It’s 6:15 A.M.; you enter your garage and punch the door open switch causing the lights to come on and the door to open.  You press a button on your key fob, chirp, the forward cargo compartment opens.  You place your briefcase inside like you do every day, five days a week.  Hitting another button causes the “suicide” style door to unlatch and slowly open – electrically, so quiet you can barely hear it over the sound of your approaching footsteps.  You notice the umbilical chord that was providing electricity swing away, up against the ceiling of your garage.

The rich leather seat is warm, that new car smell still smells comforting.  You hear, “Batteries fully charged, systems check” as the door swings closed.  A very quiet five minute drive later, in full electric mode, you arrive at launch and recovery pad 4XY.  Four X-ray Yankee is only three miles from your garage, but you are unable to hear the nearly continuous stream of arriving and departing Avicars from your home.  The station attendant flashes a ‘thumbs-up,’ everything’s okay – indicating that the exterior has been inspected and your fully fueled wings are securely attached and you’re ready to fly.

Moving onto the pad the jet engine starts automatically as the computer takes complete command.  You recline your seat and close your eyes for your ritual ten minute morning nap.  You hear the engine and lift fan pick up speed, you feel the soothing vibrations start low and develop into a high pitch that is barely heard over the sucking sound of air rushing over your canopy on its furious path to the intake…

Once airborne, the Avicar will travel along computer corridors with its computers talking and de-conflicting with other vehicles as it goes.  No pilot skills required.  Simply load cargo, load people, fasten your belts, tell the computer where you want to go… and that’s it, it does all the rest.  It will check to ensure that weather conditions are safe, it will coordinate your launch and recovery times, it will completely plan and execute your flight from start to finish.  This technology will not look like the tilt-rotor.  It will not look like versions you may have seen with a lift fan on each corner.  These designs are not safe enough in the takeoff and landing mode due to the possibility of differential thrust should a failure occur.  The new Joint Strike Fighter, with its large central lift fan, will provide the first workable lift fan model.

The Avicar sits in your garage without any wings.  It will not launch from your yard or a street, it will launch and recover from strategically placed pads like ‘park and ride lots’ in suburban areas or elevated parking garages in urban areas.  Although it has a small turbine (jet) engine, it is essentially an electric-only car capable of driving about 40 to 60 miles on a charge.  This is enough to run errands around town or to make it to one of the launch locations.  Upon arrival at a launch location, a pre-ordered set of wings that contains an appropriate load of jet fuel, or alternative blend, will be attached to your vehicle by a machine or station attendant.

The vehicle will have a deep, blended body that provides lift as it moves through the sky at 350 to 400 mph over the ground.  The body and wings will be made of graphite epoxy/carbon fiber and it will have a pair of short vertical fins at the tail with no horizontal stabilizer.  The aft portion of the fuselage will act as an elevator for backup control only.  This elevator will be split to assist with roll control and may help vector thrust for even more control.  Passengers and cargo will sit up front, there will be no pilot; the only input required will be when in the driving mode.  Above and behind the passenger compartment will be a large air intake to draw in air for the engine and to provide air for the single large lift fan located in the middle-bottom portion of the vehicle.  The air intake will open wide to let more air in for vertical takeoffs and landings, will open narrowly for normal forward flight, and will close when on the ground.The Avicar will use either a large single, or smaller multiple electric motor/ generator/ flywheel units (that spin at up to 90,000 revolutions per minute) to power the lift fan or the wheels while on the ground.  These units will use a reduction gearbox that will bring fan (or wheel) rpm’s down to a more efficient speed.  These motor/ generator/ flywheel units will receive electricity from a small battery bank like a hybrid vehicle does now, in concert with nanotube encrusted ultra-capacitors.  It will also get electricity from a generator driven by a small jet engine whose primary purpose is not to power the lift fan, but to provide thrust for forward flight and to generate electricity for flight.  Because the weight of the vehicle is above the lift fan, it will primarily use gyroscopes (the electric motor/flywheel and jet engine) and, if needed, small but powerful strategically placed electric fans for additional stability control.  The lift fan/electric motor/flywheel unit is one gyroscope, and the jet engine, mounted vertically at a 45 degree angle with respect to the lift fan, augments, or replaces, the other two gyros needed to have control in all three planes of movement (you must be able to have actuators and small movement capability to these components).  In order to make this vehicle as light as possible and to have the greatest range possible, the engine and batteries/capacitors will not be powerful enough for vertical lift off.  Also, your neighbors will not appreciate your lift off or recovery at 1:00 a.m. in the morning making launch and recovery from your yard highly unlikely and undesirable (although noise levels will be lowered by both passive and active noise attenuation systems).

So imagine this… While in your garage, your batteries/capacitors and flywheels have been charging overnight, although this process will only take a few minutes, your vehicle will be able to drive approximately 40 to 60 miles without starting an engine or stopping to recharge.  You drive out of your garage to a launch/recovery pad that is most likely within five miles of your home.  The pad and vertical liftoff/recovery eliminate the need for real estate consuming runways and the vehicle is designed so that the time to change its configuration for flight is minimal.  Ideally, (Here comes the Buck Rogers part…) the launch pad has two very powerful laser beams that are powered from the already existing electrical grid (two for redundancy – a tethered power supply or electric rail would work as an alternative for launch).  Once on the pad, the jet engine is started and the lasers then kick in, targeting receiving pads on the bottom of the vehicle.  The pads convert the laser energy into electricity that help to further spin the lift fan.  The Avicar lifts off the ground just a couple of inches to do a controllability check.  The fan then spools to a high speed and launches you several thousand feet into the air.  As the fan is spooling down, the vehicle leans nose down, aiming thrust from the fan aft to start your motion forward.  The forward thrust from the jet engine simultaneously begins to propel you faster with more forward motion.  As it goes faster still, the wings begin to provide enough lift to sustain flight without the lift fan which is then shuttered in flight.  Recovery is the same, only the lasers target you at low altitude, near a recovery pad, to spin the fan up for landing.  As the Avicar descends, the nose pitches up and air is allowed to run the fan converting potential energy into electricity and spinning the flywheel up for landing.  If the power grid is out, or in an emergency, the computer can land the vehicle at an airport like a regular plane.  In the worst event, a ballistic parachute can deploy from the top or rear of the vehicle so that it will safely parachute to a landing.  Its airbags will deploy just as they would in a highway accident to provide additional safety and to soften the emergency landing speeds of the parachute.

The huge advantage of this vehicle is time.  There will be launch pads strategically placed like park and ride lots or cell phone towers.  For short distances, you use the electric only mode; like to pick up groceries at the local store.  For greater distances, you take to flight.  Let’s say that it’s capable of flying from Seattle to San Francisco.  From my home now, I must leave at least two hours prior to departure if I’m going to fly a plane from SEATAC.  It is then a two hour flight to SFO.  By the time I arrive at my destination, I will have invested five to six hours of my time (with no delays).  With the Avicar, it will be five minutes to the launch pad, 2+30 in flight to the recovery pad near my destination, and five more minutes driving to the destination address for a total time of less than three hours.

It will also spread people out farther.  Let’s say that I live in a nice home close to Seattle.  It is expensive to live close by in the city.  I have to live close because the commute times are horrendous if I don’t.  So, move to your dream community a couple hundred miles away, and commute with the Avicar.  The same half hour commute will put you on the other side of the state, flying above the traffic.

If you can’t afford one of your own, or smartly don’t want to afford one of your own, then you enter into a joint ownership pool.  You will then drive your own car to a “park and ride” lot with a launch/recovery pad, and you will leave your car there.  You will enter a shared ownership Avicar and fly to your destination.  Once at your destination, you can either drive the Avicar, or take a taxi, bus, or shared car so that someone else can fly that Avicar while you’re visiting.  It could also be loaded with time sensitive cargo and sent on its way.  When you’re ready to return, you drive your shared regular car, or bus, or taxi back to the nearest park and ride pad where your Avicar awaits you.  It probably is not the one that you arrived in.  This one may have flown empty from a pad nearby because it was not in use.

You would pay for a partial ownership position in the vehicle and would also pay a “trip” fee each time you use it to pay for launch/recovery, fuel, maintenance, etc.  Total cost will be more than a car, but not astronomically so.  Owning one yourself would be very expensive, but upper income individuals will cope as it will multiply their time and earning capabilities.  Some of the cost will be offset if you live farther away, as a comparable home will be less expensive.  For example, that $700,000 Seattle home may “only" cost $500,000 for the same home living in or near a small, less densely populated, town.