It has been more than two years since its original announcement, and many thought the project had bitten the dust like so many others. Yet the people at Terrafugia remain firm in their idea of creating their own flying car, which goes by the name TF-X. The news is that the company has implemented a new design, and will evaluate a scale model inside a wind tunnel to check its stability.
A turbulent time for private flight
In recent times, the most important private flight initiatives suffered serious setbacks. On October 31, 2014, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise suffered a terrible accident, killing one of its pilots. The feeling is that space tourism will need decades to recover from such a blow, although Virgin Galactic has a great future opportunity with the launch of 39 satellites for the OneWeb constellation.
A little closer to the ground are the flying cars, and we still remember very well the accident of the Aeromobil prototype. Its pilot left the hospital practically unharmed, but the images showed us the flying car transformed into a metallic pretzel.
Even so, many believe that failure is just one more step on the long ladder toward success, and with that in mind we meet the people at Terrafugia again, who presented a new design for their TF-X vehicle. Granted: Terrafugia’s timeline has become completely distorted, a clear demonstration of how difficult it is to bring a flying car to market. It still has to place the Transition on the market, with its debut now projected for 2017 and a price close to 400 thousand dollars. In 2013, Terrafugia said the TF-X would require a little more than a decade in research and development, which dampens the enthusiasm of many, but advances are accumulating, and the new design itself is good proof of that.
The next step is to evaluate the aerodynamic performance of the TF-X in the Wright Brothers wind tunnel run by MIT, although this will not be done with a full prototype, but with a scale model (1:10, according to the available information). It is exactly the same tunnel used to study the Transition models, so it is undoubtedly a familiar process for Terrafugia. The wait will be long, however, we can be very patient. This century owes us a flying car one way or another...
