I'm in New York City for a few days for a funeral, but was fortunate to be included in the quarterly tri-state area Master CFI teleconference organized by my friend David Dempsey. Carl Dietrich, CEO of Terrafugia, was on the call and he gave us a great rundown on the Transition, a new Light Sport Aircraft that can also be driven on the road. After the call, I started thinking about how much fun it would be to put down a deposit and own this vehicle; you may want to think about it too.
Much has been written in the last few weeks about the aircraft, since it had its first test flight in March. But not much has been made of whether it’s a Flying Car or a Roadable Airplane and I can now definitely tell you that...
it's the latter. While you might think the difference is semantic, it’s clearly not and I’ll explain why in a moment.
A Good Beginning
Carl told us that he started saving his money for pilot training when he was 8 years old and later went to MIT to get a degree in aerospace engineering. Not only did he pick up a degree, but he found a wife and business partner, which is an awesome combination. His wife Anna is the Chief Operating Officer. After working summers as an intern at large aerospace companies, he realized that he wanted something different. When the Light Sport Aircraft rule was released in 2004, he found his calling—to build a totally different kind of aircraft for general aviation.
One of the key nuggets that he found at MIT was a survey of 1,500 pilots that was conducted in 2002. It identified four major obstacles to the growth of general aviation:
- High sensitivity to weather preventing the completion of trips
- Relatively high cost
- Limited mobility on the ground at destination airports
- Long total door-to-door travel time
For example, a survey of New England airports showed that only a third had any type of car rental or other ground transportation available, aside from borrowing the airport manager’s car. As a pilot, it’s always been obvious to me that if we truly accounted for the time to drive to the airport, load the baggage, preflight the plane and find a car at the other end, the potential time savings are minimal, particularly on shorter trips. Thus for me, the psychic benefits of soaring above the traffic below are usually a better justification for flying than any potential time savings. Of course on the cost side, image how much you’d save if you could “hangar” your aircraft at home in the garage.
When the Light Sport Aircraft (LSA) rule came out, Carl and his cofounders recognized it as a game changer which opened a window into a mature industry. Rather than invest $100 million to certify a new airplane under Part 23, a company could now certify a Light Sport Aircraft for $10 million. To validate their business plan, they submitted it to MIT’s 100K Competition, which uses a panel of outside venture capitalists and others to judge new business proposals. This pitted them against 164 other business plans, including far sexier industries like biotech and Web 2.0 businesses. When they emerged as the runner-up, they knew they had a winner.
A Roadable Aircraft
"Flying Car” is a phrase made popular in the 1950’s when other aircraft companies sold a limited number of airplanes that could be converted for use on the highway. But the words conjure up an image of a vehicle that you’ll drive around town in your daily life and occasionally use to go flying. Along those lines, one of the conference call participants said that he was disappointed that the Terrafugia Transition couldn’t be used to drive down a highway and simply fly over the stopped traffic ahead of him! I think we’d all like to do that.
By contrast a “Roadable Aircraft” implies that it’s primarily an airplane that you can drive on the road if you wish. A couple times during the call, Carl mentioned that it wouldn’t be your only car, but didn’t go into detail why. I was curious about why, if I owned a Transition, wouldn’t I use it as my primary car and drive it everywhere. I later surmised that day-to-day driving would quickly cause my vehicle to reach the Rotax 912S’s 1500 TBO, requiring an added expense that most car owners don’t face. To verify that, I emailed Carl and he sent this response:
"You would not need another vehicle, but it is likely that one would own a separate car for short trips that do not require flying. I know a few people who own very expensive cars, but few of them commute in those very expensive cars (they often own another reasonably nice car for daily driving, but they only take the super-sports-car out when they want to impress or have fun)... a Transition owner would similarly have the ability to take their vehicle to the store to run errands, but it is unlikely that they would choose to do so on a regular basis because of the combination of the exposure risk and the 1500 hour TBO on the Rotax -- operating an aircraft like the Transition is still more expensive than operating a car for those reasons, and normal cars are perfectly suited for normal 'non-flying' use.
"The Transition is the ideal weekend getaway vehicle -- or a fantastic vehicle to use when you want to impress someone (a client or a date for example), or if you happen to have a long commute, it could be used for that as well -- it is not designed to be the ideal vehicle for running errands around town. Of course if it is used on a daily basis for flying, I would not be surprised if people did run the occasional errand on their way home.
"So, it's not that it couldn't be used as a sole vehicle, but I don't expect that it will be used very often in that capacity."
Thanks for the explanation Carl! I later realized that if I were insuring a $200,000 Roadable Airplane, I probably wouldn’t want to expose it to the various dings that happen when you park a car while running errands. OK, so I’ll want to keep the Prius. But I’d still like to have a Terrafugia Transition in my garage!
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