Skycar.....I want one

[Ronald Tompkins]

A team of adventurers have returned to Wiltshire after a 4,000 mile expedition across the Sahara Desert to Timbuktu in a "flying car".

The bio-fuelled flying vehicle - known as Skycar - was designed by Dorset engineer Gilo Cardozo.

He said: "It's the first Skycar to fly over Europe to Africa. We even did a ferry trip which normally takes a car two hours - we did it in 15 minutes."

The team hopes to have it on the market with a price tag of £50,000 by 2010.

The two-seater Skycar was developed by 29-year-old inventor and self-taught engineer Mr Cardozo in his workshop in Mere, Wiltshire.

[grimly4]

Fuck off, you c-posting troll.

[Brian Gaff]

Oh my God, please no, not traffic jams in the air now. good old english name that guy has.. In a few years, automated drones will be allowed in normal airspace by the way, I'm not sure if that is a good idea either. Brian

[Andy Champ]

You may be right. How come it's taken three years to get from the BBC's web site to here?

Besides that it's not a flying car. It's a quad bike under a parachute.

Andy

[Fraser Johnston]

I wish Moller would pull their finger out and get theirs working and certified. Blade runner promised a lot and this future is really failing to deliver. Though if it was more realistic it would be a movie about someone tweeting on a smartphone.

[PipL]

... Cross channel hovercraft gone...

Indeed.

[charles]

I only used the cross-channel hovercraft once. It was a very uncomfortable journey. Thank goodness the tunnel has made that method of ctrossing the channel obsolete.

Funny no-one ever tried it on those routes..

[The Older Gentleman]

Anyone who's ever been on the Irish Sea in rough weather will tell you why.

[charles]

my point exactly ;-)

[grimly4]

Surprisingly, the fast cats are capable of running in quite rough weather (and can function long after the passengers have puked their guts), but they're pulled out of service long before the normal ferries give up.

[grimly4]

See if the Russkies have a surplus Ekranoplan.

[John Williamson]

Originally, what made it obsolete was an imminent 2 million pound bill

*per hovercraft* for replacement propellers, coupled with the then new Seacat design, which could cross the channel in 45 minutes with much lower running costs. The Seacat was, in turn, replaced by the Channel tunnel.

The sea conditions in the Irish Sea would have ruled it out for a large proportion of the year. The current high speed ships are cleared for much worse weather than the hovercraft, and even they have to stay in port on occasion. Even on the Channel crossing, which is pretty smooth as sea crossings go, if you were sitting at the back, you could watch the whole thing flexing.

For a proper high speed crossing on the Irish Sea routes, a large wave piercing hydroplane design wouldn't suffer from either the wake or the rough sea problems, though the cost might be prohibitive.

It's nice to know the Portsmouth to Isle of Wight hovercraft service is still running, with newish machinery:-

[Krusty]

Did it several times when I was a sprog & absolutely loved it.

[Scraggy]

It was my regular cross channel service of choice for two years. The only pain was a booking system that could not differentiate between cars and bikes. Simply sorted by booking the next available and turning up for the required one. " No problem Sir, straight on." Excellent service.

[Ben]

There's only one way to cross the Channel above the water line

[PipL]

Do you actually mean hydroplane, or hydrofoil? Either way, you've still got to get up to planing speed, which would produce a wake, so they'd have to cruise gently out of port.

[John Williamson]

Hydrofoil, yes. I would expect the short time it takes to get up to lifting speed wouldn't necessarily cause much damage compared to the constant wake from the high speed cats. It seems that very little unclassified research has been done, though.

[PipL]

I guess a RORO sub wouldn't suffer so much from bad weather....

[grimly4]

Townsend Thorenson tried it with partial success.

[Ace]

But there are speed limits in restricted waters, so depending on the route they might have to spend significant amounts of time on the hull, hence subject to any rough seas.