30 years to build his dream vehicle - after developing several technologies for the Skycar which have become commercially viable businesses in their own right, his dream of a viable production VTOL vehicle is now tantalisingly close to reality.

Having already built and flown a two-seater prototype, the Skycar he envisaged as a child is now finished windtunnel testing and is expected to be in full flight-testing by the end of this year. Moller believes it was just a matter of time before the world demanded some kind of flying machine which would replace the automobile and after numerous prototypes, he named his vision the "Volantor," with the model designation M400.

He espouses the benefits of the Skycar as if it were already on the showroom floor - "No traffic, no red lights, no speeding tickets - just quiet direct transportation from point A to point B in a fraction of the time. It offers three dimensional mobility for the same price as two dimensional mobility." In terms of cost Moller sees US$950,000 price tag dropping to around US$60,000 (the cost of a high end sports car today) over the next 15 years.

The four-seater prototype M400 is designed to be easy to fly - with on-board computers and GPS doing most of the work - and small enough to fit in your garage at just over 5 metres long. The required takeoff and landing area is 10 metres in diameter and it be driven on the ground with the landing gear down for short distances.

Once airborne, the M400 can also climb at more than a vertical mile per minute and has a ceiling of 30,000 feet (equivalent to that of a high-performance fixed wing aircraft and double the operating height of helicopters). Two-seater and 6 seater versions of the M400 are also planned adding to the potential range of applications for a VTOL vehicle with such rapid response capabilities including search and rescue operations, police and fire work, emergency medical support, surveillance, or the movement of small military and paramilitary teams of critical personnel - not to mention opening up an era of "as the crow flies", traffic-jam-free personal transport.

Let's compare the M400 Skycar with what's available now, the automobile. Take the most technologically advanced automobile, the Ferrari, Porsche, Maserati, Lamborgini, or the more affordable Acura, Accord, or the like. It seems like all of the manufacturers of these cars are touting the new and greatly improved "aerodynamics" of their cars. Those in the aerospace industry have been dealing with aerodynamics from the start.

In the auto industry they boast of aerodynamics, performance tuned wide track suspensions, electronic ignition and fuel injection systems, computer controllers, and the list goes on. What good does all this "advanced engineering" do for you when the speed limit is around 100kmh and you are stuck on crowded freeways anyway? No matter how you look at it the automobile is only an interim step on our evolutionary path to independence from gravity. That's all it will ever be.

The M400 is the latest incarnation in the long history of the volantor or Skycar project which began in the Sixties with the XM-2 Skycar. Working from a model built two years earlier, Dr. Moller began construction of the XM-2 in his garage in 1964 and by 1965 this aircraft could hover in ground effect. After being re-engined with two-Mercury outboards the XM-2 was demonstrated to the international media in 1966.

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