DARPA Flying Car For The Military

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, the central research and development organization for the United States Department of Defense, is in the planning stages of developing a flying car for the military. A while back I wrote a post titled Flying Car To Be Unveiled in 2011, but it looks like the military doesn’t want to get left behind by the private sector.

The current concept called the Transformer, TX for short, is modeled after the 1960’s cartoon The Jetsons, where the car would work as a military SUV but also have the ability to fly when needed. This would allow the vehicle to go through rough terrain but also able to avoid high-risk routes and fly over known IEDs.

“A future platoon could fly into a specific location and provide direct boots-on-ground seizure of a critical location,” the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wrote in briefing materials about the project. “If they encounter overwhelming enemy forces, casualties or new orders, they can immediately extract to a new location.”

DARPA has a challenge in front of them with the development of the TX. First being “coming up with adaptive aerostructures and designing a propulsion system that meets DARPA’s requirements.” Another challenge is creating the vehicle to hold 4 passengers at 180 lbs each as well as another 350 lbs of cargo.

DARPA is not the first company to attempt to build a flying car. Terrafugia’s Transition began flying on March 19, 2009 and can be preordered for $194,000 and will be available next year. The Moller Skycar has been in development for nearly 20 years, and at the time of this writing, has never flown. Not to mention countless others that have never received the press they may or may not deserve. “There’s no shortage of flying car concepts,” said Stephen Waller, TX program manager.

So far the only military branch interested in the TX is the U.S. Marine Corps, which believes the flying car could have potential uses in medical evacuations and transporting troops. Marine Lt. Col. Ed Tovar, who is working on the DARPA project, said that the Air Force wasn’t interested because the TX doesn’t fly high and fast, the Army was concerned that it would compete with helicopters, and it just wasn’t “cool enough’ for the Navy. “But I liked it,” said Tovar. “It resonated with me.”

It could be as many as 4 years before DARPA begins test flying the TX and no telling when the price of the Transition will get to a reasonable level. So until then we will continue to sit in traffic. But there is hope that someday, hopefully sooner than later, we will be souring the skies in a shiny new flying car.

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