When the most recent tech boom hit, Moller expected to find backers among all the young corporate hotshots stuck in Silicon Valley traffic, who he thought would appreciate the electronic sophistication of the Skycar. "This thing should excite the hell out of the computer industry," says Moller. "It's a flying computer." He wrote letters to the CEOs of all the major Silicon Valley companies he thought might be interested in the electronics behind Skycar . No one responded.
Still, it's not as if Moller has been a complete dud when it comes to raising money. He has done better with foreign corporations, attracting an investment of $300,000 from South Korea's Samsung Techwin, as well as $700,000 from a Malaysian concern and $1 million from a Finnish company. A Middle Eastern company became an investor when an executive there heard about Moller through one of Moller's stockholders. Overall, a majority of the company's large investors are from overseas.
And then there's Moller's affinity for profitably spinning off technologies. "I always try to find an element of the grand scheme to capitalize on," he explains. He has scored government contracts for producing smaller and simpler hovering machines, for example, including an R2D2-like "aerobot" designed to inspect the undersides of bridges. And the latest incarnation of his Wankel engines seems to be taking off as a product in its own right. Moller claims to have received letters of intent for the purchase of a total of 500,000 engines worth $1 billion, for applications ranging from electric generators to fire-hose pumps to personal watercraft resembling Jet Skis. Meanwhile, with all that ancillary success, Moller has had to answer some hard questions from his third wife. "She doesn't understand how I can make so much money and still be broke," he says. "I'm like the farmer in the joke who is thrilled to inherit $6 million because now he can afford to farm for another 10 years."
To keep himself in the black, if barely and erratically, Moller has continued to turn back to many of the same individual investors who have supported him over the years. "I'm pretty good at hustling," he says. "When I get desperate, I come up with something that would appeal. You can't just keep leading them to the same trough." Every company milestone, from a new contract to a technical breakthrough, is leveraged into an effort to ignite investors' interest in buying more stock, as well to attract new backers. Last year, for example, Moller started up the Skycar Liftoff Association, whose stockholding members will receive options on more stock if and when the Skycar flies. The scheme brought $500,000 into the company.
The engine was the key, Moller knew, in combining straight-up flight with the speed and simplicity of a light plane.
There are now some 450 investors in Moller International, with individual investments averaging a little over $100,000. None of the investors have gotten rich on the company, but they could have done a lot worse; during the past 30 years, the price of a share of stock has increased by a factor of 50. Moller himself helps make a market in the stock by informally helping buyers and sellers hook up with one another. The company is currently in the process of registering as a public company -- not because it plans an IPO anytime soon, says Moller, but so that the company can borrow against its stock.
Prospects for the Skycar have received indirect boosts in recent years from surprising quarters. The Federal Aviation Administration tends to be tough on new aircraft when it comes to certification, and the Skycar might have been in for a particularly bumpy ride if it were forced to qualify as either an ordinary plane or a helicopter, since it combines features from both. But the agency recently created a new category for powered vehicles. the skycar is likely to be the second such vehicle after the v-22 but a certified skycar is more than two years away. the faa is also in the process of creating a new air-traffic-control system light aircraft that will in most cases remove one of the major hassles in the need to obtain traffic-control clearances. the new system will allow special transceivers aboard light planes to communicate with one automatically directing pilots away from traffic conflicts. I make a legitimate case for this vehicle without a major change in the airspace-control says moller.
NASA has been helping the cause as well. The agency has long been interested in increasing its role in civil aviation, and chief Daniel Goldin has in recent years publicly predicted a boom in private aircraft that will annually deliver 10,000 vehicles within 10 years and 20,000 within 20 years. Moller points to that prediction as a vindication of his insistence that the Skycar market is out there. "Without that market, I'm just a maverick trying to turn a hobby into more than it is," he says. "So many people are just pursuing their dreams, caught up in their wishful thinking, and that can be sad."
Now all he has to do is get the Skycar off the ground. The first big test will be a straight liftoff of 10 feet or so (a low-hover test) while the vehicle is tethered to the ground to avoid any control-related mishaps. The original target was April 1999, but that date has been pushed back several times. As of this writing, the test was set for late August. If it goes well, an untethered flight will be scheduled before the end of the year.
