The Flying Car

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following piece was submitted by one of our loyal readers who asked ever-so-nicely if we could consider printing a story on a very unique test drive. Well, we appreciated his constant references to automobiles along the way and decided to give him a break…

MANILA, Philippines - I found it rather disconcerting to steer with my feet. Left foot, left turn. Right foot, right turn. Both feet, brakes. I crossed my arms so as not to inadvertently steer with my hands again, which on this vehicle has no affect at all while we are on the ground. On the radio a could hear a crackling that could jeopardize my recently acquired license. “Follow the yellow line! Follow the yellow line!”

The vehicle was not exactly a car. It was an aircraft – a Cessna 150. According to my ground instructor, almost all pilots earned their wings on the C-150. Although technically not a car, the Cessna shares similarities with its ground bound cousins. The C-150 is a two-seater aircraft and the accommodations are reminiscent of the classic Mini – shoulder to shoulder intimacy with a passenger, basic controls, nimble, light, responsive and lots of fun which basically makes up for the Spartan interiors and the absence of creature comforts.

The power plant is a hundred horsepower Avco-Lycoming. Horizontally opposed, air cooled like an old school Porsche. This engine is so similar to its automotive equivalent that it is possible to run using ordinary 93+ octane fuel. And although diminutive for today’s automotive standards, on this craft, this engine can generate G-forces akin to those you feel on a roller coaster.

For geeks like me who watch too much Discovery channel, the idea of a flying car was proposed by numerous engineers and institutions as a solution to congestion. I hate to be a wet blanket but going vertical will take you from ground congestion to air congestion. It took us about 20 expensive minutes in the holding area before we got the “cleared for take-off” message from the tower.

The take-off was not as complicated as I imagined. Full power, full speed, flaps up and I could already sense that the machine was very eager to fly. At 65 knots on the airspeed indicator, I pulled the yoke (the steering wheel on an automobile) and the most amazing feeling engulfed and inundated my whole being. I was airborne. I heard my flight instructor say the sweetest words ever uttered to me by a man: “We have lift-off!” If I were alone in the cockpit, I would have cried. This was my Everest! A new frontier conquered. The little boy in me was overjoyed.

We maintained full power, which is around 24 hundred RPMs until we broke the clouds at 2000 feet. We cruised north for a few minutes over Manila Bay. The skies above NAIA and Metro Manila in general prohibits flight training. At 2500 feet above Plaridel Bulacan, my flight instructor gave me several maneuvers to execute. I right away learned how different theory is from practice. Technically, I knew how to fly after finishing my ground course quite proficiently. Actual flying requires a lot of feel. The instruments lag a bit and you have to anticipate corrections. The best way to control the craft is to use the horizon. Too much land and you are pitching down, too much sky and you are pitching up. If the horizon is slanted, the plane is banking and with practice one can tell the degree of bank based on the slanting of the horizon. This is the basic way to fly for VFR or Visual Flight Rule in aviation speak. But it is necessary to have a good weather and miles of visibility. As I executed the flight maneuvers, I was very careful not to put the plane into a stall. (According to my ground instructor, you lose your lift and fall like a stone.) All planes have a stall warning device including this one, but at that moment it wasn’t working. In theory, to recover from a drop one has to point his nose down before pitching up. In any case, I had full faith in my flight instructor to help me recover in case I messed things up.

After a couple of hours in the skies, we headed back to Manila, flying over the sea with the coast on my port side (left) My instructor took over the controls and entered the NAIA traffic pattern. We aligned ourselves to the runway which reminded me of video games. We descended, flaps down, nose up, power off and the Cessna glided the last hundred of feet and touched smoothly, main gear first, then I lowered the nose gear and started applying the brakes. Again I was careful not to steer with my hands, which I still have to unlearn with years of driving a car.

As I mused on this new experience, I couldn’t help but think about the kinship of the aircraft with the car. In fact big automotive institutions have close ties with aviation. The most notable are BMW in which some experts say that the spinning prop logo came from the airplane propeller (while some dispute this saying that the blue and white simply is the flag of Bavaria), Spyker whose logo is in fact a propeller, Mitsubishi who manufactured countless Zero fighters and Rolls Royce who provided the power plant for the iconic Spitfire.

The kinship of the car and the plane may be the springboard for numerous pursuits of the flying car, we’ve seen it in Hollywood, in literature and the more serious concepts are featured in the Discovery channel. Some concepts fly in theory, others fly virtually. But for all intents and purposes and in my humble opinion, the flying car has already been invented. And it’s called an airplane.