Inventors have long dreamed of creating a flying car. Here’s one notable experiment from 1928 that didn’t quite work out.
The Pitts Sky Car, and the Pitts United Helicopter Corporation, were the unique vision of one John W. Pitts of Detroit, Michigan. In 1924, Pitts filed a patent application for a parasol-type lifting device that both rotated and reciprocated, and in 1926 he was awarded U.S. Patent 1602778. By 1928, Pitts and his partner W.P. Kindree had developed a prototype flying car, and while it didn’t work—it was a rollicking failure, in fact—it did become famous, sort of. It’s one of the stars in all those old films about wacky inventions and crazy flying machines.
The Pitts Sky Car is usually shown for only a few seconds in most of these reels, but the Moving Image Research Collections at the University of South Carolina has almost seven minutes of the contraption in action. In the first two minutes we view the original Hearst Metrotone newsreel, followed by more than four minutes of the movie crew’s outtakes. It’s quite a show: The reciprocating rotor doesn’t produce lift so much as force the machine to bounce violently up and down while rotating clockwise due to the torque reaction. We were impressed that, despite the severe beating he took, the pilot (John Pitts, we presume) doesn’t seem rattled at all.
Two Pitts Sky Cars were actually built, the first powered by an inline six-cylinder L-head engine of unspecified make but quoted as 65 hp. A second, sturdier prototype with a 90 hp Curtiss OX-5 aircraft engine was then constructed, but it didn’t fare any better, reportedly. The first machine is the one we see here. Now watch this.
He should have made a battery powered version.
At least he had his helmet on. Safety First
It’s amazing to me that 25 years after the Wright brothers successfully flew, people were still coming up with contraptions like this that had no provision at all for a way to control it in flight in the unlikely event that it would actually leave the ground. Just goes to show how clever Wilbur and Orville really were.
In theory, it should have produced a series of downward thrusts, creating upward pulses, lifting the machine off the ground, ever higher.
In theory.
Note there are no shock absorbers on the wheels. Poor pilot had to absorb all of the vertical stresses.
He’d been better off with a normal propeller that stayed in one position instead of jumping up and down. But when it did get off the ground, it would have cartwheeled right back down with out a stabilizer to keep the body from spinning.