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Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Flying car takes its first flight
By Mass High Tech staff
Terrafugia's flying car simulation
News updated 10:30 a.m., March 18, 2009.
MIT spinout Terrafugia Inc. today confirmed that its flying car — what it calls a “roadable aircraft,” the Transition -- completed its long-awaited first test flight on March 5 at Plattsburgh International Airport in upstate New York.
Terrafugia showed video of the test flight during a press conference at the Museum of Science, Boston, this morning, and posted video of the flight on its website earlier today. The Transition was on temporary display in the museum’s main hall. The test flight lasted 37 seconds -- 25 seconds longer than the first Wright brothers flight.
Terrafugia had revealed in a Mass High Tech article in December that it planned to test the Transition at an unspecified site in upstate New York during the winter.
The Transition is designed to work as a private aircraft at airspeeds up to 115 mph on flights of about 450 miles or less at 30 miles per gallon of regular gas, and then, by automatically folding up its wings in 30 seconds, operate as a car getting 27 miles to a gallon. The intent is to provide pilots with ground transportation once they reach their destination. As a car, it operates in front-wheel drive and is propeller driven in the air, according to the company.
“This breakthrough changes the world of personal mobility. Travel now becomes a hassle-free integrated land-air experience. It’s what aviation enthusiasts have been striving for since 1918,” said CEO Carl Dietrich.
Terrafugia, located in Woburn, has been working on the aircraft since 2006, when co-founder and CEO Dietrich, then an MIT student, won the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize and was also named a runner-up in the MIT-group-builds-auto-plane-startup.html">2006 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. Dietrich’s co-founders include vice president of engineering Samuel Schweighart and Dietrich’s wife, COO Anna Mracek Dietrich, who was honored last week as one of the 2009 Mass High Tech Women to Watch. All three, as well as several other employees, were members of the MIT Rocket Team.
For the first flight, the pilot was Phil Meteer, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, who was introduced as the company’s chief pilot.
He said the flight, planned for 18 months, was a brief, wheels-up test along the runway. The flight, followed by six more flights between March 5 and March 7, was approved by the Federal Aviation Agency, which inspected the Transition. There was no word on when the company would move into Phase Two of its tests, when the aircraft would fly away from the landing strip. “Right now we haven’t even absorbed all the data from the first flight, so (we) haven’t scheduled a Phase 2 flight yet,” said Carl Dietrich.
Meteer, who noted that the suspension is designed to handle the potholes of Boston, said that the aircraft handles like other cars on the road, and uses standard flight controls in the air.
The company expects to continue test and development for two years on the vehicle, which was displayed with Massachusetts dealer plates. Meteer noted that the Transition has safety enhancements not found on some small aircraft, such as crumple zones, a roll bar and an emergency deployed parachute.
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