Professor Paul Mahler unveils the Skycar, a vertical takeoff vehicle capable of 390 mph and 30,000-foot altitudes using eight Wankel rotary engines. While initial prototypes cost $1 million, mass production aims to drop prices to $25,000 by 2002, with four-passenger tests scheduled for August 2000. Supported by NASA and Boeing, the aircraft features redundant digital systems, built-in parachutes, and a 900-mile range, challenging highway lobbies while promising efficient urban transit and potential military applications like border patrol. [Automatically generated summary]
Can you imagine in your mind a personal vehicle like a car that would not require a runway, would take off vertically and then proceed at a cruising speed in excess of 350 miles an hour with a top end of maybe, say, 600 miles an hour.
Gets about 13 miles to the gallon.
Could fly as high as 30,000 feet, carry four passengers, you know, like a car, except a sky car.
Well, you know what?
Somebody sent me something about it, and I said, can't be.
It just simply can't be.
But it is.
And I found the company, and I found the company's name, and I hunted them down, and I got the chairman of the board to come on.
Dr. Paul Mahler is going to be on here in a moment.
He's going to tell you about the sky car.
This is not, excuse the horrid little pun, but not pie in the sky.
This is a real thing that you may be able to own.
I think you can even buy one.
You can put one on order or something like that now.
You know, put a down payment on one or something.
I don't know.
But I mean, a sky car.
Think about that.
Kind of like the movie that we all saw, which I can't recall the title of right now with the sky cars in it.
Anyway, Paul Mahler is coming up shortly, so stay right where you are.
We're going to be talking about a car just like the car you have.
Sort of.
Small difference.
It flies.
Now, Paul Mahler, chairman of the board.
Dr. Mahler founded the company, has served as the company's president since its formation in 1972.
He founded SuperTrap Industries, was chief executive officer at as he founded Mahler International to develop powered lift aircraft.
Actually, SuperTrap became one of the most recognized names in high-performance engine silencing systems.
Interesting, huh?
Doctor, under The good doctor's direction, Mueller International completed contracts with NASA, DOSC, DARPA and NRL, Harry Diamond Labs, Hughes Aircraft Company, oh my.
California Department of Transportation in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force engines.
So you know who you're dealing with here.
Dr. Mahler has received 43 patents, including the first U.S. patent, on a fundamentally new form of powered lift aircraft.
He is a world-renowned feature lecturer and guest speaker on next-generation transportation systems.
He holds a master's in engineering and Ph.D. from McGill University.
Dr. Mahler was a professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering at the University of California, Davis, 1963 through 75, where he developed aeronautical engineering programs or the program there.
But we've now modified that to be a bit more efficient in forward flight, and that's why it takes on the, I guess you'd call it more of the Batmobile type of look.
We've had periods of a lot of obesity whenever we fly a new version, and we flew, interestingly enough, our first aircraft in 1965, and it was actually covered by Walter Conkite at that time.
But it's one of those things where you go through periods of activity, and then you go through lots of periods of research and development.
And so people tend to forget, since these periods are usually about 10 years apart.
Yeah, I think that's really probably the most critical element.
There's been many efforts, as you probably know, over the years, to build sort of air cars or converter planes, vehicles that could land at an airport and you could leave the wings behind and drive around.
But the problem is you still have to land at that airport.
Yeah, it was a compromised machine, and in particular, it still required a runway, which is so limiting as to make it almost impossible for the average person to use it.
Would this realistically be something that could be you know, I say in a person's driveway, I'm sure there'd be a lot of downward thrust, so you'd have to have maybe a special room or not.
It generates a more intense wind locally at where you land it, but some distance away, say 40 or 50 feet away from the landing point, it's a lot less wind because we actually move a lot less amount of air when we fly.
Well, the key thing, and it's certainly the thing that's caused us the most grief as far as development over the last 30 years, has been the power plant to do just what you said.
Because, of course, it needs to be very powerful, it needs to be very light, and it has to have a lot of other attributes that are important for this to be practical.
But certainly low-cost, reliability are essential, and it has to be very powerful for its weight.
And we did develop this kind of engine.
This has taken on probably as much of our time, if not more, over the last 30 years than the Skycar itself.
It's pretty close to kerosene, which normally a gasoline engine won't run on, an internal combustion engine.
But this engine, which I can't take credit for, the fundamental design, it's based on the Wankel principle, which was invented by Felix Wankel in the late 50s.
Okay, then you are close to the potential of that engine.
We have, of course, done a lot of things quite different from the original design, but still, the original design has to take 90% of the credit for the potential of this engine.
Oh, between the Wankel and the regular piston, it's much easier to explain a piston than it is a Wankel.
It's a triangular-shaped rotor that operates in a peanut-shaped chamber, rotating in a fairly complex way, but actually resulting from two simple motions, two simple circular motions.
And it ends up being rotary in the sense that everything goes around.
There's no reversing of forces like in a piston.
It does trace an odd shape, but it accomplishes it with only two moving parts.
And that's the most remarkable thing as far as I'm concerned, is that this particular principle, which is pretty sophisticated because it is a four-stroke pinchable, like the four-stroke automotive piston engine, it accomplishes it with only two moving parts.
that's that's what makes it so great of course we've done i've got an awful question for you I had two cars with a Wankel engine in it, and I really liked it.
But you know, I found something that nobody ever noticed.
I found I used to like to put a compass on my car, you know, up on the dashboard.
We've had the 200, the two-passenger up about 200 times, 50 of those times remotely when we did it with radio control, and the other 150 times when I was flying it.
Well, I had one tiny accident one time when I was operating on the asphalt, and I went off the asphalt and into a dirty area, and the dust that was blowing up, I couldn't see what I was going, and I ran into a car or a spark.
Of course, I'm concerned about my longevity, too, so I'm obviously going to be as cautious as possible.
But I've also had, I would say, some very good people working for me, and I owe them a great deal because all they had to do was make a mistake in the electronics or in the mechanics, and I wouldn't be talking to you at this time.
So then, really, when this was fully developed years downline, there would be sky lanes, and that's why there would be automatic control because you couldn't trust people any more than you can trust them out on the interstate now.
That, yeah, even less so, of course, because you're going very fast, and you can imagine what a drunk driver might do up in that kind of environment.
We've always joked that really in the future, you may end up, you know, a drunk driver may end up in the wrong city, but he's going to arrive safely because he's just going to be taken there on his own accord.
So let's say I got in here in Parump, Nevada, and wanted to go to Las Vegas, which is 65 miles to the east of me.
I would just say I would just punch Las Vegas or the coordinates for Las Vegas, and there would be some coordination that would take place by computer, and off it would go.
I mean, ICARS people think I'm exaggerating the effects, but it's truly a magic carpet experience because when you're in a helicopter, you feel like you're being lifted up by a crane.
And that's pretty impressive, but it's quite different from sitting in something that lifts you up from your seat.
And the experience I had was truly a magic carpet.
There's been one other person that's flown it, a chief test pilot for New Zealand Air, who's one of our directors, who described it exactly the same way.
He's got 25,000 hours in commercial planes like the DC-10, and he said it's truly a magic carpet sensation.
We have about a four and a half acre industrial research site in which we have our facility.
And we have a huge crane out back that goes 100 and some feet in the air.
So much of the testing during the early phases, when you're debugging it, so to speak, you have it attached to the crane, and then you detach it when you're ready to demonstrate it.
At the same time, there's an onboard computer that's independent of the human that is making sure that the power of the engines is adjusted at the same time to make sure the vehicle is always level, precisely where you put it.
So the computer controls the power to the engines to make sure the vehicle stays in exactly where you want it, and then the vanes decide whether you want to hover or go forward.
You know, software is always an issue, and that's why we have what's called a voting redundant system.
We have four digital computers, and we have voting involved, which decides if one of these have crashed, and we kick it out of the system.
And, of course, you are also warned that one of your computers has crashed, and so you have a warning to decide to continue the flight or get down.
But you're right, redundancy is important because certainly initially, even though we don't have near the amount of code that Windows 95 has, we still have to be concerned.
We built one for bridge inspection for the state of California and other vehicles for various military applications, some of which maybe they don't want me to talk about.
But any vehicle, I mean, it's a perfect observation platform because it can go up and hover at, you know, 300, 400 feet or 3,000 or 4,000 feet and then return in a very short period of time.
Aircraft, you know, good aircraft, and I and when I use that term, I'm probably talking about home-built aircraft, which are, you know, if you're familiar with that field, are pretty state-of-the-art.
Some of these home-built four-passenger aircraft are getting 20-plus miles to the gallon, flying at close to 300 miles an hour.
Pretty impressive what they're doing out there.
And so this, when it's flying as an aircraft, is competitive with existing really good composite airplanes.
It, of course, burns a lot of fuel when it's hovering, so you don't spend a lot of time hovering.
No, it's like the hummingbird.
We liken it to the hummingbird.
The hummingbird is a very high metabolism, high-energy creature.
Well, I've always been extremely excited about the I grew up on the side of a mountain on a chicken farm in Canada, and I was pretty isolated.
And so, you know, the idea of having the degree of freedom that a hummingbird, and there were a lot of hummingbirds around, so I saw this early in my life, you know, three, four, five years old.
And that was just, you know, it was obviously something you couldn't help but envy.
I'm not certain that that was really what inspired me as much as it symbolized my own desire.
But in any case, it was the perfect symbol of what I would like to be able to do.
And, you know, I've pretty much been on that path ever since.
I wasn't a particularly excited student as far as academic skills is concerned until I decided that I had to get some kind of education if I was going to do what I wanted to do.
The thing that would be most rewarding to me personally would just see this in some production mode where people start to be able to have access to it.
I mean, it's nice that I have it, but ultimately my dream is that this vehicle is available for the public.
Theoretically, a five-year-old could use it and not get in trouble.
I mean, they may not go where he wants to go, but he's going to be safe.
And that's so critical.
We kill over 40,000 people a year because there's, you know, half of those because of drunk drivers and the other half because of people that are drowsy or inexperienced or whatever.
Now, an obvious question is: how are you going to keep these things from running into each other?
I know that big aircraft now have this new avoidance system that tells one to go high and one to go low if they're on a collision course or left or right or whatever.
Well, you wouldn't really face, there should be nobody in conflict with you because, excuse me, on one level, say you take 5,000 feet of space out of the airway and you operate each level at about 200 feet apart.
On any one level, all the vehicles would be going at the same speed in the same direction.
At a level 200 feet below that, everybody's going the same speed in the same direction, about 15 degrees different from the one above.
Of course, they charge according to the risk and what their profitability needs to be, and so they'll just adjust the rates accordingly.
Hopefully, it's a competitive business and remains that way so that everybody has that option.
But you're right, that if it does live up to the reliability that Boeing apparently has established that it should have in a study that they undertook, we would expect insurance to be very low.
Well, it would reduce the way it's used, but, you know, quite frankly, I think the car companies are probably the rational source for manufacturing these.
I don't, for example, have the facility to produce this vehicle in very large numbers.
And although certainly we're looking for the kind of funding that would get us into modest production at some point in time, no matter how successful we were, we wouldn't be the only manufacturer.
Well, I don't know that we'd be snapped up, but we'd be a producer of product and other companies would probably license some of the patented technology we have.
No, I think that's probably not the case with the automotive companies.
They tend to play catch-up.
And usually they're playing catch-up with the Japanese.
So, you know, I know that the Japanese study everything I do because every time I build an unmanned vehicle for the military, I ended up seeing a similar vehicle coming out of Japan.
So I know they're watching me very carefully, but I'm not certain any American company takes me that seriously.
The nacelle for purposes of containment of the fan should something go wrong is lined sort of bulletproof.
Keep the fans inside if something went wrong.
unidentified
Wonderful.
Now, I fly also.
My dad was a pilot.
And he told me about a situation.
I never did encounter this yet flying, but he had a situation where he was approaching on landing, actually, final at El Paso International Airport in a light plane, Cessna.
And he hit a thermal that actually tilted his plane on its side.
And he had to put a lot of power in to bring it out and save himself.
Is there anything like that that might happen to the M400 and it recovered from something like that?
We've been approached recently by half a dozen companies that would like to do that.
We certainly are looking to working with them because we'd like to have such a simulator as a sort of a test or a training session, so Speak for anybody who's going to be buying one of these.
Yeah, so we could actually, you know, the software today with 450, 500 megahertz computers, you can really get right down to almost perfect simulation.
And actually, it turns out that this is probably a pretty boring vehicle, though, in that scheme of things, because it is so easy to fly that there's not a lot of skill.
Whereas some of these flight simulators, when you're trying to replicate a real airplane, still require the skill that's typical of flying aircraft.
Well, I'm a ham operator, and I have a big 100-foot tower up.
And when you put up an antenna, no matter whether you cause interference or not, if anybody sees a flicker on their TV within a mile, they're knocking on your door.
It's the cost of a very high-performance helicopter, which comes close to a million dollars.
But more importantly, for the average person, this vehicle is inexpensive in its design and can be produced for the price of a modest automobile, perhaps $25,000.
So that would require large numbers, and that's where we hope this would be within the next five to five thousand.
I'm talking about a basic vehicle that does the job of getting it from point A to point B. If you want all the luxuries in it, of course, it would become more expensive.
Do you know that there are many who believe that Jacques should come out of retirement because there are many who believe that he should be the first contact, should first contact come?
No, I haven't, but that doesn't change my opinion because I personally believe that the people I've talked to are as open and fair and honest as you can have it, and I don't have to see it myself.
In fact, it would be highly coincidental that I would ever see one in view of the fact that they're not just everywhere.
But I've certainly talked to people that have had extremely close encounters.
Mine wasn't quite that close, about 150 feet above my head, Doctor, a triangle, noiseless, not flying, doing, oh, I don't know, maybe 30 miles an hour or less.
Because we've studied, in conjunction with a friend of mine at the Stanford Research Institute, we've studied the physiological effects of some of these people and being able to determine a lot about the propulsion system by correlating that with physiological effects.
He's chairman of the board of Mueller International, and they're producing the Skycar.
It's a car.
It's something that would go in your driveway and take you where you want to go at about 350 miles an hour or better after taking off, and of course, then being able to land vertically.
Can you imagine that?
Seats for people is going to be tested in August.
Kind of like a magic carpet.
That's what I used to play when I was a little tyke.
Before it turns inside out, and then you break a bone.
But then I traversed to a terrible accident in which I had a compound fracture of my arm while hang gliding and crashing.
And I've tried various forms of it, and now that I've got a little bit of income, I've been dying to buy an ultralight because I thought that would be the next best way to fly.
But what you have sounds safer, more fun.
I see you advertise here.
It says, no traffic, no red lights, no speeding tickets, just direct, quiet transportation point A to B. That's correct.
Did you go through the same early attempts, some tragic at flight, or did you proceed to your doctorate directly?
Well, they did because I was pretty much of a risk type person.
I did a lot, even though I never got in trouble with aircraft.
I've broken maybe almost every bone in my body once, and I've got literally hundreds of stitches from racing go-karts in Canada for the national championship and running around with motorcycles and racing and various other hockey, playing hockey, and broke my ankle in a racquetball and those kinds of things, broke my neck in motorcycling.
So I've had my share of accidents, but interesting enough, never in an aircraft.
And first of all, I do have a few experiences jumping off our roof with an umbrella, but I found it was better to use my sister's cat, tie it on, and throw it, and that didn't hurt so bad.
But with the aircraft, I'm wondering, Dr. Mahler, if you were featured in Popular Mechanics ever, or maybe several times, I don't know.
But the article did, the cover did show the four-seater, which then was delayed, of course, as we went through the production of an engine to go with that.
You really hit upon the issue in this whole process because I devote an inordinate amount of time in that area, you know, generating capital through other businesses, going out there and generating other products and licensing those products, building unmanned vehicles for the military or engines for the military.
But mostly, I have to say, I have a number of wonderful stockholders that have joined me over the years.
I have over 400 stockholders who have a vision, a really great, compatible vision with what I'm trying to do and have been patiently working with me for that period of time.
A wildcard line, you're on the air with Professor Mueller.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi.
Bart in Greenville, South Carolina.
Yes, sir.
Dr. Mueller, at the turn of the century, hemp was outlawed because it was too much of a competition against the cotton growers, the cotton growers that it outlawed.
I would think that what you're making is a big competition for the airlines.
Is there a possibility that you can envision that airline lobbyists would grease the politicians to the point to where it would take an extremely long time or forever to get certification and get airspace for what you're trying to do?
Well, in a sense, it's correct that we would be competitors, but at the same time, keep in mind, I don't see myself as being necessarily a major manufacturer.
There's nothing that would prevent me from licensing an airline company.
We've certainly talked at length with Boeing as a potential candidate, and they've done extensive studies on the Skycar.
So I believe that ultimately the airlines or the auto industry or both will be involved in this technology.
And to some extent, it's just another product in their line.
I'm not trying to keep this to myself.
I'm just as happy to see joint participation in the future of this technology.
Well, that probably is maybe they don't want me to talk about that, but what they really said was three.
First off, they said the vehicle was impeccably technical.
They had no disagreement that the vehicle did everything we said it would do.
But they said they didn't want to invest.
Number one, they said they could never build something that sold for under a million dollars.
Two, they said that we would take away some of the business, and they didn't like that idea.
And three, they couldn't identify the market at this time, which, of course, is true, but that doesn't show much vision, of course.
We continue to dialogue with them, though, and so I don't give up on the fact that eventually they'll come around or somebody like Boeing will come around and recognize that this is a real opportunity.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Mueller.
unidentified
Hi.
Hey, Art Nett from New York City, listening to you on WABC.
Yes, sir.
Dr. Mueller, you've accomplished some tremendous breakthroughs and technical problems that you've conquered.
The other caller took out some of the ones for my sale, but just real quickly, the guys who said they couldn't see selling anything for $100 million or find a market for it sound very much like the people at Ewlett Packard who told Steve Wozniak, what would anybody want to do with a personal computer?
That's correct.
Well, my question to you still is this.
The federal government, the state, local governments have a tremendous investment in the infrastructure, the highway administration.
And you have, again, the auto industry and the airport industry who's going to attack you.
And I'm concerned about the environmentalists who will attack you also for the fact that you can't possibly have the gas mileage out of an aircraft that you can get out of a car.
Well, the missions are our missions of our engine are essentially non-existent.
It's one of our high points.
The California Air Resources Board just did an independent test of our engine and set the new standards for recreational vehicles in California based on our engine.
Well, we're better than an automobile in the operational mode to the extent that most of the emissions in an automobile is when it's idling or in traffic.
And we eliminate that.
So whatever emissions we produce, which are very low, an automobile produces low emissions primarily because they use a catalytic inverter.
But what we eliminate is this idle mode, which is really where most emissions come from.
unidentified
This is very exciting.
I'm just concerned that it's such a paradigm shift.
And, of course, it was also a very big shift when the automobile was invented.
They were running around with people and lanterns walking in front of them.
They were required to run in front of them with a lantern.
unidentified
I'm also thinking of the efficiency you'll gain in terms of transit time because you don't have to take circuitous routes to get from point A to point B. Right.
But this gentleman is one of the most interesting people you've ever had on your show and also one of the most credible.
I wanted to just finish a little bit on this last caller.
He talked about a fuel economy.
We define fuel economy in terms of passenger miles per gallon, which is more important because what will really happen is you'll see one, two, three, four, and up to six passenger versions of this.
And if you hire this vehicle and you're a one person, you'll hire a one-person vehicle.
And you will get close to 100 passenger miles per gallon in a single passenger vehicle.
At the moment, but one might envision new drive systems.
As one imagines or believes that the things that fly in our sky and do things that they should not be able to do, one has to imagine drive systems of the future.
I have two questions for the doctor, but first I would like to tell you that about flying.
When I was about, I don't know, four or five years old, I lived in Long Island, New York, in Elmont, and I was a young child, and the wind would be blowing extensively, and I would have a large jacket, and I would open up my jacket, and I would literally be lifted off in the air for several seconds.
Doctor, being that you've been involved with this for over 30 years, and you'll probably know a lot more than you're actually speaking about, I would like to know, have there been any government agencies or any of the industries or military complex have come to you and threatened you to slow down, that they didn't want you to go as fast?
They've come to us and asked us to build unmanned versions of this for various military applications.
So I suppose because they have an interest in using it in that capacity, they tend to be on our side.
I would say more recently, people like Dennis Bushnell, Dr. Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA Langme, has been extremely supportive of this technology and has actually induced NASA to put our Skycar on their top priority list for development in the 21st century.
unidentified
That's a good thing.
Because you do realize there have been people that have been off.
Well, it's hard for any scientist not to be familiar with his work.
He's, you know, obviously being a part of much of the past electrical activity.
And we've looked at some of that, but it doesn't fit our particular configuration at the moment, even though there are elements of his work that I'm very interested in.
The vehicle can function with and still hover with one engine failed.
It can continue to fly with as many as six of the eight engines failed, but of course it can't land that way.
So you have to pop the parachutes.
So if you were in this dire state of affairs, perhaps you ran into a flock of geese or something and ate a bunch of them, you then would be faced with finding yourself a nice clear field that you can pop the parachutes and land in.
But other than that extreme case, we have no critical components in the aircraft.
unidentified
Wonderful.
Second question I have is about the wing.
Is it a fully symmetrical airfoil or semi-symmetrical?
No, but certainly what we've done in the last 10 years has been engine developed, and that is always subject to improvements because you're always wanting to get better specific fuel consumption.
You always want to get your mileage of this vehicle up, and so we continue to work on improved technologies in the power plant.
We've done about as good as we can in the airframe.
So right now it's left up to finding more efficient ways to power the aircraft.
Well, there is a siege underway at KPFA in Berkeley, California.
And I just received the following.
I have no way, of course, of knowing whether this is accurate or not, but it simply says, Comrades, I'm writing this from inside the occupied studio of KPFA Radio.
At about 6:05 p.m., the news department interrupted the story they were reporting to do live coverage of the attempt by Pacifica's hired thugs, in quotes, to eject one Dennis Bernstein from the station.
Dennis had just finished doing his program, Flashpoints, during which he had played parts of a press conference held earlier today by KPFA supporters, opponents of the Pacific Corporation.
Almost immediately, the air went dead a few minutes later.
Broadcasting resumed with a taped speech which made no reference to what was happening at KPFA or Pacifica.
At the moment, the police are beginning to arrest people in the room where I am.
There are several hundred of us inside and outside the station.
I assume at least several dozen have been arrested so far.
I have no way of knowing whether this is accurate, but I am getting several faxes in the same vein.
And we'll try and, we'll try and, there's always two sides to every story.
So we would have no way of knowing what actually is going on.
But if I could interview somebody from there, if this situation is still fluid and still going on, I will, of course, endeavor to do it for you.
So an interesting situation certainly is going on in San Francisco right now.
And as developments, as I become aware of them, I'll get them to you.
All right, back to Professor Mueller and the air car, the flying car, the flying car.
I'd like to ask Dr. Mueller about the methods his air car will use for navigation.
I'm assuming it will utilize some combination of GPS and ground-based stations for accurate positioning, but it will still have to interact greatly with air traffic control, regardless of the altitudes it cruises at.
Well, it uses, as you said, GPS and certainly many of the existing technologies.
In addition, to improve the accuracy of positioning of the vehicles, the FA is introducing geostationary satellites specifically to be used with the GPS.
That combination is going to be able to position you very precisely at all times within a few feet.
And of course, they have something called ADS, which is a communication network between a central control station and the Skycar or any other vehicle that utilizes this kind of controlled airspace that we're talking about.
We have a videotape of a number of very well-done programs.
The Smithsonian Institute did a series called the Invention Series, and they had a segment on the Skycar, which is very professionally done.
There's a company in Europe, again, an affiliate of Discovery, that did Extreme Machines that was shown on the Learning Channel and other programs, which we include.
And then we also include the piece that Peter Jennings did called the Cutting Edge Technology on Primetime News.
So it's about, I guess, about a total of a half an hour that shows many of the aircraft flying, because, of course, in each one of these segments, they take pieces of some of the history of the aircraft.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Professor Mueller.
unidentified
Hi.
Well, I'll tell you what, what a pleasure.
I just want to say first, Art Every Night, because I'm falling asleep.
I listen to your show, and I say a quick prayer for you and yours.
Thank you.
So everything gets better.
Dr. Mueller, back in 1990, I picked up a popular mechanics book magazine, and I saw your car on the front cover, and I read the entire article, and I said, 10 years, I'll be driving one of those.
Yeah, that featured your car, which pertains to one of my questions.
They highlighted the fact that when there's multiple skycars in the air, they'll all be controlled by some kind of air traffic control system, and you really won't even have to put your hand on the stick.
I wonder if that's still in the works, if that's how you plan to do it.
It's really the only way this vehicle is going to have mass usage.
You can't imagine at these sort of speeds in this vehicle this small operating in a free mode where people would make decisions to change directions or anything like that.
Sure, if you stay out of this controlled airspace for us, which might be, as I suggest, something like 2,500-foot altitude at, say, 5,000 feet at another 2,500 feet at 22,000 feet, if you stay out of that, you could operate just like a conventional airplane flying around, controlling it and behaving if you want to.
I prefer to stay out of that region between you and I. In other words, for pleasure.
Yes, we develop the rotor power engine, which is based on the Wankel principle and get an engine that you can hold in your lap that puts out 100 horsepower.
unidentified
Exactly.
Well, just for the record art, I'm calling from Virginia City.
It was a ground effect machine with the idea that it could leave ground effect and fly.
It was circular shaped.
It really looked a lot like the so-called UFOs that people report.
A great deal of money was invested in it by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, and the Canadian government.
But it was a little bit ahead of its time in terms of concept and a little bit behind in terms of ability to execute on that concept.
So it really never worked much more than as a ground effect machine.
Actually, to be honest with you, it was very close to identical the way it operated from our first aircraft, the one we flew that I built in my garage.
Well, it could come to, although we've tried to stay away from military money except for unmanned vehicles because we enjoy the freedom of this being a purely commercial project.
Before I get into my question, before we go off at 5 o'clock, can you give the number out a few more times after I'll take it down?
Hi, Professor Mueller.
How are you?
Good, thank you.
I'm glad to speak with you.
I am a handicapped person.
Could a blind person conceivably fly this?
And I asked that question in sincerity.
And my other question is, you know how a hovercraft works with a helicopter or blowing all the air around and when they have trouble rescuing people with a basket, you could make something that you wouldn't have that much air blowing around with a hovercraft, maybe a basket with this type of engine or some type of thrusters built into it.
They're thinking of a device to keep the air away from the people that are in the water because they'll think I'm with you.
I think it would be much, much better than a helicopter.
It's certainly much less susceptible to the environment.
So that means it would be able to be much more stable.
And you have four major jets going down from the vehicle, air jets.
These could certainly be directed away from the person you're trying to rescue at some angle.
So I hadn't thought about that particular point that you just made, but I could see that being something we could deal with that a helicopter could not deal with.
His other question, he is a sightless person, and the way you've described the system, when it's really all together, you would almost imagine a sightless person could use it.
All you really do in this is, you know, you could go to a voice-actuated, we have used voice-actuated coding as well.
So rather than punching a number, you can just tell the computer where you want to go, and it'll take you there, and you'll be a passenger during the entire flight.
Well, I think you're going to see this just because of the thermal nature of transportation today and most of the major cities, there has to be some alternative.
And really, if you look around, you know, what better than a three-dimensional world trying to solve a two-dimensional problem rather than a one-dimensional highway system.
It can do everything the helicopter can do, and it does everything an airplane does, and that's just exactly what these people need if they're creating.
unidentified
That means that if they buy them in South America or wherever, and they're just a citizen of the country, what implications would that make for immigration?
Well, I think it gives them another tool if you're trying to deal with the border patrol options, because since you can land anywhere and you can move very quickly, you know, you certainly would have another source for protecting our boundaries if that's your, if that, if that's what you're doing.
I mean, it's not, you know, no single vehicle is going to be utilized all for good.
And so you're absolutely right that the one thing you wouldn't want to have is have a vehicle like this in the hands of the drug traffickers unless you had the authorities with the same vehicle.
Maybe we have to have a souped up model for the authorities.
His company is producing, is going to produce, no, is producing the flying car.
It will seat four.
It kind of looks like the Batmobile.
You can see it on a link from my website at www.artbell.com.
By the way, we're covering one other story or trying to right now.
That's the KPFA siege, as we've been told, and there have apparently been quite a few arrests already.
Keith just put up a link to their audio, their live audio, and so you can hear what they're doing.
They appear to be playing music at the present time.
I'd like to get somebody to interview perhaps next hour, if that's possible.
So, if anybody out there has a number that will reach a live person at KPFA, please either fax it to me, and my fax number is area code 775-727-8499, or get it to my board operator in Oregon at Area Code 541-664-8829.
Now, I promised you we would get Dr. Mahler's number on again, and I promised the gentleman in Boston I would too.
So, if you'll have your pencil and paper ready, we'll do that right after this break.
One more quick note: Norm in San Francisco writes to me, Art, at 1 a.m., the local news on KCBS 740 in San Francisco reported that about two dozen protesters were, in fact, arrested tonight.
And the story, he says, you just read on the air is probably more true than the news report.
So, a fluid situation.
We don't know what's going on up there, but we'll find out.
All right, going back now to Professor Mueller and the flying car, Professor, let's give out the number again.
And I wanted to kind of touch on the one thing that you were touching on that you didn't really talk too much about and the fact that where you might get some resistance would actually be not the auto dealers or the auto manufacturers, but the highway lobby.
They are studying mutant dragonflies that they've been finding now.
And you know, some of the first mutant frogs came from Minnesota.
Now they're checking out mutant dragonflies.
Great.
And we had straight-line winds over the 4th of July that took down what they're estimating at 25 million trees in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and just north of there near the Canadian border.
And my question for the doctor would be, would this be efficient for short flights, like say 30 miles, or is this mainly for something, say, maybe 100 miles or beyond would be when it would be used, and the rest of the time you would use a normal car for, say, shorter trips of 30 miles or 50 miles.
The vision I would have would be this vehicle would be used typically, and of course it certainly could be used for 30 miles, but typically for 50 miles and above.
And below 50 miles, I think electric cars finally would be useful.
They certainly aren't useful today for any reasonable speeds and any reasonable distances.
But if this Skycar were available for the average person for those 50-mile or even 30-mile trips and further, then you'll have all kinds of electric cars that could be picked up just at the curb, put in your credit card and drive it where you need to drive it, and then take off from there with the Skycar.
unidentified
There you are.
And then so then you would still have your car manufacturers and to some degree your highways and stuff, you would just be lessening.
Our own studies and the Boeing aircraft study as well showed that we'd have to produce about $100,000, which is a very small number relative to automobiles, as you well know.
I guess in America they produce about $15 million a year.
So that wouldn't be that difficult.
They go below $100,000.
And the other question, I'm sorry, was actually we haven't done a lot of marketing simply because people have been coming to us, and since we're not really producing in volume, we've actually had people giving us deposits and forcing us to give them delivery positions because they wanted to be part of it.
Well, the the vehicle itself has some uh fairly uh sophisticated electronic screens on board, which could easily be used to present any kind of information.
You know, you could pull in in satellite information, you could pull in uh T V shows, you could do in a lot of other things of that nature.
And certainly if you get the you know, you're going to have air conditioning as a as something that's an accessory, but could be a very important so could heating in 25,000 feet.
Yeah, well heating is really not a problem.
We produce lots of heat with the engines, but air conditioning obviously is an add-on that does entail some expense.
And of course, electric motors built into the wheels to move it out of your garage without starting the engine is something that we've certainly considered.
There's many things that would make it convenient for the individual, and including what we call mutual noise cancellation, which is when we generate an anti-noise to counteract the noise by the aircraft so that it can become very quiet.
These would all be add-ons and they would entail some expense.
Well, no, actually, because some of the major environmental groups are our greatest advocates.
The Blue Water Network, for example, I guess, which is funded to a great degree by Ted Turner, who go about trying to get non-polluting technology out there, have been one of our biggest supporters because our engine has passed the California Air Resources Board at a very, very low emission level.
The 150 is about half the cost of the, the M400 and it would follow that at that on down pretty consistently.
As the M400 drops in half, the 150 will drop in half as well.
unidentified
And if nobody said it, thank you very much.
I'm very much, like everybody else in America probably, looking forward to flying this thing.
Um, and the idea of being able to fly with my hands instead of my hands, my feet, look out the window and juggle at the same time is really nice and um also So, Art, I'd just like to point out, I've been a longtime listener of yours.
I just really wish you could schedule, say, one day a week to be boring so that we could get some sleep.
And so for 24 hours, you can buy this radio, AM FM, television audio, weather radio, the whole thing, exactly high-end radio for $119.95, which is insanity.
So look, the telephone lines will open at 6:30 in the morning.
My advice is get on, that's Pacific time.
You're going to have to get through because when I say 24 hours, I mean that after that, it expires and you won't see it again until Bob goes back to China.
And I don't know when that's going to be.
unidentified
Hey, this is your mouth talking.
So, you and me, we're out here in the sunshine, and you got everything covered in sunblock except our lips.
No, I think that you, through your callers and your own questions, we've covered that we've done a pretty good job.
I mean, it is a big story in a sense that obviously I've been with it for 30 years, so I never get to say what all the details because I don't think everybody would want to hear about them.
No, they go on to, you know, they go on from the time that we started working with an alternative, a mechanical version of the hummingbird.
And obviously, we're getting to that point where we really are close to replicating that kind of capability, and that's exciting, terribly exciting for us.
From Virginia Beach comes this question: Not everybody's going to have enough money, even when the price comes down, but what about the Sky Car as a checkered cab?
That's probably the best question that anybody could really ask.
And in fact, one of the things that the Boeing Aircraft Company did that we thought was very good is they did an extensive study and did an economic evaluation of these cars as lease cars or rental cars.
And that's exactly where they thought the stake would end up.
You would dial a local cab company.
The vehicle would end up at your doorstep within a minute or 30 seconds.
You'd go outside, you'd time it in, it'd take you exactly where you wanted to go at 300 miles an hour.
And I may have missed this, and you may have already covered it, but if this is an automatically instructed vehicle, what is going on in case of computer failure?
Well, there are backup systems, global systems for controlling.
Obviously, there's a very large number of global positioning satellites, so as long as you can see a couple of them, you're still okay.
The vehicle itself has multiple engines and can operate with a number of those engines failed.
It can fly horizontally with a number failed.
It can land with one, one failed.
We do have, as I mentioned earlier, parachutes built into the airframe itself that deploy in the worst of all worlds if you run into a flock of geese or something and you take out all your engines.
But that's fairly unlikely because the vehicle does make some noise and would probably avoid that.
unidentified
Well, I've been waiting for years to hear of a development like this.
And again, that phone number, folks, is Area Code 530-756-5086.
And I would presume, Doctor, that not only the videotapes, but I guess if you were really hot, you could get on the list for whatever amount of dollars it takes, $25,000.
Of course, we have some restrictions of what we can take normally if the investor needs to be qualified because we are not a public company, so we have to make sure that they satisfy certain rules.
However, sometimes people can call in and get stock from existing stockholders, which we have no control over.
And a lot of people have become stockholders by doing that.
So there is a number of possibilities.
And we will be going public here within the next year, which would allow everybody to participate.