Tom LeCompte flies a plane—a single-engine Piper Comanche. You might expect him to be a champion of aerial personal mobility, yet he is skeptical of flying cars, such as those proposed by Uber.
“At the time it was built in the early ’60s, it represented the culmination of company founder William T. Piper’s vision for bringing flying to the masses, a vision that borrowed heavily from Henry Ford’s ideas of simplicity, affordability and mass production,” he writes of his plane at Cognoscenti. “Piper wanted people to feel free to go to grandma’s house for dinner, even if grandma lived three states away.”
Piper tried to give his planes the look-and-feel-and sound of an automobile, with Naugahyde upholstery, custom trim and molding, a muffler, and even an air-speed indicator calibrated in miles per hour rather than aeronautical knots.
So what’s the problem? “Piper built a wonderful product, but the dream of ‘an airplane in every garage’ came and went,” LeCompte writes. “Flying a plane is not like driving a car.”
He continues, “So I have to wonder why the vastly more complicated and ambitious concept of marrying car to airplane endures as a realistic objective.” He cites seven announcements over the past week related to “dual-use” or autonomous flying vehicles—not to mention Terrafugia, whose Transition is farthest along toward government certification but may soon be obsolete, because its operator must be a licensed pilot. Terrafugia planning a new product, the TF-X, that will be autonomous.
LeCompte says that when you try to design a vehicle that’s both a plane and a car you can end up with a lousy plane and a lousy car. “It seems to me we have the existing earthbound technology to get people around safely, quickly, and efficiently,” he concludes. “We’re just having trouble finding the money and political wherewithal to keep the roads up, fix the bridges, and to maintain and expand public transportation.”
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