Dr. Paul Moller unveils the Skycar, a hummingbird-inspired, four-passenger flying vehicle with eight redundant engines (750 HP for vertical takeoff) and GPS-based "highway in the sky" (HIPS) airspace control, achieving 400 mph at 25,000 feet. Ethanol-powered with 750-mile range and emissions 98% cleaner than conventional cars, it’s priced at $250K now but could drop to $50K with $1B in funding—though U.S. automakers like GM lag behind Japanese firms. Safety features, including millisecond corrections and blind-friendly voice controls, address terrorism risks via ground-based tracking. Moller’s decades-long pursuit, from a 15-year-old helicopter design to McGill University prototypes, contrasts with America’s slow adoption of green aviation tech, hinting at a future where personal flight reshapes urban mobility. [Automatically generated summary]
From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippine Islands, 7,107 islands strong, Manila, I'm Art Bell, and howdy, everybody.
This is Coast to Coast AM, the very largest program of its type in the world.
And I am proud to be escorting you, honored to be escorting you throughout the weekend.
It's going to be a very, very, very good weekend indeed.
So just sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.
I've got a couple of things right off the bat for you.
Number one, my webcam shot.
Now, how do you get to that?
Every weekend, I get all kinds of inquiries about, hey, Art, you keep talking about these pictures.
How do I get to them?
You go to coast2coastam.com, and in the upper left-hand side there, you will see Art's webcam.
All you need to do is click on that, and you will see whatever the latest is that I put up.
In this case, it is a picture of Erin, my wife, who I and I put that up, I might add, just a very little while ago.
That was taken in Hong Kong.
As you know, we took a trip to Hong Kong, and so what's in the background?
That was taken on Victoria Peak, which overlooks Hong Kong, just an absolutely spectacular city.
And we had a pretty good day.
It was the second day after a rainstorm, and so that's a clear shot, believe it or not, for Hong Kong.
That's fairly clear.
And I'll try and get some others up for you.
But that's a shot of Hong Kong when we were there a couple weeks ago.
Now, before I dive into the world news, some of which is, I think, humorous for a change.
Well, not really, but I see humor in it.
I guess I see humor in a lot of things, except what I'm about to tell you about.
Now, several years ago, several years ago, somebody in my name wrote a hate letter of all things against the Filipino people.
Now, as you know, Ramona, my dear departed wife, was half Filipino.
And so bad, it was awful then.
It was absolutely awful then.
This thing now is years and years old.
Of course, I did not write it.
It was written, the FBI discovered by somebody using a computer at UCSD, a campus at San Diego, and at that time they didn't monitor who used the computer, so there was no way to trace.
You know, it went dead, and we never found out who sent the letter, but it certainly was not me.
And then that letter, unfortunately, was picked up by a newspaper here of all places in Manila and published.
That tells you, even with all the warnings that it was fake and hoax, and that was all up, and they nevertheless did it.
And now that letter is beginning to go around again on the Internet.
Actually, it never has stopped.
But the fact that I'm now here in the Philippines is sort of an added little dimension to this because here it goes around again, and I'm beginning to get a lot of death threats.
Now, nobody lives forever, and I'm willing to take my chances, but this is getting a little silly.
The Philippines is normally, particularly this part of the Philippines, is a relatively safe place to be.
But with this kind of thing going around yet again on the Internet, it's not all that safe for me.
So I have posted the relevant information.
There are actually many websites that have the information that it was false and bogus and baloney and has been for years.
But there's a certain, I don't know, there's a certain kind of repetitive power that keeps something like this going and going and going and going.
And it's been going for years.
And now that I'm actually here in the Philippine Islands, it's kind of dangerous.
So I've had the webmaster post again the fact that it's false.
And if any of you can do anything to get it stopped before somebody decides to off me because of it, I certainly would appreciate it.
So take a look at that.
It's on the coasttocoastAM.com website right now.
And I would presume the fact that I'm now living in the Philippines probably prompted whoever sends this kind of horrible stuff around to start it going round again.
Anyway, please take a moment and take a look at that.
It's on the coasttocoastAM.com website.
And you can be damn sure I did not, would not ever write anything like that.
Three young children found dead Saturday, just hours after a woman was charged with killing their pregnant mother and her fetus in a grisly attack in which her womb was cut open, said authorities.
Two boys, seven and two, and their one-year-old sister found together.
God, that's just horrible news.
And then Venezuela.
Well, of course, there's been a lot about Venezuela lately.
The Venezuelan president sending oil and saying greasy things about our president.
Well, gee, Venezuelans, a foreign minister said that he was, it seems, illegally detained his words for 90 minutes at a New York airport Saturday by U.S. authorities, who he accused of treating him abusively and attempting to frisk him.
U.S. and U.N. officials called the incident regrettable, but said that Foreign Minister Nicholas Maduro, this is funny, I'm sorry, said that Foreign Minister Nicholas Maduro had been identified for secondary screening, an added security check that can kick in for a variety of reasons, like your president saying bad things about our president, huh?
Yeah, secondary security.
I used to drive between the United States and Mexico when I worked for a Mexican radio station.
And people would, you know, you'd be waiting to go back into the U.S. from Mexico, and people would, on the Mexican side, have no respect whatsoever for the order of lines, or as my wife would say, to form a line.
And they cut in.
And it used to make me so angry that I would, I'd just, you know, I'd say, hey, you see that vehicle two behind me?
He cut in line way ahead of everybody else.
Well, those are the kind of people who can occasionally get to secondary inspection and they really tear a car apart, I'll tell you.
So when I read this one, I laughed and laughed.
An added security check, it says that can kick in for a variety of reasons.
High winds, heavy rain, tornadoes pounded parts of the Midwest and the South, leaving at least eight people dead, stranding people in the cars, forcing others from their homes, leaving thousands without power.
So here we go.
The death toll in Kentucky on Saturday reached seven, including a father and his one-year-old daughter in a truck that skidded into floodwaters.
In Arkansas, a woman whose boat was struck by lightning died.
Authorities were searching for two missing people.
A lot of rumors going around about where bin Laden is, whether or not he's on the face of the globe anymore.
A leaked French intelligence document raises the possibility that Osama bin Laden died of typhoid.
But President Shirok said Saturday the report was in no way whatsoever confirmed, and officials from Kabul to Washington expressed skepticism about its accuracy.
As for the rest of us, we can only hope.
A al-Qaeda-linked group posted a web video Saturday purporting to show the bodies of two American soldiers being dragged behind a truck, then set on fire in an apparent retaliation for the alleged rape slaying of a young Iraqi woman by U.S. troops from the same unit.
The Mujahideen Council, an umbrella organization of insurgent groups, including al-Qaeda in Iraq, posted a previous video in June showing the soldiers' mutilated bodies and claiming it killed them.
It's not clear whether Saturday's video was a continuation of that footage or why it might have been released right now.
More than a third of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans seeking medical treatment from the Veterans Health Administration report symptoms of stress or other mental disorders.
That would be a tenfold increase in the last 18 months, according to an agency study.
Well, no surprise there.
You go to war, and it certainly is stressful.
Speaking of war and disruption and all the rest of that, I'll have some, or as Paul would say, and I love to repeat the rest of the news in a moment.
Well, you can imagine my surprise when earlier in the week, perhaps you can imagine my surprise, if you look at a map and you note where the Philippines is, and you note where Thailand is, you will note they are our neighbor.
So I was a little surprised.
We all were and quite shocked.
And of course, it was big news here when we awoke to find out that the military and a bloodless coup had taken over Thailand.
And there were tanks and armored vehicles in Bangkok and all the rest of it.
Well, yes, indeed, there has been a coup in Thailand right next to me here.
And somebody sent me this.
The king art, no matter what happens in Thailand, will prevail, as he has the total loyalty of all the citizens there.
In the end, he'll solve this problem, as always.
I travel to Thailand in most provinces, and I'm continually impressed with the 100% loyalty of the Thai people to their king.
It's true.
My wife is Thai, and my son is also.
On any given Monday, you'll see about 75% of people there wearing yellow shirts as a token of admiration to the king's assertion to the throne anniversary.
So let the military and elected government beware, as the people will only follow the wishes of their king.
Signed Aaron Darren, I completely agree with you.
And it looks as though it'll be all right, although you never know with a coup.
All coups begin with the general in charge saying, of course, the freedoms that you've enjoyed and the Constitution will be returned to you shortly as soon as we've straightened everything out.
And you never really know until time passes.
Nevertheless, you wake up and your neighboring country has had a coup and you pay attention.
By the way, we're going to go to open line, so if you know the numbers and you've got something that would really rock to get on the air, you're welcome to begin dialing.
European scientists voiced shock today as they viewed pictures which showed the Arctic ice cover, get this, had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost all the way to the North Pole.
Oh my God, the satellite images were acquired from August 23rd through the 25th by instruments aboard EVASAT and EOS Aqua II satellites operated by the European Space Agency or ESA.
Perennial ice sheet, sea ice rather, thick ice that is normally present year-round and is not affected by the Arctic summer, had virtually disappeared over an area bigger than the British Isles.
Vast patches of ice-free sea stretched north from an island lying about midway between Norway and the North Pole and extended very deep into the Russian Arctic all the way to the North Pole, said the agency.
The situation is unlike anything ever observed in any previous low record ice season, said Mark Drinkwater, interesting name of Ess's Ocean Ice Unit.
Drinkwater, huh?
It is highly imaginable that a ship could have passed from perhaps northern Siberia through what is normally ice-packed to reach the North Pole without any difficulty whatsoever.
Spitsbergen is one of the islands which are Norwegian.
If this anomaly should persist, the Northeast Passage or Northern Sea Route between Europe and Asia will be Open over longer intervals of time, and it is conceivable that we might see attempts at sailing around the world directly across the summer Arctic Ocean within the next 10 to 20 years, or if what they're saying is true, they might even try it, well, any time now, I suppose.
If the federal government will not take a stand against global warming, individual states will have to do so alone.
California, it turns out, has now filed a lawsuit against six leading car manufacturers saying that the emissions from the cars they produce are changing the state's weather.
Andrew Gumbel reports in the Independent that California Attorney General Bill Locklear is suing GM, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, and Nissan because of what they either knew or should have known the severe impact of their vehicles would have on the health of the planet.
Vehicle emissions are the single most rapidly growing source of carbon emissions contributing to global warming, yet the federal government and the automakers have refused to act.
See, do I have time for this?
I might have.
I kind of like this.
I don't know who sent this to me, but I just, for some reason, I like it.
It's called The Way We Live Now, Ominous Clouds.
The day the weather channel went on the air nearly 20 years ago, it was balmy out.
Clouds scudding in a high sky, no possibility of rain.
Today, looking out my window, I see that's still the case.
By the way, this was written by D.T. Max and published March 3rd, 2002.
So he goes on, Today, looking out my window, I see it is still the case.
The weather is still nice.
At least there's a breeze.
The Weather Channel anchor is right now warning me, though, the weather may change.
A front is somewhere not very far away.
They say there are five stories in Hollywood.
With the weather, there's always been only one.
It will get cold, then it will get warm.
Warm, cold, warm, cold.
The huge effort the Weather Channel makes to cover this repetitive story.
840 employees, 15,000 affiliated cable systems, a news budget of several million seems justified by its success.
It has become part of the cable landscape with CNN and ESPN.
That was not always the case.
When the channel began in 1982, people laughed.
Even its own employees thought a national 24-hour day, 7-day-a-week weather network was just, well, overkill.
Wasn't the very point about weather that it was local and that we watched it only when we need it.
But to everyone's surprise, the Weather Channel took.
The subscription base ballooned from 2 million to 85 million homes.
It turned out there were a lot of avid weather watchers out there.
We provided heroin for the addicts, Ray Ban, the Weather Channel's chief meteorologist, says.
What are we addicted to?
What are we looking for?
Not whether they need their raincoats on the other coast, I don't think.
We watch the Weather Channel for the global read, the state of the planet, for reassurance that it'll all be okay.
After a few years of big storms, bizarrely warm winters, and drought warnings, we no longer want nice weather.
We just want normal weather.
Which may explain why, though we've never needed it less, we've never been able to live, work, eat without going outside.
We've never been big consumers of meteorological information.
Today, though, there are some 4,000 websites covering the weather.
And the Weather Channel's marketing people have noticed an intriguing phenomenon.
People are watching their programs for longer than anyone ever expected.
Eight minutes was the original projection.
But one in four now watch for 20 minutes or more at a time.
Wow.
People come for their own weather, but they stay for their neighbor's weather, and finally for the weather around the world.
No low in Asia is too obscure for them.
No hiccup in the jet stream over Australia too far removed.
The phenomena seems widespread in the weather industry.
People are unsettled, said Ross Gelspan, founder of, I think it's heathsalign.org, who has noticed a large increase in visitors to the site recently.
It's the freakish weather that we're having.
That's it, folks.
The freakish weather.
The weather channel's viewers skew to the affluent and the educated, indoor types.
We watch it nervously, scanning the weather for deviations from the norm.
How many category four hurricanes will there be this year?
Can El Niño explain this hot winter, La Nina?
Or is it our combustible engines, our coolants, our CFCs?
The scientific jury may still be officially out on global warming.
It's not, though.
This presidential administration may be skeptical, but in January there were cherry blossoms in Brooklyn, cherry blossoms, mind you, and the thermostat in the Washington metro turned on the air conditioning.
These facts fill me with unease, and it's not just me.
I spoke to Faith Gamel of the Switchin tribe in northern Alaska, who said that members of the tribe who for thousands of years have looked at the sky and been able to read the next day's weather are now very confused.
It's warm, then it gets cold, then it gets then the next day it snows, then it rains.
No one can really seem to predict anymore.
So it's appropriate that while local weather reports try to cheer you up and get you out the door, the weather channel doesn't.
Its claustrophobic studio and low-tech effects, yellow, spiky sun, puffy white clouds, goofy jazz background music allow the depression over the Atlantic to merge with the one in your head.
You feel invited to spend the day there, brooding that the Weather Channel was born just as the hole in the ozone layer first came to our attention.
It grew to maturity, so to speak, under the same cloud we did.
Never knowing the innocent time when 70 degree days in the winter were cause for rejoicing.
Its meteorologists understand modern-day original sin, the world is no longer as we found it.
Where once we needed the weather, now we feel the weather needs us.
This is part of a larger, inadvertent role we've assumed as custodians of our planet.
We used to hunt.
Then we just photographed.
Now we restock.
We run rivers, parks, species.
We're responsible for reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone and reminding moose how to recognize their own scent.
The hope that an obscure woodpecker in Louisiana might not be extinct has made it a media celebrity because if it's dead, we killed it.
When a baby gorilla is born in the Virunga Reserve in East Africa, researchers sometimes have A party to name it like Latter-day Adams.
That's the same energy the weather channel draws on as we watch it.
We silently hope that ours won't turn out to be the story of the Garden of Eden.
We ate the apple, then we cut down the tree.
We couldn't resist.
We wanted wood.
Now we're worried that we're going to die from the sun.
Compare that with the story in Genesis with the original weather report.
Bright morning, heavy rains, followed by clearing at dawn.
After the Lord promised Noah, for as long as the earth existed, cold and heat, summer and winter shall not cease.
Watching, we wonder, how do we go back to that?
And I thought that was a very, very interesting article.
I don't know why.
I guess perhaps because I am also a Weather Channel devotee.
Particularly when I was home in the U.S., I frequently would watch the Weather Channel, not just when the hurricanes were threatening some part of Louisiana or the southern U.S., but nearly all the time I found myself switching over to the Weather Channel, an interesting, interesting phenomenon in this modern day, isn't it?
From the Philippines, specifically Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast A.M. Here indeed is Art Bell.
Somebody had sent me a really funny little MP3 file about tequila.
And I sent it off, I think it was Ben.
Ben, you sent it to me or Kay out there.
Kay, I sent it to you and said, would this be appropriate to play on the air?
It's a little iffy, but you know, and so, like an idiot, I just went to my email to check, and instead I wiped out all of my incoming emails.
So if one of you two has it there and can resend it to me at that same address, I would appreciate it.
I'd really like to play it on the air.
I think the thing is a riot.
So, you know, when you're in a hurry and you're getting on the air and you're thinking about playing something, so instead of doing the right thing, I just erased all of the incoming mail that I've had for about the last two months, which is very upsetting because I was saving several things that I meant anyway.
One of you will send it to me again, and if I get it, I'll play it.
In the meantime, let's do what we do.
Oh, coming up at the top of the hour is Paul Mahler.
Sky Car.
Paul Mahler.
Now, Paul Mahler is building.
I mean, haven't you all had flying dreams?
This is next to time travel, my favorite topic of all.
Paul Mahler is building a sky car.
What do I mean by sky car?
Well, you'll learn in the next hour.
But a private individual, just like you park your car in the parking spot or your garage or wherever you put your car, but this car flies.
It flies.
It hovers.
It, you know, this is way cool stuff.
So there's been progress finally on the Skycar, and you will hear about it in the next hour.
In the meantime, Wildcard Line, you are on the air.
So I think Jacques Chirac said, no, he doesn't believe it.
And we can only hope.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah.
You know, what was running through my mind, I was thinking, you know what?
Almost everybody knows he's in Pakistan.
So I was thinking Bin Laden's getting a little nervous and said, you know what, it's time to do fake death and do a change of plastic surgery on old face.
And I also believe that the Nokia extra battery thing also works.
unidentified
From one research I was able to do, it seemed like that was, I don't know if you want me to mention the website, but the one that deals with urban legends and the like, Snopes.com.
They seem to determine that that one was, well, although it did produce the 15-digit code, it really didn't amount to anything because of the delays.
So if you have that code and somebody steals your cell phone, you can call your provider and they can turn it off and lock it.
And so the jerk doesn't get to use your cell phone.
No, it's true.
unidentified
No, no.
No, I'm not disagreeing with that.
All I'm saying is that what the research bore out was that there is a delay that a thief would rely upon from the time you notice your phone is missing to the time that the phone service is canceled.
I suppose that could be the case, but it's still, I still love it.
I mean, even if you never get your phone back, and they specified that in the report, if you give your provider that, they can lock the keyboard, lock the phone, turn it off, and all that.
And so, you know, it can never be used again.
And of course, the stupid thief dare never go and try and get it working again because they would catch him.
I've got a lot of very good stupid thief stories here.
Stupid.
Maybe hold them for tomorrow and I really good stuff.
You know, I've been accused of being a Mason for a long time.
I know that.
Actually, I've heard that the Masons really are quite a benign, good organization that helps an awful lot of people and not the secret, dastardly organization that some people make them out to be.
The only way that I know that you can send me something is to fire it off to the network, and ultimately, I suppose it might get to me.
But I am, after all, now on the other side of the world.
So I would say probably the network, but I don't know.
Maybe the network will save stuff up and then ultimately send me a box of stuff.
But anyway, I told you about six years ago that me and my friend 40 years ago was driving around Los Angeles getting 456 miles to the gallon of gasoline.
And, you know, James McCanney offers some, I'd say, some scholarly insight into understanding these strange storms that have occurred throughout the 90s.
Look, I think that there's no great mystery to what's going on in the world right now.
Whether you want to look at the north and south part of our world and the calving of the icebergs in the south, the fact that we can now navigate to the north pole where before it was solidly frozen, the fact that the temperatures in Alaska are going up so quickly that polar bears are drowning and the ice is virtually soon to be no more.
I mean, all of these things are not a big mystery.
All of these things are a clear indicator of why our weather is becoming a little rougher and will ultimately become a lot rougher.
It's getting warmer.
Heat fuels storms.
It's really that simple.
Heat fuels storms.
So it's going to get rough out there.
On the international line from Stockholm, Sweden, of all places, Sean, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi, Art.
This is Sean.
As you said, I was lucky enough to get a hold of you via Skype, which is a computer telephonic service.
I've been a longtime listener and a first-time caller.
I have a prediction-slash theory about it involves 2012.
Okay.
Well, the theory part is this will work for a lot of the Evolutionist people out there, but if you look at how evolution says we went from ape-like creatures to where we are now as humans, I believe you can possibly extend that one step further and take it all the way up to an alien-type race.
There are others, of course, who feel the well, it's kind of a choice.
Did the Mayans get sick of writing calendars, or is that the end of all time?
From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
You know, it's worthy of note that Hurricane Helena, which, you know, hurricanes normally start off the coast of Africa, travel their way across the Atlantic and, you know, hit Florida or the Gulf Coast or just travel north a little and poop out.
But Helena looks as though it's going to hit Ireland as a at least tropical depression.
And I'm sure that's a surprise.
I don't know how many times that's ever happened in history, but it's on its way.
So across it came, and then back across it went, still at least a tropical depression.
That's absolutely incredible.
Coming up in a moment, Dr. Paul Mahler, he is the founder and chairman of the board, has served as the president of Mahler International since its original formation in 1983.
Mahler International was formed to develop a powered lift aircraft called Skycar and other related technologies.
Dr. Moeller holds a master's in engineering and a Ph.D. from McGill University.
He was a professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering at the University of California Davis from 1963 through 75.
In 1972, he founded SuperTrap Industries, which became the most recognized international name in high-performance engine silencing systems.
Dr. Mueller has received 43 patents, including the first U.S. patent on a fundamentally new form of power lift aircraft, and yet another on the revolutionary rotopower engine in 1997.
He created Freedom Motors to manufacture and distribute this engine.
Most of all, though, my God, he's building this sky car.
This is a car for all of us, you know, the little people who will be able to walk out into their driveway, hop in, and fly.
Dr. Mahler in a moment.
It absolutely has been my dream, and I think I've related this to Paul any number of times.
Well, back in the 60s, I got very interested in trying to, I guess, create something that did pretty much what a hummingbird does, but something that you could get in and end up like a mechanical hummingbird, I suppose.
I didn't really realize the true complexity of it, although the theoretical, in particular, how much it was going to cost, how much technology was involved.
But I guess we wouldn't get in things like this if we understood how big a problem they really are when we start out.
That was the goal, to create something that you could really maneuver around front, back, up, down, in a comfortable and easy manner, and most importantly, in a safe manner.
So the number one goal was how do you make this vehicle so safe that there's nothing that can go wrong because you don't park at the side of the road when something goes wrong and you're in the air.
And one of the advantages is you can really computerize the vehicle and you can computerize the so-called highway in the sky, the acronym is HIPS, that's really coming into place right now.
And if you do that, you take the pilot out of the loop.
And as you know, and most people probably realize, most of the accidents today are due to error on the part of the driver.
So if we can get that out of the loop, which we believe we can, we've already improved things.
But clearly, you have to make the vehicle very safe as well.
Well, of course, the Skycar is the end of a series.
We had an early aircraft that was much more like the Jetsons.
It's easy to describe that way because I think most people have an image of the Jetson's car.
And we flew that vehicle very successfully many, many times.
But what it wasn't capable of doing was flying fast.
And we really knew that if you're going to make a change in transportation, you're going to have to make a change in the speed at which we get around as well.
And so we moved from that Jetson-like vehicle to what we have today, which is often described as a Batmobile-type vehicle.
Well, that wouldn't be my term, but when I'm asked to describe it, I really don't have a terminology that allows you to describe it, except that it looks perhaps for some people's point of view, a bit like a Batmobile.
Well, much of the numbers that I give you are numbers that come out of computer analysis or wind tunnel testing because this is not the safest career in the world when you're in the early mode of testing because there are a number of things that could go wrong and it's not like an airplane that can glide somewhere or that you can parachute out of because if you're hovering, that isn't an option.
So we've had to be very, very careful in our initial efforts.
But we've flown it a number of times.
We've actually run it with a failed engine and landed it safely.
Well, we have a very fast set of computers on board, and we have many computers that talk to each other.
And if one computer is not telling the same story as the other three, it's kicked out of the system.
That's called a voting system.
It's the same system that's used on the F-16, or in fact, on the space shuttle or the shot to the moon.
It's a very, very safe and reliable way to work.
And so that's the most important thing of all, that you have the computers telling the engines and everything else what to do.
And they really not only sense the attitude and the direction and the acceleration of the vehicle, but you have, of course, algorithms that then take that information and convert it into making the vehicle stable.
Most important thing, though, is you can fail something, as we said, like the engine, and the vehicle will correct itself so quickly that you don't even know you failed an engine.
We've landed the engine in one case in an earlier flight where we didn't even know the engine had stopped running.
But that sounds scary when you think about it, but it's really like taking an eight-cylinder engine and breaking it up into four, into eight single one-cylinder engines, and then integrating them with a computer so that if one engine or one piston goes out in a V8 engine, the engine continues to function.
Are these actually separate engines or absolutely separate so that they can fail and the computers will say, we need more thrust on that side of the vehicle or on that particular lift pod to take up for the fact that we're seeing the thrust reducing and it'll do it very quickly.
It does it in something like 25 milliseconds, which is an extremely short period of time.
We've done wind tunnel testing on a six-passenger, but that's about as big as you can go for the reasons that the laws of physics don't work on your behalf if you get bigger than that.
So that's you changed a different configuration, maybe like the B-22 Osprey, the tilt rotor aircraft, if you want to go with more people than that.
Well, I wish I had one every day myself, because like everybody else, I'd like to go off to that mountaintop in the distance and land and see what it's like up there.
Well, that quickly, of course, it brings in a million different questions.
For example, even now, with airliners and small aircraft, our skies are fairly crowded.
If we had a situation where people were off the ground in their automobiles and they were able to go to the sky, wouldn't the skies get Dangerously crowded.
And I'll just start by saying that if every car that's on the road today in America were in the air at the same time in this hits this highway in the sky, they would still be miles apart.
We have this enormous amount of basically unused space.
And even though we think it's scary, it's primarily scary because it's not very controlled.
It's kind of random.
The pilots are still asked to keep looking out the window to see if somebody's coming towards them from some different direction.
That's not the world in which you want to operate this vehicle in.
This vehicle is going to be able to sense through GPS and many other sources exactly who's around you, and it's going to be directing itself.
You're not going to be directing it.
This highway in the sky that I refer to is quite advanced.
It's a lot more advanced than most people realize.
It's starting to be used, and it's going to be used extensively in the coming years.
Well, it's interesting, and I understand that you have to do it in the manner that you're describing, where I guess the driver, the pilot of this thing really doesn't have much to do except perhaps push button or contribute to the guidance computer or whatever, and then it sort of all happens automatically.
Of course, that's the form that you'd probably say would be appropriate for mass transportation, getting us all around in a commute network.
But if you really want to use this as a pilot where you're going to have fun and roll it around and do a lot of things you do in a light lane today, you just have to stay off that highway in the sky, which is well defined, and there's all kinds of ways to protect you from getting into that.
And you could go out and fly this, but you'd then have to have some level of skill.
You'd have to have what's called a powered lift pilot's license, which you can get today for it in that case.
But otherwise, you probably only have to register your name.
So, I mean, a 90-year-old woman could get around in this vehicle in the highway in the sky.
But if you are an enthusiast, flying enthusiasts, you could also do all kinds of things with it.
If you're burning gasoline, it has the capability of going 750 miles on a tank of gas, which is about 45 gallons.
But if you're burning ethanol, which is what we use, because we really think the future of this kind of transportation system really should be centered around something like ethanol.
It's safe.
It doesn't have near-the-fire hazard.
It doesn't generate any toxicity, really.
We just recently, and this is probably the most exciting thing that's happened since you and I last talked, we just recently showed that our engine produces emissions that are way below the super ultra-low emissions for California, which means, quite frankly, that when our engine is operating, it actually is cleaning the air in most major cities.
In fact, I owe my greatest debt to Felix Wankel of anybody in the world because, quite frankly, without his invention of the Wankel engine, I would not have a Skycar.
I wouldn't have an Aerobot.
I wouldn't have a hybrid car that we created with the engine.
There's many things that we've shown that become practical and real just because of the Wankel engine, which we've made a number of changes in, but still was basically invented by Dr. Felix Wankel.
That's probably a lot more difficult than explaining the Sky Car, I can tell you, because it's really a triangular-shaped rotor inside of a peanut-shaped chamber.
But to describe how it functions, I can say superficially certain things about it that are really important.
It's a four-stroke engine, which is very important because four-stroke engines have very little pollution normally compared to two-strokes.
But it's much lighter.
It's about as powerful as a turbine engine, at least in the form that we've developed it, for its weight.
We can generate as much as two horsepower per pound.
And of course, that's very critical because we need a lot of horsepower, but we don't want that horsepower to be used up in weight, and so we don't have payload.
And if I had not developed this engine as a result of Wankel's invention, I simply would not have a Skycar.
I think I ran this by you one time before, but I noticed when I had my rotary engine vehicle, I'm a person who always likes to know where I'm going.
So I would buy these very nice little things that I would put on the dashboard that would tell me whether I'm going north, south, east, west, whatever direction I'm going.
You know, a compass, a floating, you know, they have these floating compasses that you can put in vehicles.
And I did that when I had my Munkle engine vehicle.
And inevitably, and every time, and this is something nobody ever talks about, but it would magnetize my engine ultimately after three or four weeks of operating.
And I don't know how many people know this, but there had to have been a gigantic or at least a fairly large magnetic field that was being generated by the rotary engine that ended up permanently magnetizing.
I've not experienced it, but it is a rotary motion, and certainly as a rotary motion, it would be more likely to generate something like that than one that just went back and forth, of course, which would tend to, you know, might create a magnetic field, but also would get rid of it.
Okay, well, just for fun, you might test that because it wasn't just with one compass.
I recall buying three or four and then finally figuring out, my God, it was my engine that was doing this.
And so after three or four of them, I was pretty damn sure that was it.
So you might take a look at the engine and see if your engines are doing that.
Perhaps there's some other shielding or something you have that is preventing that.
But that is something that a rotary engine did, and it was totally fascinating.
I can certainly see its application in what you're doing with a Sky Car.
Now, we're coming up on a break, but I really want to know, Paul, how the testing has been going.
And, you know, this has been going on quite a while now, and people are dying to know what kind of progress you've made in the testing that you've done thus far.
And for that matter, how close we're getting to being able to actually get these on the market.
I've heard that when we do get them on the market, they're being mass-produced.
It might be $50,000 or $60,000 per copy.
Can you imagine that, folks?
A car that flies for $50,000 or $60,000.
I'm Mark Bell.
Absolutely.
It cannot be just my dream.
I'm sure many of you out there have exactly the same dream.
Imagine being able to walk out your front door, walk up to this sleek, beautiful sky car, and you can see a picture of it on coast2coastam.com website, and getting in, pushing a couple of buttons, setting the navigation, whatever, and flying.
I mean, isn't it everybody's dream flying?
We see it in almost every futuristic movie from Star Wars to, well, you name it, it doesn't matter.
The personal flying vehicle.
Paul Mahler is working on exactly that.
It's called the Skycar.
More in a moment.
Once again, Paul Mueller.
So, Paul, catch us up on testing.
Now, you've had a big breakthrough, I guess, in fuel, and that certainly sounds good.
But if I recall correctly, last time you and I interviewed, you had only sort of had a hovering test.
But quite frankly, we knew that for this Skycar to be something that everybody could own, we had to come up with not only a better engine, but we had to come up with a facility that could produce this engine inexpensively.
And so much of what we've been doing since you and I last talked is working on that heart and muscle and guts of the Skycar, the engine.
And we now are in a position where we're going to be setting up a plant, a major plant, a half a billion dollar plant in Eastern Europe to produce the engine in extremely high volumes.
Now, not just for the Skycar, of course, much like our Super Trap Muffler.
If we can produce a product that has a lot of other uses, and clearly this does, then we have an inexpensive engine for the Skycar, and that allows us to get the price of the Skycar down because the controlling factor in the Skycar's price is going to be the engine.
If we can get that price down, we get the Skycar price down.
And we have a very big task to do that in this case because we have 750 horsepower.
And so it's a large amount of power, but we still have to get that cost to be about 20 to 25% the cost of the vehicle, which means if we're going to produce a $50,000 vehicle, we have to produce an engine for around $10,000 that has a reliable 750 horsepower.
But even so, Paul, if the price were three or four times what you're talking about, you know, for eventually in mass production or something, I assure you, there's plenty of people with plenty of money who would plunk it down and buy one right now if you had them, even at an inflated price.
And I would assume that before you get to the mass production you're talking about, there will be models that people can buy at a somewhat inflated price.
And of course, we've identified a huge military market as well.
We've already supplied a number of our vehicles to the military for unmanned applications, prototypes, really, for their test purposes.
And we are proposing to supply unmanned versions of the Skycar to the military as well as later, a little later, manned versions.
But we think there's a good way to start out testing it in that environment simply because they have very skilled pilots and a lot of test facilities that would be very useful for us.
They didn't need to go very fast because they were designed to go out there within a couple miles of the site, go out and take a look, hover for a while, get some pictures, get some radiation numbers, and then go on back.
So they were like a single duct with a fan horizontal, which could hover for a reasonable length of time and then return home.
Well, that's really kind of an economic issue because the next stage in where we're going is very expensive and too expensive, quite frankly, for a company like ours, even though we're a public company and we're actually going to be profitable as a public company in the coming quarter.
That's not the kind of money.
We would not be generating the kind of money that's needed to bring this to the next level.
And so really what we're doing is we're talking to a number of major aerospace companies with the view that they would become a partner with us.
Well, not necessarily aerospace.
It can be companies like General Likely 2.
There's no real reason it has to be aerospace.
It's not the auto industry for obvious reasons.
Right now, it's barely thriving, so at least in America.
So we're looking at thriving, successful companies that have a lot of vision and fairly deep pockets to allow us to move to the next level.
You know, you'd probably be somebody to comment on the current condition of the big three car companies in the U.S. What is going wrong in America with our automobile production, and where do we stand right now?
And, you know, there's many things that might account for it.
And I won't get into a lot of the issues of long-term labor issues that might be part of it.
But I will comment on the fact that, you know, I've talked to these people and I've heard other people comment.
They made things in the past, statements in the past like, we're never going to build a hybrid car because we don't think hybrid cars have a future.
With that lack of vision, you can understand why they might have serious problems.
We built a hybrid car back in the mid-1990s using one of our rotor power engines.
And this was a car based around a Honda Civic, and it went 0 to 60 in under 6 seconds and was projected to get 70 miles to the gallon of gas.
I think that hybrid cars certainly were recognized by Honda and Toyota a long time ago as having a future.
Why Detroit couldn't see this as an option, now they have to go and lease these rights or acquire these rights through license from Japanese companies.
Well, I'm not sure if it's Brazil, but I think it might be Brazil, which has almost transitioned, I'm told, entirely to hybrid cars or very nearly entirely to hybrid cars, and it's all working very well indeed.
And I think that that's something we could do in time here.
It would take us a long time because we burn a lot of fuel in America.
But still, ethanol is a wonderful option.
It certainly is the option for the Skycar because it has so many other advantages besides being very clean and not dependent upon the Far East or the Middle East.
I mean, does the day come when you just say, you know, I really want to give it a shot and go out there to your test vehicle and get in and at least go up and hover for a while?
Well, you know, that's probably the biggest thrill in my life is when I get the option to fly this.
But, you know, I have a large number of stockholders and I only really have one vehicle.
And until we get sufficient funding that we can build more vehicles and perhaps I can develop the potential to have more lives because clearly this is a risky adventure.
I think that that's an option that I can't pursue as much as I would like to because the few times I've had a chance to really push the limits, and of course I pushed the limits much harder in the Jetson-type vehicle.
I flew that over quite a distance and at greater heights because we had flown it long enough.
We were a little more comfortable with the technology.
But it was a truly magic carpet flight, and I'd love to be back there every day.
It's one of the things that drives me forward is the incredible thrill of a vehicle that flies like that.
Well, there are, but, you know, the price of entry is so high.
Our company, which is a really modest company, has spent in today's dollars over $200 million, an astronomical amount of money, considering that we really would be in many ways classified, for instance, by venture capitalists, a startup company, because we still have not produced a product for the market, at least in this particular generation of products.
And So the issue is when you're dealing with that kind of technology and that kind of cost, the only people that can really do that normally, and I guess that means I'm abnormal, is the military.
And privately, certainly the big companies, if they can't even consider that hybrid cars are an option in America, you can imagine how they view something that's going to fly.
That's not going to happen from any car company, certainly, even though Toyota has a very strong interest in the SkyCar and Honda's been with to visit me and BMW.
I can say the GM has not, nor has Chrysler.
But it's a moving possibility that we think has a big feature in that direction.
Well, that's one of the reasons it's taken me so long, because, of course, to do that, I've had to do a lot of other things.
I've had to go out there and become a real estate.
I'm in real estate.
I've made many millions of dollars in real estate, which always ended up back in this technology, much to the concern of my wife.
And I've, of course, had the Super Trap Muffler, where we did about $200 million in sales over a number of years.
I built a number of unmanned aircraft for the military, as I said earlier, but these tend to reduce the amount of effort I can put in one direction at any one time.
So it is not something that I can pursue as aggressively as I would like, but clearly at this point in time, I recognize that I have to have a partner.
And that's exactly, I'm not at liberty to tell the kinds of names we're talking to, but I can tell you one of the people that we have as a potential strategic partner is one of the largest corporations in America.
Justin in Phoenix, Arizona asks, if the Skyway system is eventually so advanced, would it be so advanced that a blind person, for example, might be able to operate a Skycar?
Because you could, certainly you can do voice communication, because really all you're doing when you get on board this vehicle is telling it where you want it to take you.
And of course, that may sound a little extreme, but you forget today we send missiles theoretically down chimneys of places we don't like.
Well, the emission levels required under the super ultra low emissions are very, very low.
They're considered the lowest that any vehicle can achieve.
In actual fact, our emissions of two of the three pollutants is only 2% of those emissions that are considered lower than anything they've ever seen in a vehicle.
So we have emissions so low that they are less than the ambient conditions in cities like Los Angeles or Sacramento.
Certainly, that's not true of all cities.
But those two examples are two cities where when our engine is operating, it will actually reduce the emissions in the air that exist already.
If a person owned a Skycar, the way you envision it, would you have to drive it to an airport somewhere and take off from the airport, or could you go out to your driveway slash personal little airport, lift off vertically and go?
Well, I would say for the next 15 years, you would drive it.
It is legal on the street.
I would not say you would drive it on the highway.
It's not designed to go 65 miles an hour on the highway.
But certainly you could drive it at 30 miles an hour on the street to a Vertiport, as they might be called, a few blocks, perhaps even a mile or two from your home, and take off from there.
What's the problem there for the time being is control, amongst other things, that whatever system, highway in the sky system, it can't be that advanced within this period of time because it takes a finite time to have a system first that can even take you off from a vertiport reliably, controlling you in relationship to everybody else.
GPS is the global positioning satellite that you see in some cars today, or it's utilized in cars and airplanes to locate where you are.
Not a lot of people realize that there are supplemental systems going into place that'll take that GPS signal, which now allows to position you within 20 to 30 feet accurately, that'll position you within millimeters accurately.
There are supplemental systems like WAS, which stands for Wide Area Augmentation System, and LAS for Local Area Augmentation System.
And then there's TCAS and ABS-B.
There's a bunch of systems out there that are going in place or are in place that allow you to know exactly where everybody is precisely at all times.
That's one part of the formula.
The second one is this virtual highway in the sky where everybody flies at exactly the same speed at exactly the same altitude when they're going in a specific direction.
So you have these series of vectors, so to speak, but you don't really see them.
You just are guided on them in this highway in the sky system.
If you want to see a picture of the Sky Car, you can go to coasttocoast AM.com.
And, boy, it's pretty sleek and pretty good looking.
Imagine hopping in that.
Up you go and away you go.
Up, up, and away, I think the term is.
From Philippines, I'm Mark Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Seems like it ought to be reality already, doesn't it?
Paul Mueller is my guest.
He's the Skycar guy.
And actually, we've had a series of interviews with Paul that span quite a number of years now.
And still, the car has done nothing really much more than hover.
But the promise, of course, is that it would be able to go, I don't know, 600 or 700 miles on a tank of, I presume now, ethanol.
It would fly at perhaps 25,000 feet.
It would take you from here to there at about 300 miles an hour.
It would be an amazing, amazing device.
Can you imagine air in America, the air above America, the airspace just filled with these things going back and forth on these virtual highways that Paul is describing?
He certainly can imagine it.
He's sunk an awful lot of money into this.
In fact, we'll talk about the money angle of all this in a moment.
Once again, here is Paul Mueller.
Paul, if you had an infusion of money, of serious capital, how much money do you think it would take to take what you have got right now and make it completely workable?
A quarter of a million dollar vehicle we could probably do for about a hundred million dollar investment just simply because you tool up for that level of production that would go with that, which might be 2,000 to 5,000 vehicles a year at the most.
If you want to tool up to the level which would really get the price down and put this in people's garages at $50,000, you'd really have to put the kind of money in that you put in when you build a new type of car at Detroit.
And that could be in the area of $500 million to $1 billion, perhaps even higher.
Still, that's a small amount of money in today's world.
There are many billionaires in America, obviously, they could fund that if they had the future view to do so.
You know, the system is driven, the highway system is driven by the number of vehicles.
We have this marvelous highway system in America developed to take on cars.
And, of course, because the highway system is there, we build a lot more cars to use it.
So it's a catch-22 problem.
It grows together.
The infrastructure and the number of vehicles grow together.
But $250,000 and 10,000 vehicles a year in a few years would add up to a lot.
We have the view that what we're going to do is we're going to do with our engine, much like we did with our muffler system, we're going to make it a worldwide product.
The plans are to build almost 3 million engines a year within two years of production.
That's $250 million a year if those engines were in production at that level for things like motor scooters and motorcycles in the Far East, where emissions are a big problem.
Perhaps here at home, the kind of engine that would go in a snowmobile and get rid of the two-stroke engine there.
As you go forward, which is bigger in the picture, the unmanned vehicle right now, the military vehicle, or is the four-man or four-person manned vehicle much farther down the line?
I wouldn't say the manned vehicle is much farther down the line.
I think that the immediate vehicles will be unmanned.
And the reason that is, it's not a necessary factor, but it's a practical factor because people don't get, people can envision why these vehicles can be, our unmanned vehicles can be used for a number of things.
For example, we have a contract from the California Highway System to build an unmanned vehicle for bridge inspection, one that can go up underneath the bridge and look for cracks, and there clearly are a number of cracks there.
So we think there's a number of applications like that that are immediate that we will continue to pursue.
But if money were available, there's no reason why the manned vehicle can't go forward just as fast.
It's just that it seems to be much more acceptable in the minds of most of the business people who might be interested in our technology to start with unmanned vehicles.
Well, it seems to me that our car market has been sort of snatched away from us by the Japanese to a large degree.
And it seems to me that if we were to proceed, if America got off its stuff and proceeded with something like your skycar, we could snatch that market right out from under them, couldn't we?
Fortunately, I still do a lot of things to try and slow down the aging process because I became aware that this is going to take longer than I planned.
So I'm doing a lot of watching my diet, doing a lot of exercise, and keeping in shape.
I expect to live over 100 because that's the way I want to be around to enjoy this.
Well, I started, I designed my first helicopter when I was 15 and started building that in that time period, and that's obviously 55 years ago, or close to 55 years ago.
So indirectly, I've been working on it ever since then to some degree.
I got much more aggressive in the early 20s.
When I took a teaching position here in California in my mid-20s, I started building, I got the biggest garage in the local community with a little house attached to it, and that's where I started actually building the vehicles themselves.
And I've been pursuing it both theoretically and practically ever since then.
But engines have become the, or always were the stumbling block.
You need a large amount of power in a small package, and I never had that really.
Even the Mazda engine that you referred to in your car was still quite a bit heavier than necessary to make this thing fly.
We have engines the size of a bucket that Put out 150 horsepower, and we have engines the size of, see, what's a good, maybe two feet long and a foot in diameter that put out 300 horsepower.
And Honda's coming out with a new airplane, a small microjet aircraft.
So the car companies are looking at aircraft, not necessarily my type of aircraft for sure, but the fact that the car companies are going in the aircraft direction is a sign that the future is going to change.
Well, big companies become kind of complacent over a period of time.
For the Japanese to compete here, they had to offer something special, and they tended to offer initially fairly small, inexpensive cars that were reliable.
And building on that reputation and continuing to keep that reputation allows them to build cars in America, Toyota and Honda, that are reliable with American manpower at economic prices compared to Detroit.
I don't have a direct answer other than the fact that I've seen myself many big companies that went south because of the complacency of being the top dog.
When I was doing my Ph.D. at McGill University, not as part of my PhD, but as a, you know, like everybody needs a hobby when they're doing a PhD.
But in any case, I loved vertical takeoff aircraft so much that I ended up in the evening working on a model of an aircraft, which we called the XM-2.
And, well, we called the model XM-1, but it was a scale model of the first one that I built in my garage in 1964 and 65 and flew it at the University Airport.
And actually, it got quite a bit of publicity.
It was shown Walter Cronkite on CVS and other things as we flew around the University Airport at three or four feet off the ground.
But it wasn't a stable aircraft.
If you tried to go any higher than that, you would have crashed because you needed artificial stabilization when you were near the ground, and that was the limitation.
That took about $25 million in about 15 years to get a system that would fly the aircraft for itself.
What prevents now, in your opinion, what prevents a sizable investment, the additional $100 million or a lot more that you need to make this practical?
What's preventing that?
What's stopping these companies when they come take a look?
There must be something, some hole in this whole idea that's stopping them from forking over the money.
Well, first off, I don't know how seriously they really do consider it even to start with.
I think they're checking out technologies.
They think of themselves as car companies for the most part.
So how serious they are, I don't know.
But assuming they had some serious interest in it, they would certainly be concerned with the fact that the government is involved in the approval process because that is a, you know, theoretically a lengthy process, the FA certification.
But in all fairness, if I'm going to take their side of the issue, I'd have to say that historically aircraft, because they've been built in small numbers, historically, have not made much money, nor has engines for aircraft made much money because the numbers have been small.
And unless you have this vision that this can be large and we can produce a huge number of these aircraft, it makes them very nervous that, in fact, the numbers would be small.
I think any major breakthrough and paradigm shifting kind of breakthrough is going to have a lot of resistance because of its difficulty in predicting the future.
And big companies don't tend to be very futuristic.
Is there any chance that you could cobble together a version of, perhaps even with the vehicle that you have now, that would demonstrate horizontal flight as well as vertical flight?
I assume that you still have only done your vertical flight in a tethered fashion.
And the main reason for that is the engines we were using up until recently were very limited in their power.
But we have made a fairly major breakthrough in the amount of power we're getting out of the engine.
And we're installing eight much more powerful engines.
The previous engines had about 65 horsepower each, and we're putting in eight engines that have 120 horsepower each.
They fit in the same space, and this would really allow us the extra power in case we lost a number of engines or just the ability to control becomes a lot easier if you have excess power.
And we're also building a lake, a fairly sizable lake, over which we can do low-speed flights, not high-speed flights, because high-speed flights you definitely go up to altitude to do, but low-speed flights in an area untethered where the press could observe them.
And we have actually over 1,000 sign-ups by the press to attend a flight next spring when we do this.
Most of the tooling is complete for the new engine installation.
We have the engines Almost completely assembled.
We have started the lake as a project to have complete in the next few months.
And so once the weather clears in the spring, I believe we'll be in a position to give a demonstration that would be safe and at the same time show the full capabilities short of conversion to full aerodynamic flight.
If anybody's interested, they could look up milkfarm.net and they can read about the site where the lake is going to be and where we would be doing our test flying.
People are very, Paul, people are very, what's the right word, impatient.
They hear about something like this, and then the next thing they want to hear is that they can go out and buy one.
And, of course, as you've pointed out, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of investment here and some not very forward-looking companies, and you're just doing this on your own.
So, like many pioneers, it is possible, Paul, that you may not see this come to fruition in your lifetime.
But everything that I've done has generally taken longer than I planned.
But certainly when we set out to develop an engine that we've now completed that has a world market, we succeeded when we went into the Muffet business.
We became the dominant manufacturer of these kind of products in the world.
I think we're going to, I am sure we're going to be successful to some level.
Now, will I see this as a replacement for the automobile?
I don't think so, not in my lifetime, but as a vehicle that can replace about 40% of the miles we travel today on the highway, which is 50 miles and more, I say absolutely.
What I want to do is a segment, a 30-minute segment, and take questions from all of you in the audience.
So if you have a question about the Skycar, its progress, where it's eventually going to go, and how it's going to get there, pick up a telephone and join us now, and I'll get you on the air with Paul Mahler.
For me, it's a dream.
I don't know.
I guess I've, all my life, I've had this dream of personal flight, and I know I'm not alone.
Here's a man working on it, now 70 years old.
I guess we've been doing interviews now for about the past, I don't know, eight or ten years.
Maybe Paul can fill me in on that.
And we can all only hope that the Skycar will become reality.
Paul Mahler, and your chance to speak with him in a moment.
Once again, Paul Mahler.
As I said, we'll do a segment here and take questions from all of you about the SkyCar and its progress, or in the view of some, its lack of progress.
But Paul is one man, and I guess he's about $200 million into this project right now to get a car that would work and would sell for about a quarter of a million dollars.
Expensive, but hey, for those with the dream, I think a lot of people would be willing to fork it over.
It would take about another $100 million.
So, Paul, if you're there, I'd like to take some questions from the audience.
I've been seeing stuff on the internet about your car for ages, and it's so cool that you're doing this show.
I'd just like to ask, you were discussing economics.
Is it possible, and I know this may be a horribly, horribly stupid question because I'm not informed about the subject at all.
Is it possible to do mass transit vehicles?
Because Boeing seems to be doing pretty well with their mass transit, and they make significantly more money if they can squeeze a few more people into the plane because they can sell it for more.
You know, a bus would be more like getting on a 767 or something like that anyway.
Paul, I like the idea of the small skycar, and I guess you do too.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Paul Mueller.
Hi.
unidentified
Yes, sir.
In the 60s already, there were people that were interested in a one-man helicopter, and you have these fine engines and these exotic computers.
I think the one-man helicopter not only would be very feasible, but would pave the way for the national system and the motorcycles around the world by the millions or one-man vehicles?
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Paul Mueller.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
Hi, Paul.
I have a question, sort of a curiosity about the physics.
I don't think it would be necessary for a Skycar to ever do this because of all the different safety checks.
I'm familiar with the Skycar, but I am curious to know whether it would be capable of flaring out if it ever had to, though it probably would never have to.
When you say flare out, you're talking about whether it could be made to land in a conventional airport, for example?
unidentified
Well, what I'm saying is, for example, if the engine absolutely quit, or all the backup engines quit, everything quit, the idea is when you're falling, using the apparent updraft due to your falling through space to power the fan as a windmill and get enough flywheel out of the rotor to then reverse the ways on it once again to get power just from inertia of the engine to make a powered landing in the last few moments.
One question is, in the future, how would you be able to compete with the airlines since the airlines are a hell of a lot cheaper?
And the second question is, what's really concerning here, if it happened to get a hold, the terrorists actually got a hold of this, could be a very destructive weapon for the United States.
It can hover, it can go over the White House or major cities.
Well, Boeing did an extensive study on our technology and concluded that, and this actually is available on the Internet, which if anybody checks with the company can find out the address, but they showed that it would be actually very competitive with the commercial business because of the basic low cost, the low cost of burning fuel, for example.
Jet airplanes, even though they carry a lot of people, still burn a lot of fuel per passenger.
But, of course, in the very big airplanes that they're contemplating, no, we couldn't compete the latest, most efficient jet planes on that basis.
But then again, you're giving up a lot.
You're flying with a whole bunch of people and you're going from point A to point B, which may not be where you want to go, but the only way to get there indirectly with our vehicle, you can go personally from any small place to any other small place.
And of course, these very small jets that are coming about today, you may have heard about like Eclipse, is going to try and help you do that.
So there's a big market for that and the desire of people to go from point A to point B on their own schedule.
Well, I think we have the best answer for terrorism there is because if you have this organized highway in the sky where you know where every vehicle is precisely and why they're there, you won't get any surprises.
People aren't going to appear from out of nowhere.
First off, as I said, the vehicles are controlled from the ground rather than the air to start with.
And so the terrorist, long before he gets into the controlled airspace, is going to be identified.
And we're going to know everything about everybody.
You may not like that concept, but that's going to be the nature of this world because that's how we get people to go safely from one point to the other without running into one another.
It's Rob out in Albuquerque, the home of that Eclipse Aviation jet that your guest was mentioning.
I see it fly around here all the time.
Even that thing's like a million and a half dollars now.
But question for your guest is, as an aircraft owner, he's I guess proposing that this is all going to be under electronic flight rules, which would mean that in order for me to fly my little Cessna in the airspace that currently exists with this vertical takeoff and landing skycar he's talking about,
I have to upgrade my little Cessna with probably $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 worth of avionics so that we don't fly into each other because obviously the person flying the vehicle won't be a pilot.
Well, the only thing we have to do is protect ourselves or protect you from going into this controlled airspace, specifically controlled virtual highway in the sky.
And of course, one of the reasons your systems would cost $40,000 is because we produce very few of them.
But the ABS-B system, which gives you a very good sense of who's around you and why they're there, is going to be very inexpensive.
The TCAF, which is one that you may be aware of, that's pretty expensive and wouldn't be something that could go in immediately.
But if we have huge volumes, that would be additional support for you that would assure that you could operate the way you want and still coexist with this highway and the sky that I'm talking about.
Well, I think it would be a very complementary approach because if you want to go long distances, the jet airliners are still the way to go.
And as the guest earlier mentioned, when it gets to these large airplanes they're contemplating, there's nobody that can compete with that in terms of passenger miles per gallon of fuel.
But if you want to go these short distances, jet planes are not very efficient.
So much of the fuel is used taking off and landing and climbing that they become very uneconomic.
So I think that there's a very complementary role it can fill.
It'll offload airports because we don't need to have runways.
And of course, airports are running out of space today, and there are no new major airports planned in America.
So I don't know where we're going to be 10 years from now for aircraft flight.
We really need something like this that complements some of the auto industry and complements some of the aircraft industry.
And quite frankly, if I didn't do it, it would happen anyhow.
Dr. Miller, your vehicle with the eight motors, just a fantastic, and you have so much control.
How come, although you use the gasoline or whatever, that you haven't thought about the lifter over-unity type motors that do exist that you would have gimbal on?
Well, the over-unity motor of any, what they call an outside-type motor, say in England for refrigerators and configurated and free, it flies and it gets up in the air, and it's just a matter of spinnings, which is what he has on his craft.
Yes, the government is very interested for a medivac vehicle and a logistics vehicle, but a government typically does not give contracts to companies our size simply because there's a lot of reasons why a company our size might be a liability.
We may not be big enough to do the job.
So it really looks to us to find a partner, and that's what we've done in the past.
When we have contracts that come up, we go out and join forces with other companies such as Pratt Whitney or a number of other companies I could name, which we've worked with, to do it together because they have a presence in Washington.
We've come a long way since we last talked to you, mostly in the area of redundancy, because while we were redundant when we talked, we didn't really have as redundant a system.
You could find areas where a failure could have brought down the aircraft.
And so we've spent probably three years now building that system to a much higher level of reliability.
And while we haven't tested it any significant flights forward, we certainly have simulated in detail, which is where you start off and when you're checking something in any case.
Well, myself, of course, in no way do I have the skill to be an expert electronics designer, either hardware or software, nor am I an expert composite man.
So, of course, we're a public company.
We have a large number of stockholders.
We have a fairly high market capitalization.
And so really, we're dealing with a lot of skilled people involved to make this happen.
Not enough, I would say, as I would certainly like to add a few hundred more to our company.
But we would certainly, at the same time, if where there's skilled people out there, we're always looking for them.
And they can look at our internet site and they can see the kind of people we're trying to have join us.
Well, it's money, but it really is money and a relationship as well, because as I said, money alone, I'm not at this stage of my life planning to create another General Motors.
I want to see this project a success, and I'm going to make it a success by joining forces with the right partner when we've decided who that should be.
Yes, you might mention to somebody they can just put Skycar on any search engine on the Internet, and they're going to find an enormous number of things they can read about.
Skycar alone is enough to get them anything they want to see.
And when we come back, we will go into one hour of absolute undiluted open lines.
From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Beldis.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
I wonder if some of you remember that very, very nice lady who called from Canada, actually, for a couple of consecutive weeks.
Well, she said she was coming to the Philippines, and indeed she did.
And she wants to shout Out to her husband Tom.
So, Tom, up in Canada, hi, buddy.
We're about to rock and roll into some open lines, but there is something since we got an update from Paul Mahler that I'd like to do here in a moment.
It concerns flying.
As you know, many of you may know, I'm a Lutheran, so I guess I can read this.
Somebody sent this to me, and I thought it was funny.
We are pleased to announce Lutheran Air is now operating in Minnesota, also serving Wisconsin, North, and South Dakota.
If you're traveling soon, consider Lutheran Air.
Lutheran Air, the No-Frills Airline.
You're all in the same boat on Lutheran Air where flying is an uplifting experience.
There is no first class on any Lutheran Air flight.
Meals are potluck.
Rows one through six bring rolls, seven through fifteen, bring a salad, sixteen through twenty-one main dish, and twenty-two through thirty dessert.
Basses and tenors, please sit in the rear of the aircraft.
Everybody is responsible for his or her own luggage.
All fares are by free will offering, and a plane will not land till the budget is met.
Pay attention to your flight attendant who will acquaint you with the safety system aboard Lutrin Air Flight 599.
Okay, listen up.
I'm only going to say this once.
In the event of the sudden loss of cabin pressure, I'm frankly going to be real surprised, and so will Captain Olson, because we fly around 2,000 feet, so loss of cabin pressure would probably mean to second coming or something of that nature.
I wouldn't bother with those little masks, those little rubber tubes.
You're going to have much bigger things to worry about than that.
Just stuff those back in the little holes there.
Probably the masks fell out because of turbulence, which to be honest with you, since we're flying at 2,000 feet, we'll have quite a bit of.
Sort of like driving across a plowed field, but after a while you get used to it.
In the event of a water landing, I'd say forget it.
Start saying the Lord's Prayer.
Just hope you get to the part about forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us, which some people say is trespass against us, which isn't right, but what can you do?
The use of cell phones on the plane is strictly forbidden, not because they may confuse the plane's navigation system, which is as heated pants all the way anyway.
No.
It's because cell phones are a pain in the wazoo.
And if God meant you to have a cell phone, he'd have put one on your mouth on the other side of your head.
We start lunch right afternoon.
It's buffet style with a coffee pot up front.
Then we have the hymn sing.
Hymnos are in the seat pocket in front of you.
Don't take yours with you when you go.
I'm going to be real upset, and I'm not kidding.
Right now, I'll say grace.
Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed.
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
May we land in Duluth or something pretty close.
I don't know who sent that to me, but thank you.
I have something extra special for you, including open lines, coming up in a moment.
We're going to open lines here shortly, so feel free to grab a line and join in.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Open lines.
unidentified
Hey, I just wanted to, well, first of all, I wanted to say I love you, man.
You are just super huge out here in New Mexico.
You and George both.
And I would love to see you guys do some sort of live show or something like that, maybe on the right there.
There are very few live shows left of any kind on television or radio.
unidentified
Yeah, it's amazing.
Anyway, first of all, very concerned for your safety down there with any kind of death threats because I think you and I both know that life is fairly cheap down in the Philippines and money buys everything and it doesn't take that much.
Let's go to the wildcard line and say howdy you're on the air.
unidentified
Hello, Art.
This is John from Long Island, New York.
How are you doing?
I just have a couple of quick questions.
Are you ever planning to move back to the United States?
And the second question is: do you feel, besides that disturbing letter that you got, do you feel just as comfortable here in the Philippines as you would in the United States back home?
I did buy the condominium here in Manila, and I absolutely love it.
And I'm here because that's where Aaron is.
And so, let's see, the second part, do I feel as comfortable here?
Yes.
I feel as comfortable here as I would anywhere else up until the time this letter began to circulate again.
Now, it is dangerous.
There's, I guess, no two ways about it.
It is dangerous, so it's something that I'm going to have to think a little bit about.
I don't know.
As I say, this is not one of those things that you, I don't run away from things.
I sometimes run to them, but not away from them.
So my inclination is not to run away from this.
But I do, I'm realistic, and so I do recognize the danger from this damn letter.
And so it's something I'm thinking about.
Will I ever come back?
Yeah, maybe.
Certainly, there's a lot back there for me.
And so we'll see.
I would like very much for Erin to see the U.S. She is not one of those gals who particularly wants to live in the United States, but, you know, one never knows.
So who knows what the future holds?
Let's go west of the Rockies and say howdy you're on the air.
I guess I didn't say a whole lot about the fact that I was going to be in a video game, but sure enough, I am in Prey, and I think it shocked and surprised a lot of people because I didn't say much about it.
Okay, well, what happened is, oh, I don't know, it was probably about six months or so, maybe seven months before I left the United States, I was contacted by a game maker who made a game called Prey, and they asked me if I wanted to be in it.
And I said, sure, why not?
It had to do with, as he just mentioned, alien abduction and that sort of thing.
So I thought it would be a natural.
And sure enough, they rolled in, and we put the voice tracks together quite quickly.
And it was one of those things that was just naturally easy and naturally good.
So if you're a video game player and you bump into something called Prey, I believe that's P-R-E-Y, you'll hear my voice.
Wildcard Line, you are on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
Yeah, hi, Art.
Do you recall a show you did a few years ago about a mysterious returning radio signal, which was broadcast at one point and then returned, the signal returned full strength to Earth some 15 hours later?
I don't remember the exact interval, but it was sometime after the signal was broadcast.
What you're talking about is called long delay echo, LDE.
Nobody understands how it's occurring, why it's occurring.
Wait a minute.
There are no physics that will explain what's happening, but I can tell you it's as real as a heart attack.
I've had it happen to myself.
unidentified
My theory is that perhaps if the interval is, let's say, for argument's sake, 15 hours, that at 7.5 light hours distance from the Earth, there exists some sort of phenomenon which bounces the signal back and acts in a similar way as the signal was full strength when it came back.
It has certain similarities or certain same physical properties as gray line propagation.
And apparently, the Philippine government isn't sure either.
So they must have this giant stock of hair somewhere.
I don't know.
unidentified
And I got something, you know, all these 9-11 conspiracies, I think because there's no faith in the Bush government, I think everybody's too quick to accept all these outrageous theories.
I refuse to believe, perhaps naively, that our own government would destroy the trade center buildings, the Pentagon, try to destroy the White House.
I don't for one second believe that.
And perhaps that's a naive way to be, but I don't think so.
I guess I have some lingering patriotic feeling about my government, about my presidents, whatever they may be.
And we've had some difficult presidencies, right?
Even at the worst, though, I don't think we've ever seen anything of this sort.
And I don't think we've seen it now.
I don't think for one second that our government orchestrated what happened on 9-11.
I don't think our president did.
I think that exactly what seems to have happened is what happened.
And maybe that's showing my age.
I'm 61 years old now, but I've always been a loyal American, and that's not changing now.
Even though the people who do believe in these conspiracies are quick to point out that anybody who does not embrace the 9-11 conspiracy theories is a traitor.
That's actually the kind of word they use all the time.
Traitor.
You are a traitor if you don't embrace this, if you don't think that the U.S. did it all, that we wired extra explosives into the buildings to be sure that they went down.
I think there have been enough people who have said that the amount of jet fuel, for example, that was carried by the planes was quite sufficient to begin to weaken the structure of the buildings.
And we could go on for a very long time about this, but I'm not going to.
I simply will say that as a matter of article of faith, I do not for one second believe that we destroyed our own buildings, that we crashed a plane into the Pentagon, that we sent one on its way toward the White House, that we did this ourselves.
No, sir, I don't believe that.
And whatever I may believe about our president, I certainly don't believe he would order something like that.
So there you have it.
Good morning, everybody.
Afternoon or evening, whatever it is, wherever you are.
I happen to be in Manila, the Philippines.
I'm Art Bell.
Indeed, here I am, and I see many of you are there.
We're in open lines, something I very, very much enjoy.
There may now be a medical explanation for shadow people.
Now, I'll talk to you more about that tomorrow evening, but there's a certain segment of the medical community, scientific community, that believes they may have discovered a medical reason for what we call the shadow people.
Okay, the answer is I have all my ham gear here, and I'm in the process of getting the reciprocal licensing taken care of, and then I've got to approach the people here in the condominium building and see if I can get an antenna on the roof.
unidentified
Oh, okay.
And I was also going to wonder if I had to send you my email address so you could send me that to Kila.
You know, I seem to remember something about that.
unidentified
Yeah, in the annual 4th of July parade.
And imagine a 72 Pontiac Catalina, 75 miles per gallon, a Mercedes 86 Diesel, 162 miles per gallon, and a obvious question here is why aren't we all using it then?
Well, I called him, and this is like four years ago, and he said they're ready, they're going to be going into production, they're going to be built in Mexico.
And he said, stay in touch because I'll let you know and send them money.
I'll send them to you.
Once you prove that they work, then you send the money.
Well, I called him back probably nine months later and disconnect.
And then I heard an interview with Byron Wine last fall and this man, El Caggiano, wound up in China and he's building them for the Chinese government over there.
I've cut down to about a tenth of what I've been smoking at all times, except when I'm on the air.
Now, the radio bone, I can assure you, and radio people out there, you know this is true, is directly connected to the smoking bone.
Now, I'm not a drinker, but I believe that anybody who drinks, who goes to a bar, will tell you that the drinking bone is connected to the smoking bone.
Well, the radio bone is also every bit as much connected to the smoking bone as is the drinking bone.
So when I'm on the air, I don't have an opportunity to chew gum, and that's what I've been doing otherwise, is chewing nicotine gum to try and cut down.
So I would say I'm doing okay.
In view of how much I did smoke, which was almost all the time, I've done quite well, about a tenth of what I used to smoke.
I'm a convenience store clerk for a certain company with a letter in a circle.
And a couple of years back, I guess two clerks got killed.
Well, now I've been seeing, like, that I'm working the midnight shift, I've been seeing shadows walk by the doors and doors will open themselves or cigarettes will appear on the counter when nobody's been there.
But yeah, so weird things have been going on, and I've been listening to you probably since I was about 15, and I'm just starting to get a little freaked out.
If it was me, which it's not, of course, I think that I would, if I'd seen enough of that, things moving on their own and all the rest of that, I'd probably move on.
But then again, that's just me.
Let's go here and say you're on the Air Coast Coast AM with Art Bell Howdy.
Maybe what's happening is, just like the eggs from the Princeton Project, the random events of recording silence were actually picking up, oh, it could be anything, anything emotional, I would think.
Obviously, that's just something that occurred to me.
I'm not really sure specifically how we would go about testing such a theory.
So, I mean, is it just people that are just being extremely narrow-minded about the possibility of, I mean, because I would say, yes, it's people being very narrow-minded.
But I was going to say, because there are so many different forms of life here, there are mammals, but, you know, between us and a lion or something else like that, I would think that, you know, the possibility of life here would exist in the same fashion someplace else.
And it allows me, I hold a little card, and it's not exactly a dual citizenship kind of deal, but it allows me to come and go as I wish from the Philippines.
It's a permanent visa, or you could consider it kind of like a permanent residence card.
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like a permanent residence card.
And so I can come and go as I like without any visa problems.
It's absolutely wonderful.
I wish we had something very much like it going the other direction, but we don't.