Henry Ford was one of the richest men of the early 20th century. He singlehandedly cleaned city streets of horse manure by introducing affordable, reliable cars.
The Model-T Ford remains one of the most important products of the industrial revolution, forever transforming our lives.
Having realised the dream of the common man for cheap and reliable personal transportation, Ford decided to have a go at flying, more specifically how to create a Model-T for the air.
A flying car is not really a huge technological leap in aviation technology. In fact, in many ways, it represents a step back because it is essentially a plane with an aerodynamically flawed body and unnecessarily heavy.
Planes are designed to fly, they don’t have to pass a 45 per cent frontal offset crash test at 55mph so they are made as lightweight as possible. But cars weigh well over a tonne and can carry only five people at modest speeds.
As a concept, the Flivver is not really a flying car but more of a personal plane for the common man.
Designed to fit in the driveway of a house it has a short and stubby body, and wings.
legendary airman Charles lindbergh once flew the Flivver during a visit to Ford airfield in Dearborn Michigan and he later described it as an awful aircraft to fly.
Short and stubby things don’t fly well, that is why planes tend to be long and sleek.
Test pilot and Henry’s blue-eyed boy, Harry Brooks, used the prototype to commute from his home to the Ford airfield and later used it to travel between the facilities around Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan.
The Flivver even undertook endurance trials and in the final attempt made it all the way to Florida, covering 1,564km.
Brooks was so confident of the plane that he took it over the Atlantic ocean but, sadly the plane crashed and the pilot was never found.
The wreckage washed ashore and investigations found a toothpick jammed into the fuel cap vent holes, which likely caused engine stoppage. Apparently Brooks himself had jammed the toothpick into the vent holes the night before to prevent moisture from entering and condensation forming inside the tank.
He probably forgot to take it out the next morning.
The Flivver programme was killed as a result even though the crash was caused by a misplaced wooden dental cleaning apparatus rather than any design flaw.
The Flivver was a well-designed aircraft, coming as it were from the pen of William Bushnell Stout, an aircraft designer, whose company, the Stout Metal Airplane Company was bought over by Ford.
Stout was a fan of Hugo Junkers, the German aircraft designer who pioneered metal aircraft design and some might even think that these two great minds kind of copied each other when both Ford and Junkers came out with three engine aircraft.
Ford called theirs the Trimotor while Junkers went even less imaginatively with the name, calling theirs, the Ju-52.
The most obvious difference was that Junkers had a low wing while Ford’s version had a high wing configuration.
The Trimotor was first produced in 1926 while the first Ju-52 came out in 1930.
The success of the Trimotor gave birth to the Flivver and later the Stout Skycar.
The corrugated aluminium body seen on the Skycar came as a result of their direct experience with the Trimotor.
Although the Ju-52 came four years after the Trimotor, Junkers had pioneered the use of corrugated aluminium as aircraft skin as the corrugation added stiffness to the material.
The first version for the skycar was powered by a Michigan Rover R-267 four-cylinder air-cooled engine displacing 4,375cc in and producing 75hp at 1,975rpm.
The engine was placed behind the cabin in a pusher configuration while the rear section of the skycar was simply made of space-frame tubing with the vertical and horizontal stabilisers attached at the end.
Various small changes were made until version four of the Skycar but in the end it never made it to market and all that is left are museum exhibits.
Skycars are interesting as an insight into the human psyche’s close link to the dream of flying and how unattainable personal flight seems to be.
Maybe that is about to change.