Street Legal Flying Cars? Terrafugia Clears Key Regulatory Hurdles

Terrafugia, the Massachusetts-based flying car company, has proved yet again that it’s a master of navigating the complex requirements for selling a street-legal aircraft. The question now is when its creation, the Transition, will actually make it to market.

This month, the company was granted four exemptions by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for the Transition, a two-seater aircraft that's also a four-wheel car. Terrafugia will be allowed to use plastic rather than glass in its windows, for example, and motorcycle tires rather than specialized versions of car tires. These are the latest steps—and perhaps the final major hurdles—in Terrafugia’s attempt to make its flying car road-certified. Last year, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA’s) granted the company a critical exemption that allowed Transition an extra 110 pounds over the maximum weight typically allowed for light sport aircraft.

Terrafugia asked for these exemptions because of the unique problems associated with making an aircraft that not only drives like a car but also meets the regulatory requirements for American automobiles. For example, using the shatter-proof glass mandated in U.S. cars would add to the Transition's weight, which was already over the FAA’s ordinary maximum. But now that the company has secured an exemption, it can use polycarbonate windows to bring the weight down.

The tires are primarily a cost issue: To meet government rules, the Transition would require custom car tires that would add $120,000 to the cost of each vehicle, according to the company. But Terrafugia has already tested motorcycle tires and rims on the vehicle successfully, and NHTSA’s ruling should allow the Transition to use those tires.

Not all of the company’s requested exemptions were granted for the full three years requested. NHTSA granted Terrafugia only a one-year exemption from using advanced air bags. It similarly granted only a one-year exemption for employing an electronic stability control system, which helps drivers maintain control of the vehicle and prevent roll-overs.

Nevertheless, these exemptions appear to be the last major hurdles for the company—at least when it comes to garnering the approval of air and auto authorities. “With what we have, with the additional weight and the four [exemptions], we should be good from this point forward,” Anna Mracek Dietrich, Terrafugia’s chief operating officer, tells Popular Mechanics.

Though Terrafugia's regulatory battles might be over, its problems in delivering a real flying car to market are not. Last month, Terrafugia CEO Carl Dietrich announced a new delay to the production prototypes of the Transition, which the company had hoped to fly at an air show this month. The company now plans to fly the production prototypes next March, and is also pushing back first deliveries of the aircraft to late 2012, according to Deitrich’s announcement.

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A Human-Powered Helicopter Takes Flight(READ IT)

A University of Maryland team has succeeded in building and flying a helicopter powered entirely by a single human pilot. Next Step: The Sikorsky Prize, a human-powered-helicopter award that has been awaiting a winner for 30 years.


On June 2, the University of Maryland team's flight time was certified at 4.2 seconds. Though that time is less than half of what the team members recorded themselves, Maryland still became the first team with a certified flight time

Two years of work culminated in a few seconds of flight this month as students from the University of Maryland flew their homemade helicopter right into the record books. The event was the first-ever human-powered helicopter flight flown by a woman—and sets up the Maryland team for a run at the elusive Sikorsky Prize, an award for human-powered helicopters that's gone unclaimed for just over 30 years.

Judy Wexler, a biology graduate student at the University of Maryland, was the pilot. Wexler pedaled furiously using both hand and feet pedals to get the craft airborne for just 10 seconds. Ten seconds might not sound like much, but in the 30 years that the prize has been out there, only two other teams have even gotten off the ground. The team is now waiting for the National Aeronautic Association and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, an international body that maintains aviation records, to certify the time.

The helicopter is extraordinarily light—only 210 pounds, including the pilot. Crafted primarily from balsa wood, carbon fiber, Mylar and foam, the aircraft has a limited weight that belies its size. The X-shaped frame has crossbars measuring 60 feet, with a rotor at each endpoint. The rotors themselves are 42-feet in diameter, with blades that are 21 feet long and just 7 pounds each. The helicopter needed to be light enough to lift, but strong and efficient enough so that it wouldn't shudder apart with the motion of the pedals. To accommodate the huge frame, students added additional truss supports, or "baby trusses," at weak points along the structure.

The pilot pushes the pedals with both her hands and feet, requiring a transmission system capable of transmitting the two different forces simultaneously and smoothly to the rotors. The students used string, light chain and carbon-fiber gears to build the transmission; it's all held together by string: There is a spool of fishing line attached to each rotor, and all of the strings are connected through an elaborate pulley system to a central pulley underneath the pilot's legs. This central pulley links directly to the foot pedals and connects to the hand pedals via the chain.






Getting the woman-powered chopper aloft was a monumental struggle. Darryll Pines, dean of the college of engineering at the University of Maryland, calls it "an engineering soap opera." After two years of design and construction, the students assembled the helicopter in full for the first time just a few days before the flight. While the frame and rotors handled beautifully, holding together without major structural damage during the test-flight period, the team needed to reinforce the cockpit. And the transmission system had to be entirely rebuilt overnight. Plus, the students were working through final exams, sometimes leaving work on the project to take a test and coming straight back to continue work—or going two or more days without sleep. In the last possible hour before the competition window closed, the craft finally got off the ground.

The Maryland students named their helicopter Gamera after the ferocious flying turtle from Japanese monster movies. (The University of Maryland's mascot is the terrapin, also a turtle.) Fifty students from both graduate and undergraduate backgrounds spent over two years working to bring the project to this point. Project manager and Ph.D. candidate Brandon Bush says that despite all the trouble, the students stayed confident in their design. "It's just simple math," he says. "It had to fly."

But there's still a long way to go before they reach their ultimate goal: the Sikorsky Prize. The American Helicopter Society created the prize in 1980 (and PM covered the announcement) and will award $250,000 to whichever team builds a helicopter to meet four challenging criteria (along with a few other minor requirements). The helicopter must be powered entirely by its human pilot, remain aloft for 1 minute, reach an altitude of at least 3 meters (about 10 feet) during the flight and stay within a 10-meter (32.8-foot) square.

No one has succeeded yet. Of the two teams that have gotten off the ground, one, working at California Polytechnic State University in 1989, flew for 7.1 seconds. The other, built in Japan, flew for 19.46 seconds in 1994.

Officially, however, the Japanese and Cal Poly teams failed to be certified by the NAA and corresponding international record-keepers, meaning that the University of Maryland team will hold the world-record time if it passes certification. Whatever the official figures say, Pines says that the Maryland team will attempt to surpass the Japanese time. "We're learning on the fly, just like they [did]," he says.

But for now, the Gamera team is savoring the moment. V.T. Nagaraj, a faculty advisor to the group, says that everyone involved is still elated. "It was amazing," he says. "We have not yet come down to earth"

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Indian Aviation News

1.Fuel price hike adds to Air India woes,incurs Rs650 cr additional expense
2.New aeronautical telecom network system to enhance air safety
3.Major air mishap averted at Chennai airport
4.PAC to examine CAG reports on KG Basin, Air India
5.US national deported from Delhi's IGI airport
6.For Mumbai Airport is a private bus shuttle the only solution?
7.Broker's missing son did return to India
8.Airports in terrorists? sights?
9.Shooter Sanjeev Rajput's rifle broken
10.Chidambaram unhappy with AI?s financial revival plan by SBI Caps
11.No clause in pact violated, Swiss airlines tells India
12.One missed chance to land led to 30-min wait
13.Jet Plane Owner Witnesses Reno Air Tragedy

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