Today in Technology History

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February 21

This year, as we celebrate the centennial of flight, we’ll occasionally bring you some obscure oddities from the history of aviation -- like today’s story about flying cars.

Yes, that’s right, flying cars. In the first half of the twentieth century, engineers made several attempts to build hybrids of automobiles and airplanes. As early as the 1910s, aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss designed an “autoplane” with aluminum wings, although it never successfully flew.

During the Great Depression, the U.S. government wanted airplanes to become cheap enough for ordinary people to afford for personal transportation. That was the impetus for Waldo Dean Waterman to create the first functional flying car.

Waterman (1894-1976) was an airplane engineer with a flair for creative design. Figuring that most people couldn’t afford both an airplane and a car, and believing that the car was a necessity of modern life, Waterman set out to build a car that could be turned into an airplane. The result was the “Arrowbile,” a small plane with wings that could be detached in a few minutes. Much of the vehicle was made with standard car parts, and in fact a normal Studebaker engine powered the wheels (when in car mode) and the propeller (when in airplane mode).

Waterman made the first test flight of his Arrowbile on February 21, 1937, and it handled admirably. Over the next few years, he demonstrated the flying car at air shows around the country. According to newspaper reports from the time, it was capable of flying at speeds of about 110 miles per hour, and driving at about 55 miles per hour. One pilot who flew an Arrowbile from California to New York was quoted as saying, "If traffic got heavy, I flew. If the weather got bad, I cruised along the highways."

Although the Arrowbile worked, there wasn’t enough interest to make it successful. Only a handful were built, and Waterman eventually moved on to other projects. Several other operational flying cars have been built since then, some of which garnered considerable public attention, but none has been commercially viable.

Related links:

• Click here to learn more about the Arrowbile.

• This page examines the concept of the flying car, and lists several other attempts to make hybrid car-planes.

• Click here, here and here to read more about Waldo Waterman.

• Scroll down this page for more pictures of the Arrowbile, including a photograph of Waterman driving Amelia Earhart around in an unfinished Arrowbile in about 1936.

 

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