" Mark my words : a combination airplane and motorcar is coming . You may smile , but it will descend . "
Auto magnate Henry Ford earned his fair share of ridicule in 1940 when he made that boisterous announcement . The flying car may still be come , but it ’s certainly taking its sweet time . Seven decades later , there ’s still no sign of it .
What makes Ford ’s confidence so mystifying is that the mogul had already spearhead one attempt to put the coarse man in the sky , and that project had failed miserably . This is the chronicle of that plane , the Ford Flivver .
In 1924 , Ford larn the Stout Metal Airplane Company and begin crop on various designs for civilian aircraft . Ford ’s aircraft division had some successes , like the Ford Tri - Motor transferral plane that roll out in 1926 and earned ecumenical acclaim when Admiral Richard Byrd flew it over the South Pole in 1929 .
Henry Ford had bigger goal for the division , though . He had already put car possession within the intermediate American ’s range , so why not put a plane in every service department , too ? The idea sounds silly now – just as it probably did then – but Ford threw himself into the project . With engineer Otto Koppen at the helm , Ford ’s aircraft segmentation went to work build " the Model T of the strain . "
Ford knew that successfully marketing a civilian plane would be sly , so he charge Koppen with plan a modest , light foxiness . ( Koppen by and by said that Ford want a planing machine that would go in his office . ) By the summertime of 1926 , Koppen had add up up with an aircraft that check the bill . The Ford Flivver was a pocket-size single - seat plane that was just over 15 feet farseeing and had a wingspan of just a tomentum under 23 groundwork . It run on a 3 - cylinder , 35 - horsepower engine made by the Ford company Anzani , and it weigh just 350 pounds when empty .
As unlikely as the task initially sounded , Ford now had a prototype of his everyman ’s plane . Now he just needed to work out the kinks , show it to the world , and get every American in his own carpenter’s plane . Ford unveiled the Flivver on his 63rd birthday , July 30 , 1926 , with the caller ’s trustworthy trial pilot , Harry J. Brooks , at the controls .
When Brooks submit that initial public flight in the Flivver , it looked like Ford had hit another home ladder . AsPopular Sciencereportedat the meter , several novel features of the planer made it seem feasible that your norm Joe could get behind the controls . The planing machine ’s flaps were arrange to give it maximum upward lift in small spaces , and a rear wheel made it potential to ram from one ’s household to a improvised runway .
For the next year and a half , Brooks flew the original Flivver and two other image as the company polish the design . Brooks loved the little aeroplane so much that he actually used it to commute from his home to mould . Brooks would tell the jam , " fly a plane like this is no more difficult than flying a big plane , except in this plane the pilot has to consider a little faster . "
Brooks was one of just two man ever to fly a Flivver . The other was Charles Lindbergh , and Lucky Lindy did n’t share Brooks ' exuberance for the design . Lindbergh later called the Flivver one of the forged aeroplane he ’d ever piloted .
Brooks even assay to fly one of the Flivvers from Michigan all the way down to Miami on a exclusive tank car of gas in January 1928 . Although bumpy weather forced a landing in Asheville , NC , the flight still set an American distance record book for light planes . Brooks reported that the efficient little airplane still had stack of fuel to finish the trip ; when the violent storm pass , he continued on to Florida .
Brooks ' trip to Florida turned out to be the tragical goal for the Flivver project . In later February 1928 , Brooks was cruise over the ocean just south of Melbourne , FL , when the Flivver ’s railway locomotive locked up , smashing both planer and pilot into the water . The wreckage of the plane eventually washed ashore , but searchers never find Brooks ' dead body .
Although Henry Ford move rapidly to announce that Brooks ' decease would n’t neuter the fellowship ’s planes for the Flivver , the task cursorily went south . Ford and the young test pilot had become friends , and reports surfaced that the mogul was distraught over Brooks ' death . As Ford ’s guilt grew , he decide to terminate the Flivver labor and get out of the light carpenter’s plane business entirely .
Ford ’s fellowship subsequently got back into the small aircraft business organization with labor like 1931 ’s Stout Skycar series , but Ford was never able to put the common man in the melodic phrase .
This post in the beginning appeared in 2011 .
