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Outside Magazine April 2003

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Out There
Joy Ride
Intoxicated by the uplifting potential of a build-it-yourself hovercraft, our guy decides to take a flying leap into the future

By Larry Gallagher


	Boys Life, December 1974 and August 1979

IT STARTED IN THE CHILDREN'S SECTION of the San Francisco Public Library. I was leafing through a recent issue of Boys' Life, looking for a particular link to my past. There, in the middle of the Gifts and Gimmicks section—right between "Build Your Own Robot" and "Two Stick Fires: Guaranteed"—was the exact advertisement I remembered from 27 years ago, when I was 13. The ad featured a picture of a little boy gazing at a funny-looking triangle mounted on three circular pods. "FLOAT ON AIR AROUND YOUR HOUSE OR SCHOOL!" the copy read. "EASY TO BUILD! POWERED BY AN ORDINARY VACUUM CLEANER MOTOR! LOW COST!"

I'm not the only person who remembers this pitch. Most anyone who became a Scout in the past 92 years got Boys' Life as part of the deal, and the Air Car ad is seared into millions of memories. Doctors, lawyers, scientists—I've seen their eyes come alive at the mention of it. And, sure, between our proctology finals and corporate takeovers we might forget about futuristic conveyances for a while, but the fascination is always lurking. Especially now. We live in a time when grand old visions about personal flying machines are finally starting to seem feasible. When I was a kid, the great flight hope was the Rocket Belt, a backpack-size contraption first developed in the 1950s at Bell Labs in Buffalo, New York. The Rocket Belt ran on hydrogen peroxide, a liquid that, when forced through a mesh of treated silver, generates temperatures of 1,300 degrees, 130 decibels of noise, and an insane plume of steam capable of lifting a man off the ground. But the Belt had a flaw: It burned through its fuel so fast that your ride only lasted 30 seconds.

It's obvious that the world still longs for hovercraft. I think the main reason people got so excited about the Segway—Dean Kamen's self-balancing scooter—is that for a while there, before he revealed what he was really working on, the rumor mill had it that he was creating a personal flying machine.

That didn't work out, but things are looking lively elsewhere. Large hovercraft that ride on air cushions over land and water are used by the military, law enforcement, and search-and-rescue professionals. Smaller hovercraft are on the market, and more-ambitious personal flying machines could be showing up on the horizon. One currently available hovercraft is the Airboard, a sporty Australian-made gizmo that looks like a flying saucer with handlebars. Airboard riders zip along on an air cushion at 15 miles per hour, and the craft comes with a steerable wheel that engages with the ground, letting riders perform zigzags, spins, and other tricks. But the thing is expensive. Sold through high-end catalogs like Hammacher Schlemmer, its price tag ranges from $8,877 to a whopping $16,300.

Even more interesting are concepts like the Solotrek Exoskeleton Flying Vehicle (XFV), a full-fledged personal flying machine in development since 1996 at Trek Aerospace, an aeronautical-engineering company in Sunnyvale, California. If you locked a troop of Boy Scouts in a room for a month, feeding them only Kool-Aid and Pop Rocks, the XFV is the sort of thing they'd dream up. Picture an arcade-game cabinet with a pair of turbines on top, powered by a 120-horsepower gasoline engine.

The pilot straps himself to this bulky rig in a standing position, controlling it with joysticks during vertical takeoff and landing—or VTOL, as we say in the hover biz. Computer simulations suggest that the XFV, which cost several million to develop, will someday go 69 miles per hour and reach heights of 8,000 feet. But for now we're still in could-be mode: The longest test flight, made in December 2002, lasted just over a minute and involved a vertical climb of only five feet.

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