Woburn (MA) – A company called Terrafugia is currently developing a plane that transitions into a car. For a mere $148,000 you too can own a Transition. When completed in late 2009, it will have an average cruising speed of 115 mph, gets over 25 mpg in the air. It’s classified as a Light Sport Utility vehicle and weighs only 1320 lbs. It will be powered by a 100 hp, 4-stroke Rotax 912 ULS. This engine is FAA certified to run on both 91+ octane autogas as well as 100LL. The same engine is used to power the rear push-prop and front wheels, using a clutch-based transmission for power selection. The Rotax engine is certified to allow a 5% ethanol mixture.
The key feature of Transition is its folding wing. With the push of a button, and when the vehicle is turned off and parked, the wing can extend out for air flight, or retract into large, wide vertical posts near the car for normal driving and garage storage. Concerns over the hinge mechanism may be the biggest remaining hurdle for early adopters, however. Terrafugia has a patent-pending for a system they’ve developed which meets all requirements of air-use. They also point out that military aircraft currently use various folding wing designs.
Transition’s wing loading is approximately 8.8 lbs per square foot, which is comparable to light sport or general purpose aviation aircraft. They currently have a working prototype wing design, however it is machine mounted and is not part of the actual aircraft. All of the pictures and images seen are either from a 1/5th scale prototype that was built and flown, or from computer generated animation.
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