
The first flying car (1959) [video] - Animats
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMF99kJGLQc
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Animats
Here's an awesome, well funded idea that didn't work - the AvroCar. A true
flying saucer powered by three jet engines, it was built for the U.S. Army in
1959.

But it didn't quite fly. It could hover, and move around like a hovercraft,
but didn't have enough lift to get out of ground effect. It was also unstable.
One of the prototypes was brought to NASA Ames in Silicon Valley (it wasn't
called that yet) and spent a lot of time in the big wind tunnel. It turned out
that, although there are some theoretical advantages to disk-shaped aircraft,
the negatives outweigh the positives as the disk gets bigger.

Around the same time, the U.S. Army was testing the UH-1 Huey helicopter,
which worked, carried more payload, and was far more useful. So they canned
the AvroCar program and bought many thousands of Hueys. That was the end of
military flying saucers.

(The National Archives has posted good, full-length high-resolution copies of
the original films.[1][2][3] Short AvroCar clips have been around for years,
but they'd usually been through broadcast TV or VHS, with heavy loss of
detail. Amusingly, the earliest film was classified SECRET, the second one was
marked OFFICIAL USE ONLY, and by the third one, there's no classification.)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMF99kJGLQc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMF99kJGLQc)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdSo31A9j_I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdSo31A9j_I)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opD86VZSWpo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opD86VZSWpo)

