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Ahh, the flying car. With the benefits of both the car and the plane all rolled into one – surely it must be the ultimate form of personal transportation, or is it neither fish nor fowl?

James says

James: Well the aerocar was a good aeroplane actually. It flew very nicely. It was very benign. It answered the controls quite well. I don’t quite understand how it's possible that when you look how the wings fold in and little spikes go through and a little bit of bent tin holds the spike in place, that’s terrifying. Because with a normal aeroplane like these, if you just want to undo one nut and bolt for one control surface, you have to get permission and you have to get it certified and signed off by an engineer. But with that thing you can put it together like a giant piece of Meccano and apparently that’s fine. I don’t quite trust it.

As a car, it was absolutely terrible. I mean truly the worst car I’ve ever driven by a long, long way.

It's got a three speed crash gearbox. It's got appalling drum brakes and these wonky little wheels set out at the side and it's just useless. In a way, this is like a VW Beetle because it has a four cylinder flat arrangement air-cooled engine. But, of course, it's an aero-engine so the capacity is around four litres and the racket is unbearable. It's appalling!

Because they had to be light, Taylor made the bodywork out of glassfibre long before the Corvette made such a thing famous. Also, because the rear wheels were used when the aeroplane landed, the car had to be front-wheel drive. But there was only engine and that was mounted behind you so it said drive to the front for the wheels and to the back for the very long shaft that drove the propeller at the rear of the aeroplane. Terribly complicated but very, very cleverly worked out - but a rubbish car.

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The Hindenburg disaster knocked the airship for six, but maybe it's time has come again. With inert helium, rather than explosive hydrogen, providing the lift, could it be time to bring back a bit of style and grace to the skies?

James says

James: Well I wish we still had them because they must have looked fantastic. I mean when you see pictures of the Hindenburg or the R101 or whatever floating around above a city, they were generally at quite low altitudes, they just looked so elegant and so dignified, and they were obviously very luxurious. Very expensive as well like all long distance travel was in those days unless you were a steerage class on a tramp steamer.

I liked the sort of vision of Hugo Eckner, the Zeppelin designer. He was a great pacifist and a great believer in uniting the world through a very gentle and very elegant form of long distance travel. So I can see why they didn’t work. It's not just that they had a tendency to catch fire and kill everybody, it’s they are a bit slow, they’re a bit difficult to manage and there was a time when everybody thought aeroplanes would never fly long distances, they’re too unreliable and too difficult to fly, and that the airship was the answer, but actually it turned out to be the other way around. And it's a bit of a shame because I’d love to walk outside and see a Zeppelin, you know, an eight hundred and fifty foot long silver cigar floating around a couple of thousand feet above my head because I think it would just look fantastic.

Well we hear it about every ten years I think that the airship will come back, and I’ve seen the designs for the giant freight-carrying airships which are inconceivably massive, something like eight times the volume of the R101, and they would be able to lift big pieces of machinery and fly them around the country or even around the world very efficiently and using very little fuel - but it never quite happens. I don’t know why the physics of airships make sense. I mean it's quite simple, you have a certain volume and it displaces a certain amount of normal air and it will float and therefore it will lift a certain weight. But there must something more complicated about it because it just doesn’t happen. Apart from little blimps for filming the football or the Formula One or advertising film, that’s it.

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The Omnibus, a vehicle for all, transport for the masses – and lots of fun for Cliff and the gang on their 'Summer Holiday'. Is the idea of personal transportation a huge mistake, should we just learn to share a bus together rather than jumping in a car?

James says

James: I quite like riding on buses because it reminds me of being a child. But the problem it seems to me with buses is there’s no flexibility built into them so a bus is always the same size. Whereas if there were a way of having big buses when it's busy and then much smaller buses when it isn't busy, they would probably make a lot more sense. Because I seem to see an awful lot of buses chugging around, taking up a lot of space, having difficulty manoeuvring, making a horrid stink and they’ve got four people on them and they could be in a people carrier.

They are working, there’s some people in Belgium working on the super bus idea, which is a very fast luxury big bus, it's almost like a big stretch limo, and they have made one but it's a prototype and the whole thing is largely conceptual. But their reasoning is that if they organise the buses well enough, you would always be able to book a place on a bus, get on it near your home and it wouldn’t stop until you got to where you wanted to go, and that’s all a matter of logistics and making sure certain buses go in a certain way. I mean it looks very convincing on paper. But whether or not that then has any advantage over simply your own car, I'm not so sure.

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Cars, love 'em or loath 'em, you have to admit they are convenient, from A to B without mucking about. But if you want to have a chat on the phone, or just read the paper, you need a robot chauffeur to do the driving for you – but what if the computer crashes?

James says

James: A lot of the things that enthusiasts like about cars are the things that make them actually not very good, like internal combustion engines. Which, when you think about it, are pretty ridiculous, they’re full of reciprocating motion. The bit that’s actually burning the fuel might only be that big but then all the ancillaries and the alternator and all the gearbox and all the other things you need to actually make it work, then turns it into something this big. And they have flat spots in, you know, they have to idle all the time, their torque and power range is relatively narrow so you need a gearbox to make it work over a range of speeds. So that’s actually what makes driving a car quite good fun, it's that sort of glorious uselessness of internal combustion.

Wow, and we’re off. I'm not touching anything. Stopped at the junction, that’s encouraging. I haven't got my foot on the pedals. Look! Hands, no hands. I have to say this is quite disconcerting because the urge to get hold of the steering wheel, especially as that big lamppost is approaching is overwhelming. Here’s a junction, slowing down. It's turning! Very good. Trees, mmm it's seen the trees. It knows where the road is. And we’re off down the straight. It makes you realise actually when you sit here doing nothing, how much you are doing normally when you drive a car. Obviously you don’t really think about it, it's completely subliminal but I’d have to be turning here and braking and thinking – the car’s doing it for me.

So we’re driving along a normal road and there’s a car parked at the side of it. Now Junior can see that and would pull out and go around it, except there’s a car coming in the other direction and he knows that as well so he'll wait. There goes the other fella. And now, a quick look around to make sure there’s nothing else coming and around we go. The remarkable thing is that unlike most real drivers, he even had the good manners to indicate. Here we are, around the parked car and continue on our way.

I quite like this. In fact I think I’ll have one. Coming up to the junction, slowing down, indicating – very nice, nothing coming, off we go.

Now I'm now so confident in this technology that, for this next lap, I'm going to sit here and read Hot Rod magazine. Oh yes! So it's a great idea this because you could set the car off to go to the shops or to your place of work and you could read a magazine, have a snooze, talk on the phone – obviously because you’re not driving, the car is.

What this car actually demonstrates is something that we tend to forget which is that the human computer is a very, very well developed thing. When you’re driving along in a car, you’re taking in masses and masses of information and reacting to it in very, very short spaces of time, fractions of a second, usually, and the fact that this car can do that is remarkable. But handing your safety over to a machine does require quite a large leap of faith. But it is very pleasant being driven. It's like having a butler. There we go, we've come to the end. To the pub! You wait in the car, car.

The problem I think is that computers, as we know them now, in the state that they’re in now, are not a substitute for the human body because in the human body, when you do something like drive a car, fly an aeroplane, play badminton or something like that, the sequences of actions and the whole business of seeing, interpreting and converting something to hand movements and foot movements, that moves into your body, what some philosophers call the body brain. So it becomes, in essence, an instinct.

But computers can’t really develop an instinct. They can only think things through in a very, very cussed logical way. So if you’re in a computer-controlled car and that you’re driving down the road and a car comes the other way and there’s another car parked, which is an experiment we did, it can work it out. It can think that’s coming, that’s stopped, wait for that, now turn around next but it does it as a sequence of deh, deh, deh, deh, deh. Whereas when you watch a human being just do something as simple as catch a ball or drive into a car park and then reverse into a space, it's actually a very, very sophisticated motor controlled thing that’s going on. And I think until computers are able to develop this thing that we call the body brain or our instinct, I don’t see that they’ll ever do it very cleverly.

But also the road environment is very complicated, you’ve got other cars going in different directions and doing different things, and then there’s all the things that you can drive into, and then you have pedestrians and animals and things falling off lorries, and all the rest of it, up in the air computer guidance actually works quite well – aeroplanes are on it all the time.

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From Thunderball to Jet Set Willy, the idea of rocket packs has been a vision of the future since the distance past. So why haven't we all got one yet? It looks brilliant in the films, but would you really want to strap rocket fuel to your back and set light to it?

James says

James: It's a nice idea and we expect great things of them because we've seen them in James Bond and cartoons about space and so on.

Well, that was historic and very remarkable but I have ruined my trousers in several areas, I suspect, and I think to actually do that in untethered free flight across the fields would require balls of cast iron, or whatever the equivalent is if you’re a woman.There’s also another problem. The fuel consumption of this thing is so enormous, well let’s put it this way, it burns more fuel per second than a Boeing 747, and I don’t mean per passenger, I mean the whole aeroplane. So even if this thing were perfected, it would have an endurance of about 21, 22 seconds.

It's a reaction motor and it has to lift a fair weight, like a fully grown person, so it is going to be quite noisy. I think as long as it's powered by an exhaust made by burning a fuel of some sort and ejecting it at a very high speed, it's going to be hot, noisy, extremely difficult to control, probably have quite a short endurance and puts you in a position where you’re going to have a truly spectacularly bad accident. So I'm not convinced. I wouldn’t want to write it off altogether though. There’s got to be a better way, I think.

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With fossil fuels looking ever more expensive, maybe its time for solar power to have its day in the sun? There's loads of power up there ripe for the taking, so perhaps the solar future is looking bright - but what happens at night?

James says

James: Well I didn’t like that much about it, to be honest. It was pretty uncomfortable, pretty noisy and made terrible grinding noises. But I think the idea of solar-powered things is quite interesting because it is potentially free.

Here is the plan: two pick-up trucks, two generators, quite a lot of very big lights. Now this has never been tried before, driving a solar-powered car in the dark using artificial light instead of the sun.

Gentlemen, if we could have the lights on please.

Now, on my cue, we will gradually increase the amount of light shining on the solar cells on the car like this, and like this, and that will make the car go faster. It's really very simple - in theory.

Right, here we go. I have point one of an amp which gives me, virtually nothing. I think that needs a bit more light. Right, I'm ready for more light, more light, cue!

Two lots of light, I’ve got a bit more power. I'm picking up speed to four, four kilometres an hour - two and a half miles an hour. I think I’ll have more light. And more light, cue!

Well that is blinding and my face is now melting. My face is melting from the accumulated heat of all those lights, that’s eighteen kilowatts of light focused through this curved windscreen onto my eyeball.

How fast am I going? I’ve got eleven kilometres an hour, which is seven miles an hour, roughly speaking, but I’ve got a little bit of power in reserve, still accelerating, still accelerating! The wheels of the trucks carrying the light are a blur - sort of.

Eight point five miles per hour. I'm going for ten miles an hour, we’re nearly there, one and a half kilometres an hour to go. I’ve got tiny, I’ve got point one of an amp, it's very close. There it is! Ten miles an hour from light bulbs.

I'm sure you must realise, there’s some irony in burning all that energy to light those bulbs to make solar power to power this car whose headlights are on but anyway there you go.

What have we proved exactly? Well I saw sixteen kilometres per hour on the speedometer of the car, that’s about ten miles per hour, and to achieve that we had to use all of those lamps which amount to eighteen kilowatts worth. Now eighteen kilowatts is enough to light the streets of a small village, and yet that car will do hundred and twenty kilometres an hour, about eighty using just the power of the sun, even though the sun is ninety-two million miles away, and that would suggest that there is a great deal of power to be harnessed from up there - tomorrow anyway.

They were desperately uncomfortable and desperately hot as well. You’ve got your head stuck in a fish bowl really and the sunshine’s straight and obviously the thing is designed to work in the sunshine so you want lots of sunshine which is good for the car but bad for the driver. And I quite like the fact that it was made by a bunch of students on a tight budget and at the end of it I felt I should probably give them fifty quid or something towards some new panels or some new nuts and bolts, I don’t know. Yes, it was good but I wouldn’t want to drive it any distance.

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Image: Spaceship One in Flight
Rokits XPrize Gallery
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Why race through the air battling against friction when you could zip up above the atmosphere, whizz round the earth, and then pop back down quick as a flash. The idea's been around for donkey's years, could its time have come?

James says

James: People have been talking about going into space and space tourism and flying to the moon for a holiday since, well since the late Sixties when Pan Am said they were going to start their moon club, and it still hasn’t happened, so people are gagging for it and people have got the money to pay for it. We just need the machine to take them up there.

I remember reading about the original hotel, that was the British Aerospace Rolls Royce one with the special engine that would breathe air and then have its own oxygen supply, and it was all great. I read about it in a magazine like Speed & Power when I was a small boy and I thought this sounds brilliant. Australia in forty minutes or whatever they were claiming. But they got two things wrong.

One is they said it would be pilotless which, back then, we’re talking thirty or more years ago, scared everybody witless. And the other one that I can’t believe they did this, it didn’t have any windows, and this was like the early days of the Mercury capsules where they said, you know, there vill be no vindow. The idea that you would send someone effectively into space and you’d have to buy a premium price ticket to get to Australia in forty minutes but then you weren't allowed to see the journey, it was just absolute madness. Nobody would ever have bought into it, I don’t think, and I'm sure that’s part of the reason why the idea fell to earth. They didn’t make it exciting. They made it a solution, not an experience.

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Whether you dip your toe into the digital world with video calling with your webcam, or dive straight into virtual reality – why bother travelling at all when we can do it all on the net anyway?

James says

James: Well, telepresence, I think the best way of describing it is as a sort of posh version of teleconferencing. So you can - you’re not being somewhere else but the important bits of your appearance and mannerisms and speech and so on are somewhere else. I’ve never been quite convinced by the argument that, in the future, we don’t need to go anywhere because we can use the internet in a very elaborate form because I don’t see how you can mend someone’s boiler on the internet. So it's fine maybe for talking to people and having a very frank face-to-face discussion on two sides of the world.

People have been talking about this now for at least twenty-, twenty-five years. It started off with all that stuff about teleconferencing and in the early pre-broadband system, people would talk and go like this and then the person would do this and it was just rubbish really.

I don’t know if it's true. There’s something about human interaction. People actually meeting each other and smelling each other’s fear or whatever must be important because talking to someone down the phone whilst being able to see them at the same time is still not quite the same as being with them. So I'm not convinced.

But the most telling thing I ever saw was I got on a Boeing 747 in London, at Heathrow, and I was flying to Seattle, and in the cabin of the aeroplane with me were a load of blokes who were flying off to a conference about the future of teleconferencing

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From the Orient Express to the Bullet Train – we've seen that the train can be one of the most amazing ways to travel, but the 8:15 to Euston doesn't deliver. Is it time to stop playing with the train set, or will the future still see the train taking the strain?

James says

James: The problems with trains, I think, is that everybody tags them as the solution to local transport, so everybody does on about trams these days. But they actually work best over a long distance, a bit like flying does.

So if you want to go from say London to Edinburgh, going on the train is great because you can sleep or read your book or do some work on your laptop. Getting to the station is the issue. That’s when you want personal transport because you can go when you want, you can go from right outside your door and you supposedly park right next to the train. So trains are great long haul. They’re not so good short haul because unless you actually live in a station and work in a station, they’re not very convenient.

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The Wing In Ground-effect Craft is a curious idea – a bit like a plane that just takes off, skimming inches above the ground. It's incredibly efficient – but isn't good on very rough terrain and steers like a cow. Is it a work of genius or an act of madness?

James says

James: In the right circumstances, it actually makes a great deal of sense because when you use the ground effect, you get a bit of supplementary lift, well quite a lot if you design it properly so you don’t need as much aerodynamic lift which means you don’t create as much drag so it is more fuel efficient, or it's faster if you prefer, which is the way I think they prefer to think of it.

So as long as the terrain is flat and you can see a long way, so frozen tundra, calm lakes, maybe some deserts, it works very well but the sense of anticipation you need is massive. So you need to be able to see half a mile and maybe a mile to be sure you’re not going to hit something. One sand dune or a tree or a frozen bolder or something and you’re done for.

Now to understand how this thing works, we have to consider the little understood phenomenon of ground effect. So brace yourself with some aerodynamic theory.

When an aeroplane wing moves through the air, it creates lift. That’s what holds the aeroplane up in the sky. But when it's very, very close to the ground, like this, it also produces a cushion underneath between it and the ground and that can hold it up. And that it explains why the engines and propellers are mounted at this rather curious angle. They help to build up that cushion of air to get the thing going. It also explains why the wings are quite stubby. We don’t actually want this thing to fly. We want it to travel along in a permanent state of being about to take off – or, if you prefer, a permanent state of being about to land. Actually I do prefer that. I prefer the idea that we’re about to land. Anyway let’s see if it works.

Here we go – opening throttle.

Well it actually requires quite coarse movements of the yoke. As it gets going and becomes a bit more aerodynamically efficient, you can actually throttle back a bit which saves fuel. We’re really just on the cusp of flying which is why there’s a slight bounce. They won't let me go any faster than that otherwise it could all end in tears-ski.

The great thing is as well this will work on any flat surface. It will work on this frozen lake but if we were after the thaw and this was just over water, it would still work on the water as the original huge wing craft did.

Okay, how do I stop? Yes, just throttle back very gently.

It is actually very slightly terrifying because although it's a fantastic sensation, you do realise that there’s no way in the world you could stop it in a hurry if, I mean I don’t know what I think is going to appear out here, but if something did, and it doesn’t turn that quickly either. So you do need a big, big space. You couldn’t drive it down the shops. You’d just kill thousands of people including yourself.

The thing is this is all very, very clever. It's very fast. It's actually quite efficient and it's actually very exciting as well – but there is an issue.

So I'm not entirely convinced that it's going to work as a personal transport solution because well, you need a very big space, you need to be absolutely sure in your mind that it's flat and free of any obstructions. But if you wanted to do an amphibious assault of somewhere with three hundred troops, I suppose it would be perfect and if maybe you lived at one side of Lake Lugano in Italy and you worked in a bank on the other side, then may be you could have a personal wig craft to commute it. But around London or Manchester, I can’t really see it, to be honest. It's too hazardous.