This Is Rocket Science

Paul Moller may have been working on his flying car for nearly four decades, but he's no crackpot. His saga is a road map of how to keep a dream moving ahead when the world seems to offer nothing but head winds. And he just might pull it off.

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Paul Moller may have been working on his flying car for nearly four decades. But he's no crackpot. Meet Skycar

Inside a small, squat building in the interior farmland of northern California, a machine that can only be described as a one-man flying saucer sits next to a spacious workshop. It's not the most interesting vehicle in the building. That honor has to go to the gleaming red machine in the corner, the one that looks like a race car circa 2025, all wicked curves and multiple jetlike engines. It's a Skycar -- a "roadable aircraft," or a flying car, if you will -- that is capable in theory of lifting straight up past rooftops and then zooming off over hill, dale, and traffic jams.

Paul Moller believes he's going to put one just like it in your driveway.

It seems like a batty notion, but it's one to which Moller has unwaveringly clung throughout a nearly four-decade odyssey that has left him and his company, Moller International, in Davis, Calif., constantly on the brink of crashing and burning.

Moller, of course, is hardly the only entrepreneur to throw himself into a long-shot, long-haul venture that holds out the promise of great reward. But few have pursued as grand a vision against such daunting odds and with as much resiliency. The saga of Moller International is virtually a road map -- or, rather, an aeronautical chart -- of how to keep moving ahead with a dream when the world seems to offer nothing but wind shear. "I always believed I'd succeed if I could just survive," says Moller. "It's always been about surviving."

He just may pull it off.

Child prodigies are usually associated with mathematics or music. Moller, who grew up on a farm in rural Canada, was gifted in mechanical engineering. At age 11 he designed and built a working four-person Ferris wheel. Four years later, after an inspirational encounter with a hummingbird, he built a primitive and partially functioning helicopter.

Not interested in attending college, Moller attended an aircraft-maintenance trade school. But he never got over the thrill of building a machine that could hover, and he pored through engineering textbooks on his own and took a few night classes.

In 1960, when he was 23, he randomly dropped in on Barry Newman, an aeronautics professor at Montreal's McGill University, asking for advice on how he could take some college classes. Newman was so impressed that he pulled strings to get Moller into a graduate program there, despite Moller's lack of a college degree. Upon obtaining his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, a mere three years later, Moller got a job at the University of California at Davis, and it wasn't long before he had created the school's first aeronautics curriculum.

But a question kept nagging at him. Why weren't we all getting around the way the Jetsons did? In a world that was beginning to experience heady revolutions in computers, medicine, and even space travel, Americans were spending hours a day in machines that were essentially a 19th-century technology, stuck in traffic under wide-open skies. It was as if every element of science fiction were coming to life, except for the most ubiquitous -- flying cars. "You can't describe a future without a major evolution in personal transportation," says Moller.

Was there a way to combine the straight-up flight of a helicopter with the greater simplicity, speed, and lower cost of ownership of a light plane? The key, Moller decided, was the engine -- usually the weak link in aircraft when it came to cost, performance, and reliability issues. What if an aircraft could be driven by smaller, simpler engines that each turned a small fan-blade-like rotor underneath the vehicle?

In 1965, Moller built and flew a two-engine hovering platform he called the XM-2. The underpowered contraption struggled to make it inches off the ground and tended to wildly pitch to one side or the other with any imbalance in the two engines' thrusts. But it was a start.

By 1967, Moller was itching to spend all his time designing and developing a precursor to a mass-marketable flying vehicle that could challenge the dominance of the automobile. At that time he estimated it would take 10 years if he could get the right power plant. All that stood in his way were a complete absence of funding, enormous technical and regulatory hurdles, and a long history of flying-car failures. (See "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's ... History," below.) On the plus side, an easy-to-own-and-fly family aircraft could create one of the largest new markets in history.

Moller knew little would happen without investors. So he started talking up the idea to everyone of means he ran into. Soon the 30-year-old fell in with an eccentric but enthusiastic promoter who agreed to pay $15,000 up front and $85,000 in the coming year in exchange for 7% of Moller's about-to-be-founded enterprise. Moller scaled back his university job in 1968, set up a workshop in a garage, and started ordering parts. About three months later, with his $15,000 depleted and his debt rising, Moller was stunned to learn that his lone investor's business had collapsed.

Moller had to scare up money, and fast. It would become a theme for the next 32 years.

He quickly confirmed the obvious, which was that traditional sources of financing were not eager to throw money at a garage start-up with an unproven technology, market, and founder. Instead, he would have to play the passion card -- that is, find well-heeled people who would be sufficiently revved up by the force of his creativity, ambition, and vision to fork over significant sums of money without any conventional form of assurance that they'd ever see a penny of it again.

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David H. Freedman

A Boston-based contributing editor, Freedman is the co-author of A Perfect Mess, which examines the useful role of disorder in daily life, business, and science. His other books include Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines; At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion (co-authored with Charles C. Mann); and Brainmakers: How Scientists are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the Human Brain.

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