#aerocar

Be the envy of all this #MotorMonday with a not at all ill-advised flying automobile. The 1949 Aerocar was a product of Aerocar International, and the work of aeronautical engineer Moulton B. "Molt" Taylor (1912-1995) of Longview, Washington.

Taylor’s design was inspired by a 1946 encounter with Delaware inventor Robert E. Fulton, Jr., who had recently produced his own flying automobile, the ‘Airphibian’. After designing his own model, Taylor was able to reach an agreement with the manufacturing conglomerate Ling-Temco-Vought in 1956 to put his Aerocar into production, provided that he could secure 500 pre-orders.

Ultimately, however, Taylor could only secure about half the orders he needed to trigger commercial production, and only six working models of the Aerocar were ever made. The first of these models, built in 1949, is maintained in working condition (though kept earthbound) at the EAA AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Taylor’s final attempt at putting the Aerocar into production was the Aerocar III, built in the 1960s from an original model that had been damaged in an on-the-ground accident now resides at Seattle's Museum of Flight.