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Several designs exist (such as Moller's skycar) and while several (such as the Convair flying car and Molt Taylor's Aircar) have flown, none have enjoyed commercial success and those that have flown are not widely known about by the general public. One notable design, Henry Smolinski's Mizar, made by mating the rear end of a Cessna Skymaster with a Ford Pinto, disintegrated during test flights, killing Smolinski and the pilot.
In the 1950s, Ford Motor Company performed a serious feasibility study for a flying car product. They concluded that such a product was technically feasible, economically manufacturable, and had significant realistic markets. The markets explored included ambulance services, police and emergency services, military uses, and initially, luxury transportation. Some of these markets are now served by light helicopters, proving the accuracy of Ford's marketing. However, the flying car explored by Ford would be at least fifty-fold less expensive.
When Ford approached the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration about regulatory issues, the critical problem was that the (then) known forms of air traffic control were inadequate for the volume of traffic Ford proposed. At the time, air traffic control consisted of flight numbers, altitudes and headings written on little slips of paper and placed in a case. Quite possibly computerized traffic control, or some form of directional allocation by altitude could resolve the problems.
As the successive decades since failed to deliver such a vehicle, the flying car became somewhat of a totem of the failure of futurology to accurately predict the future development of society and was regularly used to poke fun at futurists.
The novels of Philip K. Dick and the film Blade Runner (the latter based on one of Dick's novels), in particular, feature VTOL flying cars, in the form of "flapples" and "spinners" respectively. More recently, flying cars have made the transition from science fiction to fantasy in the Harry Potter books, in the form of an otherwise-stock (and long since obsolete) Ford AngliaThe Ford Anglia was a British car from Ford in the UK. It was similar to the Ford Prefect and Ford Popular. The Ford Anglia name was applied to four models of car between 1940 and 1967. Anglia E04A (1940 1948 The first model, launched in 1940 and given th enchanted to fly.
The Flying Car was humorous skit written in 2002 for the Tonight Show by Kevin SmithThis page is about the American film maker; for the New Zealand actor see Kevin Smith (actor). Kevin Patrick Smith (born August 2, 1970) is an American screenwriter, film director and comic book writer. His movies are known for their distinctive vision an. It starred Dante and Randall stuck in traffic, discussing the lengths one would go to obtain one.
See also TransportFor other article subjects named transport see transport (disambiguation). Transport or transportation in American English, is the movement of people and goods from one place to another. The term is derived from the Latin trans meaning across and portare, AutomobileAn automobile usually called a car (an old word for carriage) or a truck is a wheeled vehicle that carries its own engine. Older terms include horseless carriage and motor car with "motor" referring to what is now usually called the engine. The act of ope, future of the carThe future of the car is a controversial topic, with some advocates arguing that the car has no future, and others that the car will in the future supplant most other forms of transport. There are significant challenges in the near future to continued use