Traffic Problems? Try a Flying Motorcycle

Yes, this is a future vision, but one that will, in the next few years, become a solid reality.

Part motor­cy­cle, part air­plane, and fea­tur­ing a rev­o­lu­tion­ary and stream­lined design, the SkyBike is an enclosed three-wheeled vehi­cle that comes fully equipped with extend­able wings for flight. Standard fea­tures include heat­ing and air con­di­tion­ing, a sound sys­tem, a dig­i­tal instru­ment panel that auto­mat­i­cally changes from ground to flight instru­ments, and many of the ameni­ties you expect in a four-wheeled land-only vehicle.

The man behind this vision is Samson Motorworks pres­i­dent Sam Bousfield, an inven­tor who pre­vi­ously had con­sid­er­able expe­ri­ence in aero­nau­ti­cal research with, among oth­ers, a group of elite Boeing engi­neers. The major­ity of his work dealt in high-speed aircraft—but one day he had a dif­fer­ent idea. “I decided what avi­a­tion needed the most was some­thing kind of on the low, slow end of speed, some­thing that would get more peo­ple inter­ested in avi­a­tion, and get point-to-point trans­porta­tion being used in a way that would help over­all,” Bousfield said. “Right now we’ve got all kinds of free­way con­ges­tion. Sometimes it’s very dif­fi­cult to get in and out of our major cities, and this way we can just bypass all that. Rather than spend­ing some sig­nif­i­cant por­tions of time sit­ting in traf­fic, you sim­ply go where you want to go and you’re done.”

At the same time, Bousfield wanted to ensure such vehi­cles would be envi­ron­men­tally friendly. Interestingly, while there are plen­ti­ful air-quality restric­tions on land vehi­cles, there are none for aircraft—hence envi­ron­men­tally friendly air­craft engines were nonex­is­tent. “We’re plan­ning on hybrid tech­nol­ogy or full elec­tric, but we’re start­ing with inter­nal com­bus­tion because it’s really dif­fi­cult to make some­thing fly on a com­pletely new vehi­cle model and a com­pletely new engine or dri­ve­train. So we went with a proven engine and are putting the engi­neer­ing effort into get­ting it where we want it.”

The first pro­duc­tion model avail­able to the pub­lic will be a kit model (assem­bled by the owner) ten­ta­tively named the Switchblade. The name comes from the fact that the wings swing out from (or into) the body, depend­ing on land or air mode. It will also have an extend­able tail. The kit is expected for release some­time in 2010, and the price (likely to be between $65,000 and $75,000) will include a short train­ing course for the owner.

“We want to not only make trans­porta­tion fun but get peo­ple more inter­ested in being off the ground,” Bousfield con­cluded. “It’s really fun to be in the air. It’s a truly dif­fer­ent and unique point of view. For instance, I live in Meadow Vista near Auburn, California. About half an hour’s flight away is a great lit­tle place called Grover Hot Springs. I like to go there and relax in the pools. It’s up in the moun­tains a lit­tle bit, but it’s really pretty. It takes two and a half hours to get there dri­ving. But if I had a Switchblade I could be there in a half hour, enjoy the ben­e­fits of the day with­out all that dri­ving time and all that gas, and I’d still get a great view out of the thing. It’s not like you’re bypass­ing the beauty of the mountains—it’s that you’re going straight there instead of tak­ing the cir­cuitous route. It’s a brand-new method, a point-to-point trans­porta­tion sys­tem with which you can avoid the left, right, left, right, right, left, left, left, right, and end up using a lot less energy and a lot less time. And I think that’s what I’d like to see out of the future.”

For more infor­ma­tion on Samson Motorworks and their prod­ucts, please visit www.samsonmotorworks.com.