Terrafugia Transition - First Flying Car

Have you ever dreamed that your car can fly? If you have not, you are an exception. Because when the fresh news about the first real flying car (or roadable aircraft) hit the ground, the search for flying car is steady in the top searches at Google.

Carl Dietrich not just always dreamed of building a flying car, but did everything to make it true. On the way, he realized that he has to modify it, however. The pragmatic inventor ended up creating what he calls a “roadable aircraft”, a plane that folds up its wings on landing and takes to the highway. In 2010, after three years of development, his vehicle, the Transition, will be available to customers for $194,000.

Terrafugia, the Woburn, Massachusetts Company behind the Transition, began as an extracurricular activity for Dietrich while he was completing his Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Dietrich, 31, knew from the start that the odds were stacked against his project. Since the time of the Wright brothers, there have been more than 100 attempts to build drivable planes or flying cars. All have failed commercially.

"The basic problem is simple: A car is heavy, a plane is light," says Lionel Salisbury, publisher of the Roadable Times, a Web site devoted to chronicling flying-car attempts. "The two don’t go together well."

Dietrich’s early sketches envisioned a plane that would be driven rather than an automobile that took flight. At every step of the process, he was guided by the need to create something to be used in today’s world, not tomorrow’s.

So he and his team designed the Transition with regular car tires instead of aircraft tires. When the wings are folded up, the craft can park in a typical home garage, and it even runs on premium gasoline rather than aviation fuel. "We knew we could build it," Dietrich says. "The question was, ’Can we make money on it?’ The key was not to base the business plan around a market that is not real."

Transition’s design team studied the history of similar machines and the inventors who failed to bring their concepts to market. The most notable was Moulton "Molt" Taylor, a former Navy pilot who designed his first Aerocar in 1949, launched it in 1956 and produced a grand total of six vehicles.

Terrafugia Transition - First Flying Car

Terrafugia concluded that the Aerocar failed because it was too difficult to convert from plane to car. "You had to unbolt the wings and reassemble them into a trailer," says Anna Mracek Dietrich, Carl’s wife and the company’s COO.

Terrafugia doesn’t lack for competitors. In Los Angeles, Icon Aircraft is currently marketing a towable light aircraft that is amphibious (price tag: $139,000). In Alvin, Texas, LaBiche Aerospace has developed a flying sports car, which is classified as an experimental aircraft, and is taking orders for the $175,000 kits. Milner Motors, a father-and-son team based in Vancouver, Wash. and Bethesda, Md., is working on a prototype for a drivable plane that it expects to sell for $450,000. Publicly traded Moller International (MLER) in Davis, Calif. has designed a personal aircraft that takes off and lands vertically. There are others as well, but Terrafugia appears to be further along than most in bringing its product to market.

Terrafugia plans to manufacture the Transition in-house for now, although the Dietrichs aren’t opposed to partnering with a larger manufacturer in the future. Meanwhile, they’re negotiating with the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Department of Transportation to settle on a design that satisfies both aircraft and auto regulators. That doesn’t even begin to address the substantial insurance challenges.

Terrafugia Transition - First Flying Car

The FAA gave Terrafugia a boost in 2004, when it relaxed structural and maintenance requirements for ultra-light planes by adopting the Sport Pilot and Light-Sport Aircraft Rule. This allowed experimental aircraft designers to push the technological envelope.

The Transition is powered by the same 100bhp engine on the ground and in the air. Terrafugia claims it will be able to fly up to 500 miles on a single tank of petrol at a cruising speed of 115mph with two people and their luggage onboard. It will also come with an electric calculator (to help fine-tune weight distribution), airbags, aerodynamic bumpers and of course a GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation unit.

Terrafugia Transition - First Flying Car

Terrafugia Transition - First Flying Car

Anyone can drive it as a car; however, you will need a key code to make the wings unfold. You can only get this key code if you have a pilot’s license, so that’s good for safety’s sake.

In the next five years, Dietrich hopes to sell a few hundred Transitions, mostly to wealthy private pilots and professionals who need to make short but regular flights. As FSB went to press, Terrafugia had gathered 40 deposits and its order backlog totaled more than $8 million.

While the company doesn’t anticipate mainstream adoption of the Transition, Dietrich does expect an envy factor: "You see it in your neighbor’s driveway," he says, "and you realize that he has a freedom you lack."

Videos:

Transition landing: from the skies to your garage…

Terrafugia Transition - First Flying Car

Transition video tour at AirVenture Oskhosh 2008 Show

Terrafugia Transition - First Flying Car

Sources and Additional Reading:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/02/smallbusiness/flying_car.fsb/
http://www.slashgear.com/terrafugia-transition-is-drivable-airplane-0918737/
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/engineering/article5489287.ece
http://news.cnet.com/Flying-car-ready-for-takeoff/2100-11389_3-6040007.html

Third-Hand Smoke: True or False

Readers of this blog who still smoke (as I am) should be ready to the tougher restrictions and wider limitations. You can still smoke in your house, or in your car (if no small kids present), but may be these privileges will be removed soon. So, enjoy your last cigarettes while you can. And read a fresh article published January 2, 2009 in New York Times (Author: Roni Caryn Rabin).

Third-Hand Smoke

A New Cigarette Hazard: "Third-Hand Smoke"

Parents who smoke often open a window or turn on a fan to clear the air for their children, but experts now have identified a related threat to children’s health that isn’t as easy to get rid of: third-hand smoke.

That’s the term being used to describe the invisible yet toxic brew of gases and particles clinging to smokers’ hair and clothing, not to mention cushions and carpeting, that lingers long after second-hand smoke has cleared from a room. The residue includes heavy metals, carcinogens and even radioactive materials that young children can get on their hands and ingest, especially if they’re crawling or playing on the floor.

Doctors from MassGeneral Hospital for Children in Boston coined the term “third-hand smoke” to describe these chemicals in a new study that focused on the risks they pose to infants and children. The study was published in this month’s issue of the journal Pediatrics.

“Everyone knows that second-hand smoke is bad, but they don’t know about this,” said Dr. Jonathan P. Winickoff, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

“When their kids are out of the house, they might smoke. Or they smoke in the car. Or they strap the kid in the car seat in the back and crack the window and smoke, and they think it’s okay because the second-hand smoke isn’t getting to their kids,” Dr. Winickoff continued. “We needed a term to describe these tobacco toxins that aren’t visible.”

Third-hand smoke is what one smells when a smoker gets in an elevator after going outside for a cigarette, he said, or in a hotel room where people were smoking. “Your nose isn’t lying,” he said. “The stuff is so toxic that your brain is telling you: ’Get away.’”

The study reported on attitudes toward smoking in 1,500 households across the United States. It found that the vast majority of both smokers and nonsmokers were aware that second-hand smoke is harmful to children. Some 95 percent of nonsmokers and 84 percent of smokers agreed with the statement that “inhaling smoke from a parent’s cigarette can harm the health of infants and children.”

But far fewer of those surveyed were aware of the risks of third-hand smoke. Since the term is so new, the researchers asked people if they agreed with the statement that “breathing air in a room today where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of infants and children.” Only 65 percent of nonsmokers and 43 percent of smokers agreed with that statement, which researchers interpreted as acknowledgement of the risks of third-hand smoke.

The belief that second-hand smoke harms children’s health was not independently associated with strict smoking bans in homes and cars, the researchers found. On the other hand, the belief that third-hand smoke was harmful greatly increased the likelihood the respondent also would enforce a strict smoking ban at home, Dr. Winickoff said.

“That tells us we’re onto an important new health message here,” he said. “What we heard in focus group after focus group was, ‘I turn on the fan and the smoke disappears.’ It made us realize how many people think about second-hand smoke - they’re telling us they know it’s bad but they’ve figured out a way to do it.”

The data was collected in a national random-digit-dial telephone survey done between September and November 2005. The sample was weighted by race and gender, based on census information.

Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician who heads the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, said the phrase third-hand smoke is a brand-new term that has implications for behavior.

“The central message here is that simply closing the kitchen door to take a smoke is not protecting the kids from the effects of that smoke,” he said. “There are carcinogens in this third-hand smoke, and they are a cancer risk for anybody of any age who comes into contact with them.”

Among the substances in third-hand smoke are hydrogen cyanide, used in chemical weapons; butane, which is used in lighter fluid; toluene, found in paint thinners; arsenic; lead; carbon monoxide; and even polonium-210, the highly radioactive carcinogen that was used to murder former Russian spy Alexander V. Litvinenko in 2006. Eleven of the compounds are highly carcinogenic.

Third-Hand Smoke

Don’t you think that is pretty scary picture? You do want your kids to be healthy, aren’t you?

To be honest, I am still not completely justified that the threat is so huge, that I should quite immediately. And I am not alone in this skeptical approach to the report. Reaction to this report on the Chicago Tribune Web site has been decidedly negative. Commenters mostly feel that many aspects of life can be harmful and that third-hand smoke is a scare tactic.

Good Grief writes "DIRT is bad for kids if they ingest enough" and Cadillac says "I think we should be more concerned with World War 3 instead of 3-rd hand smoke!"

Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld does not believe the report, calling the research "junk science." He writes, "This research is geared toward one end only: The banning of all smoking on private property - including your home."

The interest to the topic raised the third hand smoke inquiries to the top Google Searches today.

Migrant Mother and Economic Recession

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) said Monday, December 1, 2008, that the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007, making official what most Americans have already believed about the state of the economy. Direct comparisons to the Great Depression have become more common in recent weeks, given the collapse of the stock market and consumer spending. But those comparisons overlook many key facts. During the Great Depression, the unemployment rate surged to 25% and GDP contracted by 28% between 1930 and 1932, an unthinkable prospect in today’s environment, thanks to a long list of underlying differences between then and now.

For example, the banking system collapsed in its entirety during the Great Depression and the absence of bank deposit insurance at the time caused catastrophic erosion to household wealth and consumption. Today, FDIC insurance (and its recently elevated limit to $250,000) provides a significant cushion; the response of economic policymakers is immeasurably faster and more aggressive now; and the coordinated actions among the major economies today to address the root causes of the current episode are both impressive and totally unprecedented.

While the economy is still in the better shape, than it was during the Great Depression, the nation is definitely going through tough economic times. It is safe to say that the current economic crisis is the worst since the Great Depression.

The renewed interest to the Great Depression caused the search item migrant mother to get to the third highest position at the top Google Searches. The immense interest boost made the CNN Article about the icon of the Great Depression: a migrant mother with her children burying their faces in her shoulder.

Migrant Mother

Migrant Mother is the most famous of Dorothea Lange’s photographs, as well as one of the most well-known from the time of the Great Depression between the 1920s and 1940s. At the time the photograph was taken, Lange was working for the California Rural Rehabilitation Administration (RA) and the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Her job was to travel and take pictures to report on the living conditions of migrant workers and their families. In Nipomo, California, in 1936, Dorothea saw the woman in her famous photograph and approached her. The woman, aged thirty-two, was seated with her seven children at a destitute pea pickers camp. The following is an account of the experience in Lange’s own words:

"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, and that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it." (Lange 1960).


After returning home, Lange alerted the editor of a San Francisco newspaper to the plight of the workers at the camp, presenting him with two of her photos. The editor informed federal authorities and published an article that included Lange’s images. As a result, the government rushed a shipment of 20,000 lbs. of food to the camp. The photos’ wider impact included influencing John Steinbeck in the writing of his novel The Grapes of Wrath.

See the rest of the pictures that were taken at the same time (Source)

While there are hard economic times, especially for those who lost their jobs or other income sources in the recession, I would like to cheer you up by presenting a Photoshop parody on the great Migrant Mother picture.

Migrant Mother