To Read Sport Aviation's January 1990 Ed on the ... - Courtesy Aircraft

so badly that it was canted a fu ll 5 degrees
to one side. Then he began to shake ... and
tossed his cooki es right on the spot. In any
other kind of airplane, Molt would have been
making his first parachute jump that day, but
the Aerocar 'l)'as unique in a manner that
spared him th at experience. With its folding
wings and the universal joints in the
driveshafts, every major part of the airframe
was articulated . .. and therefore flexible
enough to withstand the shaking. That is as
good an example of serendipity as you will
ever find !
It took Molt 8 years to certify the Aerocar
. .. partly because he was plowing so much
new ground, technically, and partly because
he was having to accomplish the formidable
task on a shoestring budget. He was never
able to work full time for an extended stretch
because of the continuing need to raise
money. It was a matter of working for a week
or so, then taking a week off to scurry around
the state trying to sell a little more stock.
Terribly frustrating, of course, but the only
avenue open through which Molt could work
toward his goal of revolutionizing personal
transportation. It is interesting from our
standpoint today that, according to Molt, the
CAA was very cooperative during the certification
process .. . to the extent of actually
helping him with some of the calculations on
one occasion. "They thought a flying automobile
was a good idea and wanted to see
it developed to the point of certification ," Molt
recalls. With the enforcement driven policy
of today's FAA, overriding concern for liability
and the test procedures and paperwork
now required , we have to wonder if a tiny,
underfunded concern like Aerocar could certify
any type of ai rcraft today, much less
something as complex as a flying automobile.
CAA certification (ATC No. 4A16) finally
came in December of 1956, with the CAA's
Dick Sliff doing the flight testing. He would
later do the certification flight testing on the
Boeing 707 and eventually would be in
charge of all of FAA's aircraft certification activity.
The Aerocar was not the first flying automobile
to be certified . .. Fulton's Airphibian
was approved a few years earlier ...
but it was the first that was capable of being
driven on the highway totally self-contained,
so that it could subsequently be flown from
a different airport than the one at which it
had last landed. By any standard, the conception,
design, development and certification
of the Taylor Aerocar was one of the
great personal achievements of our time .. .
and in the future when the flying car ... or
whatever it is called then . . . is the common
form of personal transportation, as it inevitably
wil l be, the history books must accord
Molt Taylor his place as the foremost pioneer
in the fie ld.
By the time certification was achieved,
Molt and his small workforce had built four
additional Aercicars and thus had them ready
for immediate sale. The price, however, was
a breathtaking $25,000 each . . . which
though necessary due to the fact that they
were hand built, was a definite sales deterrent
at the time. By contrast, the new H35
Bonanza being sold in 1957 had a base price
of $22,650.
Of course, the Aerocar was never intended
to go head to head in the market
place with the Bonanza . . . nor was it expeeled
to cost so much. Molt had always
assumed that by the time he obtained certification,
he would have also made a deal with
one of the large aircraft corporations or, better
yet, with one of the big auto manufacturers
.' .. who could crank them out in numbers
sufficient to get the price down to perhaps
$10,000 or less. He had been working hard
at just such a deal, but with a late 1950s
recession causing businesses to run scared,
no contract had yet been signed. It would, in
fact, be several years before the pre-production
Aerocars were sold, and it would be
1961 before a commercial connection could
be made. A group in Ft. Worth, TX finally
contacted Molt, proposing to finance production
in exchange for national sales distribution
rights. A deal was struck and a new company
called Aerocar International was
formed . Aerocar International, in turn, signed
a contract with Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV) in
Dallas to build 1 ,000 Aerocars . . . with the
stipulation that 500 firm orders would be in
hand and that a payment of $300,000 for
advance tooling would be made to LTV by
December 31, 1961. Aerocar International
then began to develop a network of regional
distributors, who were required to commit to
a specified number of Aerocars . . . and
make sizeable advance deposits on them .
Unfortunately, the deal fell through because
the requisite 500 fi rm orders could not be
obtained before the contract deadline was
reached. What had happened was that 250
Aerocars were the maximum that could be
built in the startup year of production, which
meant a long wait for delivery for the second
group of 250. Few were willing to tie up deposit
money for so long a time .. . so what
ultimately proved to be the best chance to
get Aerocars into production slipped into history.
Unfortunately, the deal did not go
quietly. Aerocar International had spent the
distributor's deposits and had no means of
making restitution . . . and Molt, himself,
eventually had to sue to get back the marketing
rights to his invention. Sometime later,
an attempt was made to form a company in
Wichita to manufacture Aerocars on a less
ambitious scale ... just 50 of them, initially
.. . but that venture also failed for lack of
adequate funding . It was unfortunate because
by this time one of the Aerocars had
been sold to actor Bob Cummings and was
being seen throughout the nation on his
weekly TV show. A flood of inquiries resulted,
but nothing was to translate into
sales.
As noted, Molt did eventually sell the four
pre-production models, and, in fact, sold
most of them several times. He had a deal
with his customers in which he had the right
of first refusal whenever they wanted to sell
their Aerocars. Molt had a small waiting list
for the four machines, so he would buy them
back, recondition them and sell them a second
and third time. In retrospect, it was a
shame he could not have built at least 40 or
50 of them, because with even that relatively
small number, he could have had a steady
sale and resale business that might still be
going strong today. Maybe very strong . ..
in light of the current incredible run-up in
prices of vintage and specialty cars.
During the 1960s, Molt developed a
spinoff of the Aerocar project, designing a
tricycle geared, 4-place, airplane-only fuselage
that would attach to the tail cone and
wings of any of the Aerocars. It was intended
to be an option for existing Aerocar owners
who had occasional need for four seats in
just the airplane mode, or as simply an
airplane for new owners who wanted something
more modern than a Cessna 172.
Called the Aerocar II, just one example was
built and flown and it is now owned by <strong>Ed</strong>
Sweeney.
By the late 1960s the original Aerocars,
now called Aerocar Is, were getting quite outdated
in the auto mode, so Molt decided to
do an update. This time he set as his criteria
an aircraft performance comparable with the
Cessna 172 and an auto performance comparable
with Ford's then new Pinto. One of
the Aerocar Is had been damaged in a road
accident, so upon buying it back, he used it
as a basis for developing the Aerocar Ill. The
new car (the tail and wings remained essentially
unchanged) featured a modern body
style and a 3-position torsion bar suspension,
replacing the old cycle fender body with
its coil spring suspension. An electric motor
rotated the four torsion bars to fully extend
the gear for take-off and landing, to an intermediate
position for road operation, and fully
.retracted for flight. "Fully retracted" still left a
portion of the wheels extending out of the
body so that the possibility of a belly landing
was precluded, but enough drag was eliminated
that at 75% power, the cruise speed
was up about 12 mph . . . to nearly 120 mph.
Certification was pursued for a time, but with
the onset in the late 1960s of the anti-pollution
requirements for cars, the process was
put on hold. The need for certifying the
Lycoming for road operation as well as for
flight would obviously be too expensive, Molt
realized ... unless he had someone to manufacture
the Aerocars and share that cost.
In the 1970s the Ford Motor Company took
a good look at the Aerocar Ill . .. but then
the great OPEC induced fuel crises came
along, followed by the invasion of the U. S.
by the Japanese auto manufacturers and
soon Ford and all the other American car
makers had all they could handle just staying
afloat . .. with no resources left over for making
the great leap forward into flying automobiles.
The Aerocar Ill was demonstrated
throughout the 1970s and much of the '80s
to all who showed an interest. It has appeared
on TV quite a number of times as
new generations of newscasters "discover"
it and on each occasion, a new flood of inquiries
comes to Molt's shop in Longview.
When the world's fair was held in Vancouver,
B. C. a few years ago, the Aerocar Ill was
requested as one of the displays. <strong>To</strong>
everyone's surprise . .. except Molt's .. . it
proved to be one of the sensations of the fair
... and again the inquiries flooded in. Subsequently,
the Aerocar Ill has been loaned
to the Museum of Flight in Seattle and is
reportedly one of the most popular exhibits.
The constant exposure there keeps Molt's
phone line hot and his mail box full . . . which
just adds to his eternal frustration. If all the
world is fascinated by a flying automobile,
why can't he interest investors or a manufacturer,
he laments.
Why, indeed
As all EAAers know, Molt entered the
growing homebuilt market in the late 1960s,
first with his Coot amphibian ... the reborn
Duckling .. . and in the early 1970s with his
SPORT AVIATION 17