76
PROGRESSDefining
“Just Around
the Corner”
FUTURE
FLOCK
Terrafugia’s
designs include
the four-seat
TF-X hybrid
(top), the TF- 2
“modular”
concept
(middle), and
the Transition
proof-of-
concept
two-seater
(bottom),
expected to be
certified soon.Way back in 1940, none other than Henry Ford himself
predicted, “Mark my words. A combination of airplane and
motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come.” Almost
80 years later, we’re still smiling. Despite decades of breath-
less “Your New Flying Car!” magazine covers and countless,
baseless hype pieces on the evening news, no one has yet
produced a fully functional, commercially available vehicle
capable of taking to roadways and the air with equal ease.
But maybe, just maybe—if you believe today’s engineers and
entrepreneurs—our Jetsons future of “Personal Air Vehicles”
(PAVs) may actually now be just over the horizon.
“We’ve already designed, built, and flown a flying car for
more than 200 hours,” says Chuck Evans, vice president of
marketing for Terrafugia, a Massachusetts-based firm found-
ed in 2006 by five MIT graduates. Evans says the company’s
“Transition” proof-of-concept prototype, a two-seat aircraft
whose wings fold inward at the push of a button for road
driving, “will be certified as a light sport aircraft in 2019.” (It
will require a sport pilot license to fly.) As for the company’s
ambitious follow-up, the TF-2—a modular air vehicle that
will transport a dockable, detachable road car—Evans says,
“We’re targeting 2023 to be fully operational.”
Juraj Vaculík, co-founder and CEO of Slovakia-based Aero-
Mobil, says, “When we flew our first concept vehicle in 2013,
you could count similar projects on one hand. Today, there are
more than 100 projects. Numerous trials are running in cities