Creative New

Terrafugia’s Transition driving airplane

Via popsci.com

The team at Terrafugia is about to fulfill the fantasy of every driverpilot: a consumer vehicle that can take to the highways and the skies. All they have to do is finish the first one.

The Transition is not a flying car. The vehicle, set to go on sale next year, will cruise smoothly on the road and through the sky. It will have four wheels, Formula One–style suspension, and a pair of 10-foot-wide wings that fold up when it switches from air to asphalt. And when the engineers at Terrafugia in Woburn, Massachusetts, let me sit inside their just-finished proof-of-concept vehicle and grab the steering wheel, it’s easy to imagine piloting this thing up and out of traffic, into the open skies.

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ICON Aircraft’s new A5 light recreational airplane

Via businessweek.com

ICON Aircraft, a privately held startup based in Los Angeles, hopes to turn aviation into a powersport, like Jet Ski and motorcycle riding. On June 12, it unveiled the A5, a $139,000 plane intended for recreational flying that will be available in 2010. The A5 is aimed squarely at the Light Sport Aircraft category devised by the Federal Aviation Administration four years ago. The new class makes it easier for individuals to take to the air. The A5 is one of the first aircraft designed specifically for this market, which ICON expects could be worth as much as $2 billion annually.

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