It sounds like something out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or even Back to the Future - but one inventor claims to made the flying car a reality.
While it could well help solve the issue of traffic gridlock which plagues many cities, an airborn version of the converted hatchback looks to be some time away from the production line.
Made out of an seemingly-ordinary 800cc Maruti car, it has rotor blades affixed to the roof with extended wheelarches creating a 'vacuum section', and has been one of the star attractions at the Aero India 2011 air show in Bangalore.
Futuristic: Vishwanath's company is part-named after the DeLorean sports car of the 1980s, famously used as a time machine in Hollywood's Back To The Future, starring Christopher Lloyd (left) and Michael J Fox.Flying high?: The 'flying Maruti' is made from a seemingly-ordinary 800cc Maruti car, with rotor blades afixed to the roof and extended wheelarches covering a 'vacuum section'
It’s been hailed as the Pentagon’s priciest arms purchase programme.
But yesterday the F-35B fighter jet silenced its critics as it cleared a major hurdle and completed its first vertical landing.
Boosted by 41,000lbs of thrust, the plane, which is part of U.S. plans to develop the next generation of military fighter jets, landed smoothly at Naval Station Patuxent River in Maryland.
Test pilot Graham Tomlinson, in a radar-evading F-35B, hovered for a minute then descended to a 95-foot square pad.
The landing demonstrated the ability to operate from a very small area at sea or on shore.
Tomlinson began the roughly 14-minute flight with an 80-knot short takeoff.
The Marine Corps is due to start using the jump-jet version in December 2012.
It is the latest in jet technology first launched by the British Military designed Harrier Jump Jet.
A conventional F-35 is in early production for the U.S. Air Force, and the Navy will get a model that lands on aircraft carriers.
America is scheduled to buy more than 2,400 of the supersonic fighters, the backbone of its air combat fleet for coming decades.
Affordability was supposed to be a hallmark of the aircraft, which is also being built for eight overseas partners and other projected foreign buyers, including all those now flying Lockheed's F-16 fighter.
The F-35's average cost has soared 60 per cent to 90 per cent in real terms beyond what was projected in 2001, when development began, Pentagon officials told Congress last week.
The Air Force and Navy versions are now due to be ready for combat as much as four years after the Marines' F-35B.
Designed primarily to attack ground targets, the aircraft in the test Thursday was powered by a single engine built by the Pratt & Whitney unit of United Technologies Corp.
The eight U.S. co-development partners are Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Norway.
The vertical landing was ‘a vivid demonstration of innovative technology that will serve the global security needs of the U.S. and its allies for decades to come,’ Robert Stevens, Lockheed Martin's chairman and chief executive, said in the statement.
Hurdle: The fighter jet had come under fire from critics complaining it was over budget
Test flight: The F-35B completed its first hover landing near the Patuxent River in Maryland
Fighter first: The F-35B jet lands vertically at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, U.S., yesterday
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, the world's first commercial passenger spaceship, made its inaugural test flight over the California desert yesterday.
The flight marked the start of a test programme that will progress to flights as a glider and then under rocket power.
Throughout the two hour, 54 minute test, the space tourism rocket remained slung beneath the middle of the wing of its 'mothership' WhiteKnightTwo, a twin-fuselage carrier aircraft.
The pair achieved an altitude of 45,000ft before returning to the Mojave Air and Space Port, which is 70 miles north of Los Angeles.
'This is a momentous day,' designer Burt Rutan said.Virgin Galactic, an offshoot of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group, has collected about £30million in deposits and fares from more than 330 aspiring amateur astronauts, each of whom will be charged £133,000 to experience a few minutes of suborbital spaceflight.
By suborbital means its trajectory will not complete a full orbit of Earth.
Test flights are scheduled to continue through 2011, with commercial operations set to begin in 2012.
The rocket and mothership are the second generation of the Burt Rutan-designed system that sent the first privately developed, manned rocket into space in 2004.
SpaceShipOne went on that year to make two more suborbital flights, winning the £6.7million prize Ansari X Prize. It is now in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.Sir Richard is in a deal with the Rutan-founded Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, to develop passenger-carrying spacecraft and launchers.
SpaceShipTwo has been dubbed Virgin Spaceship Enterprise and the four-engine carrier jet is called Virgin Mothership Eve, after Sir Richard's mother.
'Seeing the finished spaceship in December was a major day for us but watching VSS Enterprise fly for the first time really brings home what beautiful, groundbreaking vehicles Burt and his team have developed for us,' said Sir Richard.
Virgin Galactic said the flight test program will run through 2011 before passenger travel is scheduled to begin in 2012.
SpaceShipTwo will be carried to an altitude of about 50,000ft and then released by the mothership.
Powered by a single rocket motor, the spaceship will be flown by a crew of two and carry six passengers on a Mach 3 thrill ride through the edge of the atmosphere for a brief zero-gravity experience and views of the Earth far below before gliding to a landing.Such suborbital flights are similar to the 1961 flights of Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Virgil Grissom - up into space and then back down without circling the Earth.
But by launching SpaceShipTwo from a high-flying carrier aircraft, there's no need for the massive rockets that propelled the Mercury capsules.
Motherships have been used for decades by Nasa and the military for 'captive-carry' tests and launches of such craft as the X-15 rocket planes.
The novel part of Rutan's design is his 'carefree re-entry' system.
SpaceShipTwo has tailbooms extending rearward from its wings. In space, the booms pivot upward to a 65-degree angle. The position causes drag and slows the descent in the upper atmosphere before the booms pivot back to horizontal.
Commercial development has been slower than expected.
When Virgin Group licensed the technology from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who funded about £17million for SpaceShipOne, Sir Richard envisioned operating flights by 2007.
A major setback was an explosion during a 2007 ground test involving the flow of a rocket oxidizer.
Three workers were killed and three others suffered serious injuries.
Approximately 600 people are now employed on activities relating to the Virgin Galactic project.
This figure is estimated to rise to over 1,100 jobs during the peak of the construction phase at the space port and when the commercial space vehicles begin their flights.
Speaking in December, Sir Richard said: 'The team has created not only a world first but also a work of art.
'It's incredible to think only 450 people have ever been into space; that's including all the Russians, all the Chinese and all the Americans put together.'
In honour of a long tradition of using the word Enterprise in the naming of Royal Navy, U.S. Navy, Nasa vehicles and even science fiction spacecraft, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson in December christened SS2 with the name Virgin Space Ship (VSS) Enterprise.
December launch: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger with Sir Richard Branson and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, break wines bottles at the christening ceremony of SpaceShipTwo (left). Sir Richard poses with aircraft designer Burt Rutan (right)
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