

Terrafugia Achieves Maiden Flight - Live Blogging from the Boston Museum of Science - rfreierman
http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/03/18/terrafugia-achieves-maiden-flight-live-blogging-from-the-boston-museum-of-science/

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ryanwaggoner
Sigh...here we go again with the "flying cars"

I don't understand what the market for this thing would be. Do they really
think the only thing holding most people back from flying more is that they
can't drive their airplane home after flying?

Aside from all the complexities and engineering challenges that trying to do
something like this requires, do you really want your $200k aircraft driving
around on the street and sitting in your garage? On top of all that, it's
_incredibly_ ugly.

Their entire selling point seems to be that now you don't have to worry about
ground transportation on either end of your flight, but $200k buys you a lot
of cessna + cab fare :)

~~~
cameldrv
The thing is, a lot of places you might want to go have a small airport and
roads, but not cab service. You have to be a decent sized city to have cab
service. One of the cool things about flying around in small airplanes is that
you can visit some of these out of the way places. The current way people deal
with this is usually folding bikes, and now there are some folding electric
bikes, which are a reasonable alternative to the terrafugia.

The real problem with the Terafugia of course is that it's not a very good
airplane or a very good car. On the airplane side, it has very poor payload --
you can't even fill the tanks, and put two average sized people in it with no
luggage. Also, even with full tanks, it has a practical range of only about
250 miles. If you're willing to make short hops, theoretically you could get
somewhere further, but I'm not sure if it's compatible with (leaded) aviation
gasoline. If not, then you have to land, drive to a gas station, drive back to
the airport, and take off every 2.5 hours. At that point, from a speed
standpoint, you're better off driving.

Still, this is a good start, and if they can improve the pertinent specs by
about 20%, I think they will have a real winner.

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sanj
It looks to me like it spent the entire time in ground effect.

