the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 224
‘Love That Bob’ television series”—an early and generally overlooked ex-
ample of product placement. Demand for the Aerocar was brisk, and by
1970 no less than Ford Motor Company was talking to Taylor about building
twenty- five thousand Aerocars a year.
But at that point, as has become the pattern, the fl ying- car dream
crashed headlong into reality. Seems the only people not enthralled by the
idea of a sky full of Aerocars were the nervous folks who managed the
nation’s air-traffic control system. “There was no way they were going to
let us put an additional 25,000 of anything up in the air,” said Taylor,
whose dream pretty much ended there.
Another dominant figure to emerge from the golden age of fl ying
cars was Connecticut inventor Robert Edison Fulton Jr., who not only was
the first man to circumnavigate the globe on a motorcycle, but who began
work on his own version of the flying car in 1945—a vehicle which became
the first- ever government- certified roadable aircraft three years before
Taylor’s Aerocar. His two-seat “Airphibian” was based on the same
detachable-wing concept as the Aerocar, and it was capable of cruising
aloft at 113 miles per hour and driving at 55 miles per hour. Despite that
and an endorsement from famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, though, Fulton
didn’t have Taylor’s commercial and promotional instincts, and the
Airphibian never went into production. One of the few existing Airphibians
ended up in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which
notes that the prototypes were driven more than two hundred thousand
miles and made more than six thousand car/plane conversions. Each of
those conversions was a lengthy and complicated pain in the butt, which
ultimately made the Airphibian impractical.
As of early 2005, according to Roadable Times’s Salisbury, the
Aerocar and the Airphibian were the only two “roadable aircraft” to have
been certified by federal aviation authorities. Not that others haven’t tried.
Among the other post–World War II designs were a sixteen-foot car with
a thirty- fi ve- foot wingspan called the Boggs Airmaster; a quickly convertible
critter called the Hervey Travelplane; the ill-fated Convair Model