FLYING CAR

Transition is not a flying automobile. The vehicle, set to go on sale this year, will cruise smoothly on the road and through the sky. It will have wheels, Formula One a style suspension, and a pair of 10-foot-wide wings that fold up when it switches from air to asphalt. And when the engineers at Terrafugia in Wilburn, Massachusetts, let me sit inside their just-finished proof-of-concept vehicle and grab the steering wheel, it is simple to imagine piloting this thing up and out of traffic, in to the open skies.But we are not speaking about a flying automobile.

The team at Terrafugia is about to fulfill the fantasy of every driver - pilot: a consumer vehicle that can take to the highways and the skies. All they must do is finish the first. The Transition is a roadable aircraft. The team makes this distinction clear in conversation, on Terrafugia T-shirts, and in giant, blue letters on the side of the trailer outside their shop.The flying automobile has been a mainstay of our imagined transportation future for as long as there's been automobiles and airplanes: fanciful vehicles that promise to have us commuting like George Jet son. Scores of garage inventors have spent their lives generating detailed designs, scale models, even working prototypes. In the 1950s, Molt Taylor, a former Navy pilot, flew a few versions of his Aerocar, an plane/car hybrid that attached to a separate, tow able set of wings and a tail. But he couldn't sign up customers to turn it in to a business. Now, the individuals who are closest to making that dream real on putting an automobile in the air, whatever they call it are about the least starry-eyed folks you could meet. Terrafugia co-founder Carl Dietrich, 31, winces at that idea. hesitate to call any of us visionaries, he says. We are engineers. Tidy Up: Marc Stiller sands a part while Carl Dietrich (kneeling) and Andrew Heifetz look on. John B. Car nett Dietrich company isn't hinging its designs on out-of-reach know-how or infrastructure. You wont find any ducted fans or references to anti gravity. He and his team are in lieu building a single-engine, rear-propeller airplane that happens to be street-legal. They perfected the design in application simulators and are using materials proven in earlier vehicles. Regrettably, that sober approach doesn't make their task any simpler. Dietrich as team intends to manufacture and sell several hundred Transitions a year. That means doing things that no flying-car hopefuls before them ever have: Build an aircraft that can take potholes and protect its occupants if it slams in to a brick wall at 30 miles an hour. Do it cheaply and reliably, repeatedly. Score passing grades from all those federal agencies. Find anyone to insure it. The Transition will meet Federal Aviation Administration standards in airplane mode and satisfy National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and Environmental Protection Agency regulations on the road. You will be able to take off only from a runway, and you will ll need a pilot license to do so. If you are stuck in traffic, you will stay stuck. As they say, a road able aircraft.