The idea of flying cars, airmobiles, personal aircraft, skycars or Chuck Berry's New Jersey highway "Flight de Ville" is pretty much as old as powered flight. If only the Wright brothers' Flyer could have been crossed successfully with Henry Ford's Model-T, then the US might have taken collectively to the air around the time of World War I.
It never quite happened this way, and probably just as well. Imagine the number of accidents that might have occurred. Then double, treble or quadruple them. Flying is a science, an art and a skill. Aircraft need to be well-constructed and dutifully maintained.
Pilots must be level-headed when skies around them darken or spin. They must cope with engine failures, seized-up landing gear, winds that hound them off course. They must know where they are, and certainly how high or low they are flying and whether up or down and in what direction.
These things might seem obvious, yet even the most experienced pilot occasionally loses it. Vertigo can strike unexpectedly. Flying through dense banks of dirty clouds can trick the mind's eye when everything looks like nothing and down is up and up down. And what would you do if a block of ice got stuck in your Pitot tube?
Ah, but if you could stretch to a Moller International SkyCar equipped with the latest NASA-developed SATS (Small aircraft transportation system) technology, such scaredy-cat concerns would surely vanish quicker than a Saturn rocket. NASA's "highways in the sky" computer navigation system promises to turn the sci-fi dream of a popular flying car into digital-age reality. Imagine clambering aboard with the nuclear family (or not) into your Ferrari-red Moller, opening the garage door of your Mon Oncle-style home -- by remote control, of course -- pressing a button or two, heading onto the freeway and, Jiminy Cricket, vaulting into the azure blue on trips to Wal-Mart, Dairy Queen and Taco Bell, and back home in time to catch a repeat of the Jetsons without a single hair turning grey in the process.
So when the American magazine Engineer said that a SATS event scheduled earlier this month at Danville Regional Airport, Virginia, might "one day be viewed as one of the most significant milestones in aviation history," it was time to take to the air.
Across the Atlantic, on board a chicken-or-fish jumbo, I studied the Engineer. "SATS uses finely tuned GPS satellite technology", it read, "to allow plane-to-plane communication and provide cockpit displays showing the precise location of every aircraft in a flying zone. It will remove the need for expensive ground-based equipment, and enable large numbers of planes to operate safely around a small airport. SATS also makes it possible for one pilot to operate as safely as two by programming in pre-determined flight paths."
I dreamed happily of weird and wonderful experimental sky cars flying into and out of Danville. And, of zooming about in one aloft in the Confederate sky like some 21st-century rodeo jock. It wasn't exactly like this at Danville. As a retired real estate developer and Cessna pilot -- who had flown himself in for the occasion -- told me, "I don't think we're gonna see these things flying for another quarter-century; I can't figure out whether I think that's a good or a bad thing. Will flying ever be the same when anyone can just get in, turn the key and go anywhere they want?"
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