MIT students to build flying car

This summer, graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will try to get an idea aloft that has intrigued people for decades: the flying car.

Terrafugia, a start-up created by Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winner Carl Dietrich and colleagues at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, is aiming to show off what it calls the Transition Personal Air Vehicle, an SUV with retractable wings, to the EAA AirVenture Conference in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, at the end of July.

The Transition is designed for 100- to 500-mile jumps. It will carry two people and luggage on a single tank of premium unleaded petrol. It will also come with an electric calculator to help fine-tune weight distribution, airbags, aerodynamic bumpers and of course a GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation unit.

The company hopes to eventually have the vehicle classified so that it can be piloted with a light sport aircraft licence.

No prototype exists yet, but the company will use the $30,000 from the Lemelson prize to build something to show off at the Oshkosh show. A fully operational prototype will come out in 2008 or earlier, according to the company, while Transition vehicles could hit the road, and the sky, by 2009 or 2010.

In the past few years, the skies have become a new frontier for entrepreneurs and academics. The chase for the X prize led entrepreneur Richard Branson and others to begin to contemplate space tourism. PayPal founder Elon Musk, meanwhile, has started SpaceX, a private company that hopes to launch rockets for satellite deployment, similar to the more heavily funded Sea Launch venture. Stanford University professors teach a course on do-it-yourself satellites.

Short-range aircraft and flight start-ups have sprung up as well. Citrix founder Ed Iacobucci has launched DayJet, which plans to buy a fleet of Eclipse planes for on-demand travel between regional hubs. People Airlines founder has a similar company based on the small, lightweight Eclipse. (Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is an investor in Eclipse.)

And for backyard adventurers, Elwood 'Woody' Norris has the AirScooter, a personal helicopter. Graduate students at Stanford also have hatched a secretive start-up geared at recreational flyers, according to sources familiar with their plans.

Flying cars are technically feasible: Terrafugia points out that inventor Molt Taylor built prototypes in the 1950s and 1960s -- but they haven't been practical from an economic perspective.

The picture has changed, however, with the development of lighter and stronger construction materials and more efficient engines. Terrafugia is aiming to build a vehicle that will fly at 120 miles per hour and get 30 miles per gallon (13km/l) in the air. (It will also manage 40 miles per gallon on motorways and 30 in the city).

The Transition vehicle will carry a payload of only 200kg, far less than cars, but how many cars can take flight after 500m of takeoff space?

Demand also has finally begun to emerge. Today's clogged freeway traffic and dispersed suburban living patterns have created an audience for these types of vehicles. Regional airports are also somewhat plentiful and underutilised. In addition, Federal Aviation Administration regulations passed in 2004 have made it easier to get a sport pilot's licence.

"Since 9/11, for the first time, average door-to-door travel speed has really dropped substantially due to a combination of increased security measures at airports and more road traffic," Dietrich said in a statement accepting the Lemelson prize.

The Lemelson foundation, named after controversial inventor and patent litigant Jerome Lemelson, gives an annual student award, as well as lifetime awards, to inventors. Past winners of the student prize included James McLurkin for his work on swarming robots. Lifetime achievement winners included Segway inventor Dean Kamen.

The foundation cited Dietrich, one of the star students in the department, for other accomplishments. Dietrich also holds a patent for the Centrifugal Direct Injection Engine, a low-cost, high-performance rocket propulsion engine. For his doctoral work, he is researching how a fusion reactor could be used to power a spacecraft.