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Outside Magazine April 2003

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Out There
Joy Ride (Cont.)

DAVID ROSS IS STILL surprised when kids manage to track him down. "I don't know how they get my phone number," he says. "The magazine must give it to them."

Actually, the inventor of the Air Car is still listed in the Orange County, California, telephone directory, and I doubt that he gets many people asking him to share the fascinating history of his hovercraft empire. A 74-year-old retiree, he spends most of his time watching TV and stuffing envelopes for the Air Car orders that still trickle in.

A photographer by trade, Ross was shooting in-house for the defense contractor Philco-Ford in the mid-sixties when the company unveiled its first experimental hovercraft, a huge thing powered by two jet engines that ran six downward-thrust propellers. Ross witnessed a few promising tests, but the craft came to grief when it crashed during a test flight. "It was a complete failure," Ross says. "A beautiful failure. A magnificent failure."

Cut to the late sixties. Ross was still working for Philco-Ford when the proverbial lightbulb came on in his head. He bought a few vacuum motors, bolted them to a piece of plywood, lashed on a skirt, and voilˆ: He had created the Air Car. He built a few variations, gussied them up with silver neoprene skirts, then took out his first ad in the April 1974 issue of Boys' Life. "My wife told me I was nuts," he recalls, "that I'd never make a cent."

He should have bet her. The first orders arrived in such numbers that Ross had to pry them out of his mailbox. He hasn't kept an exact count, but estimates he's received 3,000 orders per year since then—some 90,000 in all. These days he's netting $1,500 in a good month, $1,000 in a bad one. Every few months he gets a nasty letter from some irate parent saying the Air Car is too hard to build, and one time a kid knocked on his door, waiflike, looking for tech support.

On that score, as long as I have him on the line, I feel it's my duty to bust his chops a bit on behalf of crestfallen kids everywhere.

"Well," he says, "I never expected kids to complete the project entirely on their own."

But what about the injustice of charging nine bucks for plans that haven't been updated since the heyday of the Chevy Vega?

"I don't think it means that much," he says after a pause. "Kids have more money than they know what to do with. And they'd better have, because I need money to pay for that damn ad."

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