SkyCar Wraps up 4,000-Mile Trip

February 28, 2009 — A team of adventurers returned to Wiltshire after a 4,000-mile, 42-day expedition from London to Timbuktu in a combination car and powered parachute. "It's the first SkyCar to fly over Europe to Africa,” Gilo Cardozo, the engineer and inventor who designed the bio-fueled vehicle told the BBC. “We even did a ferry trip which normally takes a car two hours; we did it in 15 minutes." The team set off in January and traveled through France, Spain and Morocco, and then across the Sahara by way of Mauritania and Mali, before returning home via Senegal earlier this week. Former SAS officer Neil Laughton was the pilot for the expedition for the African leg of the trip. "Flying over the desert in a flying car is absolutely surreal,” said Cardozo. “It's an extraordinary experience.” According to Cardozo’s diary, the SkyCar did have some mechanical problems at times. In mid-February, for instance, there was a minor problem with one of the main drive shaft bearings in the wheel drive transmission system. Then they encountered some excitement, too, when earlier in February, a crosswind blew Cordozo and the SkyCar toward a tree. He hit it at about 60 mph, destroying the front of the vehicle. The crew worked nonstop to rebuild it, and by midnight that same day, the SkyCar was again working. The vehicle also made history on January 29 when it became the first car to fly across the Strait of Gibraltar. Cordozo’s firm, Parajet, manufactures the industrial paramotors that propel the Skycar once it is airborne. The team has invested about £250,000, or $356,875, in the vehicle’s development and is anxious to start commercial production. "We're intending to have production SkyCars evolved, with all the things we've learnt from this last five weeks of expeditioning with it, by the end of this year,” Cordozo told the BBC. The team hopes to have it on the market by 2010 with a price tag of £50,000, or about $71,375.

SkyCar travels by a ship graveyard during its 42-day trip from London to Timbuktu and back again. Photo credit: SkyCar Expedition The SkyCar made history when it became the first car to fly across the Strait of Gibraltar on January 29. Photo credit: SkyCar Expedition

• 2012 - 02/01 - NASA Launches Space Race Blastoff on Facebook
• 2012 - 02/01 - Biologist Aims for Greenest Around-the-World Flight
• 2012 - 01/27 - Photographing ISS from your Backyard
• 2012 - 01/27 - Ground Broken for New Atlantis Home
• 2012 - 01/23 - NASA advertising for astronaut candidates