It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a... no wait, it looks like it's just a plane. It's the Terrafugia Transition to be more precise, and the so-called flying car took to the air at the EAA AirVenture show in Wisconsin recently. This is the first time the Transition has been flown in front of the public, and Chief Test Pilot (awesome title by the way) did a wonderful low-pass flyby then dipped his wings to the crowd. This is a great step in getting the Transition closer to its eventual on-sale date.
It's still being touted as a flying car, despite the fact that it far more closely resembles the plane that it is. Still, we're not trying to rain on the Terrafugia parade because we're rather thrilled to see them get closer to their goal. They're creating a vehicle which can be parked in a garage, driven on public roads, then taken to an airport before it heads off into the sky. That certainly sounds like a flying car, even if it doesn't look like the ones we'd imagined when we were eight years old... or continue to imagine as we enter our 30s and 40s.
Terrafugia has another concept in the works, however, which does start to resemble the vehicle found in our dreams. It's called the TF-X, and it will be able to enter the big blue yonder thanks to a vertical takeoff and landing system. It's very much a concept at this stage, and Terrafugia estimates it will take 8 to 12 years of development work before we see a real working prototype. In the meantime, all of you potential car pilots should look to the Transition until the TF-X becomes a reality.
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