(BllFs6) wrote in
:

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


Ah, just blow off all that and carry one of these in the plane...

http://www.diblasi.com/home.htm ;-)

(even if it means you need to leave the wife at home to meet weight and
balance)

--
ET


"A common mistake people make when trying to design something
completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete
fools."---- Douglas Adams