Apparently your flying car is a step closer

Story here. Apparently, the FAA has given tentative approval for untethered flight to the Moller Skycar, effective June 10, 2014. The delay is to allow Moller to make unspecified “safety upgrades”. The inventor has launched a crowdfunding effort to pay for the additional work, suggesting that one should not bet bank on his company being able to mass-produce these things anytime soon.

Nevertheless, all y’all who have been complaining “Where’s my flying car?” Well, there it is.

All I can think about is the lawsuit that will erupt the first time one of these falls out of the sky and obliterates someone’s home.

Oh, gawd, not Moller again. The only reason he’s not a long-forgotten fraud is because he’s 100% sincere. But then, so are many astrologers.

The only reason there’s never been an untethered flight of one of his designs is because it “needed just a little more work.” NOT because the FAA blocked him in any way, which has been the continuing implication. He could have trucked a prototype out to the desert and flown it around any time in the past 40 years.

What Moller is superlative at is talking money out of investors. Crowdsourcing must have come as a godsend. (Again, he’s not a fraud - he does spend nearly all money raised on “development” - but no amount of development money or time is going to solve the fundamental problems with his concept, or any general concept of a flying car.)

I’ve been reading about Moller’s aircars since the late 1960s, and every few years there’s another gosh-wow cover story on PopSci or Discover about them. He’s always some small amount of money short of the next step and always has one more come-on ready… being out of all others, it looks like he finally actually applied for an FAA flight test certificate… oh, and JUST in time for a Kickstarter campaign.

Here’s ten bucks that says nothing like an untethered flight takes place by the end of next year.

Besides reading about him episodically, I lived in the area and for about a year worked for the next company over. You could spot Moller’s shop for a mile by the giant boom crane… used to show investors “tethered flight” in a 100-foot circle. Two of my boss/owners had been talked into investing that “little bit more” years before, with no results. He also apparently got a significant investment from Clive Cussler, along with free advertising from “Dirk Pitt” flying around in a Moller aircar in one of the novels.

Moller. <makes unnamed click sound, with eye-roll>

I’m ready to purchase! Then’t I’ll cruise through town with my sex robot.

Well, a real eye-opener is that if I read correctly, he’s managed to raise $100 million over the decades he’s been working in this project, so I salute him for being some sort of silver-tongued devil, if nothing else.

I have to admit I’m far less interested in the flying car than in the lightweight rotary engines that have been developed to power it. Seems like there’s a lot of potential there, but unfortunately (and rather suspiciously), Rotapower hasn’t seen fit to put up any technical data on their site.

I immediately thought of this.

NSFW if you don’t plug headphones into your computer before you watch it.

I’ve never met him, but from first-hand accounts he’s that Douglas Adams character that can talk all four legs off a donkey and then convince it to go for a walk. Utterly sincere. Utterly convincing. You can’t walk away, knowing *your *contribution will be the one to put the project over the top.

Yeah. It’s a world of fantastic claims and “almost.” Has been for forty years.

But in the end, there are five basic technical hurdles to a successful vehicle of this type, and the only solvable one was solved by the march of time. (The possibility of computerized flight control, making it stable and theoretically easy to fly.)