Terrafugia Transition: Virgin Flight in 1 Month
The Terrafugia Transition flying automobile is scheduled for initial flight testing in February of this year -- next month.
Carl Dietrich, who runs the Massachusetts-based Terrafugia, said: “This is the first really integrated design where the wings fold up automatically and all the parts are in one vehicle.”...The Transition...is powered by the same 100bhp engine on the ground and in the air.This design has a good chance of being successful. The wing folding and unfolding will need to be foolproof, and driving visibility cannot be obstructed by airfoils. The engine must be of highest quality and highly reliable.
Terrafugia claims it will be able to fly up to 500 miles on a single tank of petrol at a cruising speed of 115mph. Up to now, however, it has been tested only on roads at up to 90mph.
Dietrich said he had already received 40 orders, despite an expected retail price of $200,000 (£132,000). _Times
Al Fin's requirements for a full function vehicle remain the same: it must be able to fly above the weather, cruise on a water surface, travel submerged like a submarine, move swiftly over highways or all off-road terrain. It should be able to land on either water or firmer surfaces including sand, salt flat, snow, and ice. And the vehicle should provide for comfortable overnighting in virtually any climate. Is that really asking for so much?
Labels: flying cars, multifunctional, Terrafugia
posted by al fin at 12:07 pm
2 Comments:
Having spent entirely too much of my young adulthood running around on an aircraft carrier's flight deck, I can assure you that the US Navy figured the whole wing lock problem out quite successfully most of 3/4 of a century ago now. The physical lock materials (pin and housing principally) are of greater shear strength than is the wing structural material - the wing itself will catastrophically detach from the plane before the wing-lock components will fail. Additionally, the mechanism is designed such that a positive disengadgement action (commonly requiring both the plane's electrical system and it's hydraulic system to be in normal operation mode) is required to physically permit the wing locking mechanism to actuate at all. Further even to all that, the actuation system itself cannot be electrically activated unless the aircraft's weight-on-gear switch is also actuated (by, as you might imagine from the name, having the plane's main landing gear hydraulic struts compressed to a pre-determined distance by the aircraft's weight interacting with the ground - you know, gravity :)), this prevents any possible electrical current being directed to the wing fold system while there is no (or even insufficient) weight being applied to the aircraft landing gear.
Personally, I'd want to take a close look at the engineering spec's for the airframe structural members and the assembly techniques utilized myself. I would be far more concerned about the whole thing coming apart under fluctuating lateral in-flight and ordinary landing stress than I would of the wings folding in flight.
Any idea if this thing is supposed to have that aircraft parachute system installed?
:)
Thanks much for the information, Will. Did you watch the video? Is the wing folding and unfolding of carrier jets as fast and automatic as the Terrafugia's?
NASA engineers were supposedly involved somewhere in the design process, so I hope it does not incorporate any solid fuel external thrusters. ;-)
I'm not sure about the parachute.
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