Hi all...


This topic got me thinking about "aerocars" and during a night of tossing and
turning it occurred to me....

Most (if not all) aerocar "inventors" have their approach backwards....

They are trying to take a CAR and make it into a plane....

Which isnt impossible.....as long as your plane is capable of being say 750 to
1500 pounds overwieght......which means you need a REALLY big plane to absorb
that kinda fat and/or your gonna have a plane that sucks performance wise (ie
barely flies)...

And they want to take car drivers and make them into pilots.....todays drivers
expect all kinds of luxuries.....lots of room, ac, stereo, big cushy seats,
tire burning amounts of HP etc etc....which all adds way too much wieght....

And besides anything shaped like a car is still gonna bite drag wise.......

So Lets turn this around!

Lets take pilots and make them car drivers....

Any ground "vehicle" that is even a bit quiter or roomier than most small
planes would keep a pilot happy......if they had virtually ANYTHING to drive
other than a bike when they got where they were going they would be thrilled...

So, instead....lets take a plane and make it into a car.....

And it seems to me the most obvious config for that is a canard design......

Make the front canards removable or configurable so that the provide 0/negative
lift when used in "car" mode......

make the front of the canard plane "breakable" about where the the rear wings
start....and thats where your gonna put 2 "rear " wheels....

Now you have a decently areodynamic 3 wheeled motorcyle/trike.....

For such a lightwieght ground vehicle you probably only need 10hp give or take
for decent acceleration and top speeds.....

What about an engine you say?

Screw messing with the aircraft engine....which would entail all sorts of heavy
drives/clutches/transmissions/removable parts/doing scary things to your very
important aircraft engine....and just generally doing things aircraft engines
arent designed/meant to do....

Instead, lets just carry a small 2nd engine to move our chopped off front of
the plane around.......

You could use a 2 stroke ultralight engine.....one model offered is roughly
27hp and weighs about 50 lbs....it might even have enough hp/torque to drive
your "car" with just a direct drive....or at worst a 2/3 speed
transmission/redrive.....

Now, obviously this "Burtan Trike" would be a death trapp if you got hit by
another car........but so are motorcyles....and small planes when you land very
badly for that matter....

So, if you went with something like this dont you think you could keep the
weight penalty down to say 200 lbs? over a straight airplane of similiar
design? more? maybe even less?

Just some wild thoughts here...

Blll