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Outside Magazine April 2003

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Out There
Joy Ride (Cont.)

ALL OF WHICH HELPS EXPLAIN why, a quarter-century after first seeing the Air Car ad, I decided to send off $8.95 for a set of plans. I can't afford an Airboard, and I can't wait for an XFV, which will be out of my price range, too. Inspired by today's aeropioneers, I dropped a check in the mail.

The plans consist of six double-sided pages containing photos and exploded diagrams that show different Air Car models.

Imagine the outdoor fun of a hovercraft. You could island-hop Micronesia, or tote a snow cone to a friend halfway up Half Dome.

Some are triangular, some circular. All operate on the same principle: Vacuum motors blow air down through large holes in a plywood platform. The forced air is caught by a drawstringed "skirt" that creates a low-friction zone underneath. The platforms are roughly four feet in diameter, with a seat in the middle. Forward propulsion is provided by your little brother, where available. Range: as long as all the extension cords you can swipe from Dad.

It took me a couple of weeks to get my alpha model together. One night early in the process, working in the basement of my house, I invited my friend Eddie over to consult. Eddie is the author of Arty the Part-Time Astronaut, a children's book about a kid spaceman, so he's no stranger to airborne fantasy. But Eddie wasn't much help. He spent most of the evening doubled over in laughter after I revealed I'd stayed in the Boy Scouts until I was 18. His conniptions only intensified when he turned to page nine of the plans and read, "CASTERS ARE A MUST!" I tried to explain that casters are just the landing gear, but he was howling too loud to hear.

THE POSITION OF mocking-guy-on-the-sidelines is an easy one to adopt for nonpioneers. As a positive next step, I decided to confer with the boys in the hangar—serious inventors who are taking personal flight off the drawing board and into the sky.

My first call was to Trek Aerospace, where—after a fair amount of begging—I was patched through to Michael Moshier, the company's 56-year-old founder and chief executive. Moshier grew up in suburban Detroit, not far from the headquarters of the Williams Research Corporation, whose engineers were performing outdoor tests with the Rocket Belt in the mid-sixties, when he was a teenager.

"We used to drive by there all the time," Moshier told me. "I wished I could go in and be their test pilot."

The flight bug drove him to study aerospace engineering and serve as a Navy pilot in Vietnam. He made a pile of money in a range of flight-related industries, but, as he put it, "the love of VTOL never stopped festering in the back of my brain." He took his cash and started Trek Aerospace to do something about it.

Moshier told me his ten-person company has gone through an "incredible odyssey" to get their contraption off the ground. They had to design every piece of hardware, and the software to control it. They had to test everything at full power to make sure the various pieces wouldn't misbehave at the "ridiculously high speeds" at which they would move.

For a while after the Treksters started having successful test flights, it seemed as if the hard part was over, that all they would have to do was raise a little cash and polish their machine. They were already getting funds from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the R&D branch of the Pentagon, to the tune of $5 million. For that reason, the first production models were slated to go to the military, but it's not hard to imagine the outdoor fun you could have with an XFV. You could pogo from spire to spire in Monument Valley. You could hop across Micronesia without getting your feet wet. You could tote a snow cone to a friend halfway up the face of Half Dome.

But, sadly, there's been another glitch. Just before Christmas 2002, the follow-up test model of the XFV crashed after achieving a flight of five vertical feet. The craft's tether was sucked into its fan blades and blew out the engine. And though the pilot walked away unhurt, the mishap set Trek back on its DARPA contract, so the company has lost its funding. As of January 1, Trek had been forced to cut its payroll, at least for now. As Moshier recently put it in the company newsletter, good old Trek had "entered the New Year without a clear picture of its future."

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