Remarkable People

Dezso Molnar interview Part 4: My two current flying car projects

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Street Wing concept: wings folded out and ready to fly
Alex Karafilovski
Dezso with Brazilian astronaut Marcos Pontes: working on the original G2 Gyrocycle design
Dezso Molnar
"Some very simple layout renders for the Street Wing" - in this case, the wings are folded and stored on top
Dezso Molnar
Simple render of a Street Wing layout concept: wings attached and ready to fly
Dezso Molnar
Street Wing: "This is a first-round concept from artist Alex Karafilovski and we are refining the design."
Alex Karafilovski
Street Wing concept: front view. "we will get a single test machine on the road and in the air asap."
Alex Karafilovski
Street Wing concept: wings folded in for road use
Alex Karafilovski
Street Wing concept: wings folded out and ready to fly
Alex Karafilovski
G2 Gyrocycle: early branded concept render
Dezso Molnar
AMA Hall of Fame designer Craig Vetter and Gordon McCall present the "Innovation" award to Dezso for the G2 at the 2015 Quail Motorcycle Gathering of Motorcycles in Carmel, California
Steve Burton
The G2 gyrocycle: a bit of an attention grabber when it's parked on the street
Dezso Molnar
The G2 gyrocycle: Suzuki GSX-R1000 motor will give it road superiority and excessive amounts of lift
Dezso Molnar
G2 Gyrocycle: short testing blades are fitted (in red) - the flight version props will be significantly longer.
Dezso Molnar
Diagram showing how the outrigger wheels will lift the G2 off the ground to allow a longer propeller to work
Dezso Molnar
Potential gyrocycle rotor folding concept - rotor up
Dezso Molnar
Potential gyrocycle rotor folding concept - rotor folding
Dezso Molnar
Potential gyrocycle rotor folding concept - rotor down
Dezso Molnar
Craig Calfee watches as engineer Connor Reiss tests his new outrigger system on the G2 gyrocycle outside the Calfee workshop: "Version 3 was a test to see if a dual wheel front end would provide enough stability when a rider brakes and becomes stationary in regular daily riding to allow the landing gear system to remain retracted."
Dezso Molnar
Dezso Molnar works on attaching the Piaggio MP3 front end to version 3 of the G2 Gyrocycle
Dezso Molnar
Dezso Molnar going nowhere fast on the donor Piaggio MP3 scooter he pulled the G2 front end from.
Craig Calfee
"This is a singular photo of the G2 Version 2. Significant change is that we discarded the steering wheel and fitted a makeshift handle bar after determining a new course for locating the flight controls. A standard throttle was installed and the foot operated throttle and brakes removed. In this photo is Dezso, Craig Calfee, famous explorer Mike Horn, and one of his sailing crew who's name I should be able to remember. I will see if Mike can do if he is not half way up K2..."
Connor Reiss
The G2 Gyrocycle version 1: "version 1 was defined by its single front wheel, F1-type steering wheel, foot operated gas pedal and brake, and electric landing gear actuators, and electronic brain to control the landing gear retraction and deployment."
Dezso Molnar
G2 Gyrocycle version 1: "The prime objective of this machine was to refine the 2 person ergonomics, test the drivability of the steering wheel system. Use of a steering wheel would allow us total flexibility for the location of flight controls. Steering wheels on legacy vehicles such as the Biautogo were reported as "categorically undriveable". We wanted to know for ourselves, and in the first day of testing on an oval track at Willow Springs Raceway in Rosamond, California, builder Paul Taylor, racer Eugene Gordon and I were all able to quickly manage counter-steering with a steering wheel with some degree of agility."
Dezso Molnar
G2 Gyrocycle version 1: "F1 designer John McQuillaim was the principal engineer. The landing gear for stability when driving and ultimately for flight operations were controlled by an electronic brain rather than controlled by the rider directly."
Dezso Molnar
Loz Blain and Dezso Molnar in the G2 Gyrocycle in Los Angeles.
Joe Salas/4theriders.com
Loz Blain and Dezso Molnar looking over the GT and G2 gyrocycles in a hangar in Los Angeles
Joe Salas/4theriders.com
The T2 gyroplane and the G2 Gyrocycle
Dezso Molnar
Eugene Gordon rides the G2 version 1 on track to test the steering system. Countersterring a motorcycle using a steering wheel was challenging but not impossible - but the final version will use a handlebar.
Dezso Molnar
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In part four of our extended interview with serial inventor and flying car advocate Dezso Molnar, Dezso puts his money where his mouth is. After giving us his philosophy on flying cars, and reviewing his favorite and least favorite existing designs, Dezso speaks about the two flying car designs he's currently working on as he prepares to launch the world's first flying car race series. The Street Wing concept is a fully electric, solar-supported streetable airplane, and the G2 Gyrocycle is a race-focused, 200 mph three-wheeler that's already rolling on the street, and nearly ready to fly.

The Street Wing electric flying car

For the electric, I call it the Street Wing. Because of the power loading requirements of gyroplanes and quadcopters and vertical takeoff, I'm focusing on an aircraft with wings and best possible range.

It's going to be a trike, which fits the motorcycle category on the ground. You'll be able to drive it down the street no problem. It'll have steering front wheels, which harkens back to the Zuck Planemobile. So the front wheels steer and the rear wheel is powered and rigid in its alignment.

When you're driving, that allows you to steer down the road and have stable control as opposed to one wheel in the front and two in the back like a Cessna 172. That's less stable. If you're going down a hill and taking a turn, you're gonna fall over.

The other thing about front wheel steering, if you're flying and landing in a crosswind, you can point the wheels down the runway … When the back wheel hits the ground, it will tend to bring the rear end straight. On a traditional tail dragger, the wind can blow a castering rear wheel around and cause a ground loop.

Street Wing concept: wings folded in for road use
Alex Karafilovski

Status of the Street Wing project

I've started working with Craig Calfee again; he's put together an electric powerplant that's highly reliable, and we will create an open source vehicle based on it. I'll be working with engineers in Brazil to lock in the airframe design and wind tunnel testing. Alex Karafilovski has cut loose on some conceptual drawings that capture the overall approach of the machine and I like where it's headed.

We will emerge with a vehicle to place a stake in the ground to say "look, here's one new way to get around."

You'll be able to drive on the ground, fly it through the air, and the goal is to travel for the rest of our lives without buying fuel. That's possible with existing technology and equipment.

Hiding the wings

I'm gonna carry wings with me, I'll fold them up in the best possible way. Because the aircraft is built for best range, it's stall speed will be too fast to qualify as an ultralight aircraft. My intention is to additionally make an ultralight version, so others can drive and fly without a license in areas where that's allowed. But first, I want a vehicle to travel long distances with the battery power on board, that's fairly quick in the air and on the ground, and can fly over populated areas.

Experimental home-built aircraft can do that, because the operating limitations, if it's so determined by the inspector, will allow you to fly anywhere that you determine you can make a safe landing. And that can include over populated areas.

FAA Part 103 states ultralights are restricted from flying over populated areas. So if I want to fly from some city where they have an airport in town, to an airport 30 or 40 miles away inside a different city, I'll be able to do that with this first generation Street Wing.

Street Wing: "This is a first-round concept from artist Alex Karafilovski and we are refining the design."
Alex Karafilovski

Electric powertrain with thin film solar charging

We'll use an electric motor and a battery, and I'd like to eventually supplement the power of the batteries with solar panels, more for recharging completely off the grid than for extending flights.

That could simply mean I travel with a flexible panel folded up, inside the aircraft and deploy it on the ground or hang it over the wings, or I could have something that's permanently attached to the wings or fuselage like Eric Raymond has been doing forever. Or perhaps use the wind to spin the propeller when it's sitting on the ground, and use the propeller to generate power, or I simply plug the thing in to a grid when we're on it.

Gallium arsenide solar panels, originally developed for the Soviet space program, are in production and provide one watt of power for one gram of weight. They actually outperform a fully charged lithium-ion battery by weight.

The AeroVironment Puma drone has been using these cells. Eric Raymond's Sunseeker Duo has been flying 12-hour flights in Italy. It's a two-seat aircraft using solar panels on the wings. It's not my objective to stay in the air for 12 hours, I personally don't like flying 12 hours at a time, although I used to in the Air Force with mid-air refueling. I've done 14, 16 hour flights, it's a drag.

For explorations off the grid with with solar panels only, I want to fly for a while, and then be able to drive. With charged batteries, you can do a flight of an hour, and then you have to land and wait for two or three hours for the solar panels to recharge them; eventually the thing will recharge itself and you're able to do another flight, or a long drive.

Flying uses a lot of amps, but when you're driving slow on the road, let's say you're exploring across Africa or Australia; it's easier to do that, because your aerodynamic drag is really low. This is a wheel driven vehicle on the ground and a propeller driven vehicle in the air.

Street Wing concept: front view. "we will get a single test machine on the road and in the air asap."
Alex Karafilovski

Land speed estimations

We can run the numbers, but I would guess this first design could have a sustainable 30 mph (48 km/h) driving speed on solar only. This has been done before. Solar Challenge cars have been racing across Australia above highway speeds for years.

The empty weight will be about 300 lbs. About the same as those solar cars, and it doesn't much matter what the weight is, unless you're going up a hill. If you're going across level surfaces, what matters most is aerodynamic drag. If you're below 12 mph you effectively have no drag. That's about the speed we taxi at airports, and to taxi to the runway we can drive the rear wheel and reserve battery power for flight.

For racing, we will simply swap batteries on the ground like any race car gets fuel in the pits and jump back into the action.

My guess is the first generation Street Wing will be able to top out close to 70 mph on the road.

It's a use of existing technology as opposed to proposing applications for what does not. I try never to do what NASA does and some other guys, kick everything out seven years and say "seven years from now we'll have this, or seven years from now we'll have that." I mean, we have this stuff today, so we might as well use it.

The bottom line is that the travel cost is expected to drop from about $100 an hour to fly an airplane, to closer to $1. A substantial change in the economics.

Dezso with Brazilian astronaut Marcos Pontes: working on the original G2 Gyrocycle design
Dezso Molnar

The Marcos Pontes connection – open sourcing the Street Wing

I'll work with the Marcos Pontes Foundation in positioning the Street Wing development - it's an honest, benevolent project, I'm not keeping IP or writing patents. We want to create a collaborative open source project that will consistently upgrade these vehicles so that more people can fly affordably. Electric motors cost less to operate than gas motors, and they'll be able to park away from airports, so no hangar fees.

A lot more people can fly electrics for a buck an hour instead of a hundred dollars an hour as it stands today for a Cessna or similar.

Marcos is the only Brazilian to fly to space. He's very interested in promoting aviation and space flight to the people in his country who helped support his flight ten years ago. Most people in Brazil will never get to fly to outer space, so we have teamed up again to design this new aircraft. People can have an affordable, simple aircraft, that'll give them a certain advantage, and fulfil Marco's mission to help kids who want to fly. He was one of them!

Loz Blain and Dezso Molnar looking over the GT and G2 gyrocycles in a hangar in Los Angeles
Joe Salas/4theriders.com

On the Gyrocycle projects

The Street Wing is my primary focus of development right now, and the gyrocycle is really mainly a machine for racing. I'm looking for sponsors right now that have a solid history of racing vehicles that want to get involved with the gyrocycle. It's the crusher. I'm expecting 200 mph on the ground and close to 100 in the air with that one.

The objective is to make it robust and quick to switch between drive and flight mode in the pits and I have a hundred ideas on how to do that.

The first bike I built and flew was the GT, it uses the Rotax 650 single cylinder engine, and is able to drive down the road It was licensed, registered, smog checked and insured on the road and in the air. We flew it back in 2005 for the first time. It flew on the first attempt, and every other time we wanted to fly, it worked.

Then we got pressured into designing a two seat version, which was a really bad idea because there were no adequate engines. The power loading requires about 183 horsepower for the weight of the vehicle as envisioned in the flight domain. If it's a 100 mph road vehicle, and it can fly two people for 100 miles, and you want to fly at 100 mph, which is what marketing people always want to do, everything in hundreds, then the thing needs 183 horsepower, which doesn't exist in the motorcycle world – at least, it didn't in 2005.

There was no suitable motor at the time to fit the power requirements and light sport category. But we spent a lot of time at the insistence of people who were funding things to develop a two-seat flyer. That killed the company, it killed the project.

Rebirth of the G2 Gyrocycle

Now I'm doubling back, and I'm continuing work on what was a two seat ground test vehicle. The G2 Gyrocycle is monstrous, it's got a very robust GSX-R1000 engine. It's an incredibly good bike on the road. It's my first choice – if I were to ride across the United States today, I would take the G2 because it has an extremely reliable and positive steering Piaggio MP3 front end. It has a nice cage on it; I've crashed it a dozen times but never had a scratch on me. I have a full harness.

The G2 gyrocycle: Suzuki GSX-R1000 motor will give it road superiority and excessive amounts of lift
Dezso Molnar

I sit in a recumbent position with a big back seat to store all my tools and luggage. It's long, but you have no idea when you're driving it. I worked with a small team to make it. F1 designer John McQuillam, Paul Taylor, Craig Calfee and Cosmonaut Marcos Pontes. It took the "Innovation" award at the Quail last year and hasn't even flown yet. Richard Hatfield from Lightning calls it the Holy Grail.

As a gyroplane, it's long, which is great, it will give me pitch stability in flight. The MP3 front end is a stock part we installed to test two front wheels, I wanted to see how it behaved on the road. When I go to fly it, I'll replace the MP3 with a single front wheel to reduce the weight. It's light enough to fly now, but I'll take the lightest possible approach and put a Norman Hossack-style front end on it.

Why a gyroplane?

Gyroplanes are extremely powerful lifters. The gross weight capacity of this engine and rotor blades will be well above 1000 pounds. I'll set it up to fly with one person. It's already a great two-seater on the ground.

I regularly fly my trainer gyroplane with a 110 horsepower engine on it, and it climbs so fast it scares me. You don't want to hang on the prop or you will unload the rotor blade and slow it down. This G2 could fly with the Gixxer motor derated; not at full power.

The red propeller installed on the G2 is extremely short and only for ground testing the propeller transmission. When I go to fly it, I'll install much longer flight blades. It rolls at 80 mph with the red prop and we have completed ground testing of the transmission.

Dezso Molnar works on attaching the Piaggio MP3 front end to version 3 of the G2 Gyrocycle
Dezso Molnar

One reason for having the layout with the engine in the back is for the cooling wind of the propeller. It's also a safety thing. If the motorcycle engine shells out, parts will go out the back of the vehicle and not through the propeller like on pusher gyros, which can break off a prop blade in flight. A gyro can autorotate and land without an engine, but there is a short and dangerous period when an out-of-balance propeller is spinning, and can rip your aircraft apart in flight before you pull the power. You can vibrate an aircraft apart, so it's ideal to not let things go through propellers.

With the gyrocycle, the propeller diameter can be very large, since the tips of the blade aren't restricted by any aircraft structure, and they're out in clean air. That's the reason for running the fuselage thru the prop. The design is flexible, so more powerful engines can swing a bigger prop. Engine power all boils down to thrust, and big diameter props are the most efficient way to get thrust. I'm expecting good performance out of the G2.

Don't forget to check out the three other parts to this one long interview. In part 1, Dezso talks about his origins as an inventor, rocket scientist and musician. In part 2, he gives us a different way of thinking about flying cars. In part 3, he dissects his favorite and least favorite existing flying car designs. And stay tuned for the final part of our interview, in which he reveals the world's first flying car race series, and tells us what a flying car race will look like. That's coming up in the next week or so!

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12 comments
MattII
More flying cars? Haven't these people realised by now that flying cars aren't going to work, beyond perhaps a few rich fools, and even then, actually trying to drive most of them (all the ones where the wings and tail stay attached) on the road is a nightmare in its own right.
zevulon
i think it will be a mistake to remove the mp3 front end when you test it in flight. 3 wheels make for a much more stable take off and landing and if the vehicle drives well on 3. leave it with 3. it also makes parking and idling far easier.
if the engine is not powerful enough for sustained flight with 2 people and an mp3 front end. then simply use it for 1 person until you get more funding to upgrade the engine.
demo the thing properly with 3 wheels on ground and in flight. then get the money.
Nik
Finding a parking space, anywhere in town would be a nightmare! Can you imagine trying to park in a multistory car-park, impossible? Flying cars are an exercise in fantasy. Even if they are constructed, most people wont have the time, money, or aptitude to use them. The automobile has killed more people than both world wars, and that's just on the ground, put them in the sky, and the permutations for killing people multiply.
Robert Flieger
What's the ground clearance on the prop? Doesn't look like there is much room for a larger prop.
Futurist
Flying cars are not for just anyone; - You need to be sporty - You need to be wealthy
Street Wing is an incremental improvement over classical planes. There are already planes with optional road wheel and motor offerings.
The real advancement will come with even smaller single seat flying cars with VTOL or STOL capability and with land speeds that can accelerate the plane to take off speed when taking of in STOL mode which is like 30mph but not highway speeds. Highway speed capabilty will cause a lot of stress on the vehicle which you don't want for a flying vehicle.
If you can operate independent of airports or heliports you have got a winning flying car.
Range is not as important as usability. A practical flying car with shorter range is more valuable than a longer range impractical flying machine a.k.a airplane or helicopter.
Tom Lee Mullins
I think those are neat. While I realize it is not for anyone, I think it would be neat to see them driving on the road and flying in the sky.
JohnCCook
The G2 is awesome. Molnar is a genius and has narrowed down what this vehicle needs to do and what it doesn't. Who cares about parking? drive an electric buggy if you want to commute to the city. You can drive and fly reliably. If you are going to go cross county on a motorcycle why wouldn't you use this instead. Its beautiful. Small planes are impractical toys for rich people but yet there they are all over the world. I agree about leaving the mp3 front end. I like stability.
Lumen
I must say I've really been enjoying this interview series. Dezso really makes sense as he shares the thought processes in his decisions, and kudos for what he and his team have put together.
Regarding the G2, it's an awesome road warrior. I agree with JohnCCook and zevulon about keeping the two wheels in the front for stability in landing, even if heavier. But hey Dezso, you're sharp, so you'll figure it out either way. Robert Flieger seems to have a point on the ground clearance on that smaller diameter prop with not much room for a larger prop by appearance, but again, hey, you're closer to this vehicle than any of us.
The Street Wing as shown will definitely fly, and can road roam if the width between the two front wheels is not too wide. You definitely have the biomimicry insect thing going on. I guess we can thank Alex Karafilovski for a lot of that. Of course the concept is not done yet, because the wing tips folded back can likely smack cars while turning at intersections due to their distance from the rear wheel as shown, even during forward rolling motion. Perhaps partly retractable, telescoping wings can help? If left alone, the rider will really have to pull out into the intersection, if possible, to clear the wings before engaging in an even-tighter turn at that point. Nevertheless, it's a vehicle that will work, and great-looking at that.
I'm over here in New Zealand working on things at the moment, so I don't know if I'll be able to join you in your flying car race series early on, but if things are set in the US down the road, we should be able to build something that can compete with your G2 and show folks what one-seater roadable aircraft can do!
VirtualGathis
I'm curious. Mr Molnar has opinions on most of the flying vehicles I've been following, but I didn't see anything on the AeroMobile effort. It has flown successful test flights and is very similar to his Street Wing. REF: www.aeromobil.com/
Futurist
Molnar's design bears some similarity to Aeromobil, which is not much. Aeromobil suffers from heavy weight and it actually crashed once already. Molnar's design can work better if done properly. A roadworthy car needs to be sturdy, an airworthy car needs to be lightweight. So which mode do people want, road or air? If you check both you get none. You need to be biased to one or the other thinking within the constraints of today's technology and reasonable budgets.