The Audacious Mr. Moller

Paul Moller’s other car, the really expensive one, is in pieces on the floor of his workshop, so today he’s cruising G Street in downtown Davis in his beige Lexus ES 300 with leather seats and a radar detector on the dash. “It’s quiet, it’s reliable, it’s very comfortable,” he says of the Lexus. “Everything you could ask for.”

Everything, he means, except the one rather extravagant feature not available on this or any other production model. The Lexus won’t fly. And while you might not consider that a reasonable expectation for a car, you are not Paul Moller.

He’s the inventor of the Skycar, a personal vertical takeoff and landing vehicle that he’s convinced will usher in the next phase of mass transportation. Moller’s vision of the future is filled with Skycars crisscrossing the sky under the automated control of supercomputers and Global Positioning System satellites; on-demand air taxis ferrying executives to downtown offices and families to the mall. No more snarled traffic on the 5 or the 405 or the 110. No more time and money lost due to bottlenecks, car crashes, or any of the other reasons those infuriating red brake lights appear on freeways in Southern California and across the globe. Moller imagines a day when he can jump in the Skycar, punch in his destination and soar above it all, and he has spent more than 40 years and $50 million to make that dream come true.

A prototypical engineer, Moller is thin and slightly unkempt. He wears thick glasses and a beard that doesn’t quite reach his sideburns. His small, round gut is especially noticeable when he’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt for racquetball, which he plays for at least an hour every day to relieve stress. His voice, a mesmerizing baritone, strings together his vivid recollections of a life spent inventing, as well as his often startling thoughts on everything from holistic medicine to psychic phenomena and UFO propulsion systems.

At the moment, though, Moller is preoccupied by more practical matters. He’s looking for a parking spot outside Cafe Deluchi, where he meets for lunch each week with Jennifer, his 23-year-old daughter from the second of his three marriages. As he drives past the restaurant, he spies an open parking spot on the opposite side of the street. It’s a good one, but he’s got to get there fast. Entering a four-way intersection, he pulls the car hard left and into a U-turn. His face is a mix of happiness and pride as he sails into the space.

It’s a small act of defiance, like the radar detector, a signal--or a warning--that Moller will bend the rules of the road to accommodate all kinds of possibilities.

*

MOLLER’S LIFELONG PROJECT, THE SKYCAR, is his roadway defiance writ large. The latest version--the M400--is red, wingless and the size of an SUV. It seats four, and looks like a cross between the Batmobile and a Cessna. According to Moller’s design specifications, it will get 20 miles to the gallon and cruise at 350 mph. With full production, Moller figures the Skycar could sell for as little as $60,000.

If all that sounds like the delusional ramblings of a psyche overstuffed with images from the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Jack Kirby comic books and science-fiction novels, so be it. But Moller doesn’t like science fiction. “I’ve always been very pragmatic,” he says. “There’s enough imagination in the real world to keep me going.”

Much of the Skycar project is, of course, theoretical. The M400 has never left the ground. Moller had originally planned its first flight--during which the Skycar will be tethered to a crane for insurance purposes--for June 1999. When development dragged on longer than Moller anticipated, he pushed the date back four months, then to the end of the year, and again to last month. The May target date passed, and still no flight. Now Moller says he’s reluctant to specify a liftoff date because “every time I give out a date I look bad.”

He is, however, “absolutely certain” that the Skycar will be fully assembled by early next month, with liftoff “immediately or two months after that.”

That optimism is typical. Moller, a former UC Davis engineering professor, has pursued his quest with the steady, rational approach of a scientist. Teetering constantly on the edge of bankruptcy, he has managed to raise capital from private investors, real-estate investments and lucrative spinoff inventions such as a high-performance motorcycle muffler and a radio-controlled unmanned surveillance vehicle.

Even Moller’s critics agree that he possesses the technological know-how to make the Skycar flight-worthy. He has enlisted a number of distinguished supporters, including a chief scientist at NASA and an engineer who once explored the Skycar as a commercial venture for Boeing Aircraft Corp. More than 450 individuals have invested about $25 million in Moller International, the privately held corporation Moller formed to produce his vehicle.

On the other hand, notes someone who has watched Moller pursue his dream across the decades, the whole idea is “nuts.”

True, Moller still faces a lifetime’s worth of “ifs”: If he can work out the kinks in his vehicle’s design before he goes broke. If the FAA certifies his vehicle. If, after liftoff, he lands lucrative government contracts or a major corporation agrees to foot the enormous start-up production costs. If the public plucks up enough courage to step into these flying cars. If technology advances to the point where computers can be trusted to control the presumed growth in air traffic. If the insurance companies don’t find that the cost of insuring Skycars blows apart all of their traditional actuarial models.

Moller, at age 63, knows time is running out. But due in part to the arrival of the new millennium, with its unfulfilled promise of Blade Runner-esque flying flivvers, public interest in the project has never been higher. So Moller remains focused. “I’m going to go in this direction even if it’s the wrong direction,” he says, “because that’s just what I’m driven to do.”

*

BORN DEC. 11, 1936, IN TRAIL, BRITISH COLUMBIA, MOLLER IS THE oldest of four children. His mother, Jean, was a third-generation Canadian who ran the household and doted on Paul, whom his sister Karen recalls as a “genius” from a very young age. Niels, Moller’s father, was a reserved, stern Danish immigrant who turned his back on a life of affluence to build a chicken farm in the wilds of Western Canada.

Moller inherited a knack for construction from his father. He built his first house on the family farm when he was 5, a one-room structure the size of a bathroom. When he was 8, he built a two-room house with a tar roof. When he was 11, he built a four-seat Ferris wheel.

“Just about anything Paul tried to do, there wasn’t much that deterred him from his objective,” says Dan McKechnie, a childhood friend. “He was tenacious.”

Many design skills came instinctively to Moller; whatever else he needed, he picked up from books and technical manuals, or he improvised. When he was 14 he built a car out of pieces from older cars. He scavenged the frame from a 1934 Ford, the engine from a Mercury, and wrapped it all in a sheet-metal body. Prying the bolts off the Ford frame proved too troublesome with just a hammer and chisel, so he acquired 12 sticks of dynamite to make the job go faster. It worked, he recalls, but “my father’s chickens laid a lot of eggs without shells” in the days that followed.

For as long as Moller can remember, he was taken with the idea of vertical flight, which would not require long runways and constant forward velocity. When he was 19, while working during a summer break for the Canadian Defence Research Board, he found an archived set of design specs for the Avrocar, a flying-saucer-like vehicle designed to use the thrust from a horizontal, center-mounted propeller to zip into the sky.

“I got very excited about that design,” recalls Moller, whose first flying machine, the XM-2, was a modified version of the Avrocar. “I had a vision, and the Avrocar just brought it into perspective.”

The Avrocar, which ultimately failed, was developed in the early 1950s by Avro Canada in a secret joint venture of the Canadian and British governments. Their goal was to create a nimble military air carrier that could shuttle troops. Avro executives also envisioned a number of nonmilitary uses for the technology, similar to Moller’s vision for his Skycar, including the Avrowagon, a 21st century family van, and the Avropelican, a rescue craft for sea operations.

When Moller graduated from trade school with a diploma in aircraft maintenance, he returned to Montreal and took a job with airplane maker Canadair. During the day he helped design anti-icing systems for the company’s planes; at night he experimented in his apartment with various ways to generate lift. Using a flying saucer model, compressors and pressure measuring devices, he produced miniature whirlwinds in his living room.

He also enrolled in graduate-level engineering classes at McGill University and excelled, despite having no formal engineering training. Moller says the course instructor, a top-level aerodynamicist, was so impressed by his intellect and extracurricular activities that he arranged to have him advance directly into a graduate program in mechanical and aeronautical engineering, skipping the undergraduate level.

In a Russian-language class at McGill, Moller met Jeanne LaTorre. A doctoral student in psychology, Jeanne was delighted with Moller, who rode unicycles and raced go-carts and showed an “intense vitality” for everything he did. He was charming and attentive, even if he neglected to walk her home at the end of their first date. They moved in together after a few months and were married that New Year’s Eve.

Moller earned his PhD in two years, and in 1963 he packed up his toys and relocated to Northern California, where he joined the engineering department at UC Davis. The go-go years of the California aerospace industry were underway, and the young engineering school was open to new ideas. With his dream of flying cars, Moller fit right in.

Moller bought the “biggest garage I could find with a house attached” and converted the garage into a workshop. He built much of the XM-2 there, using fiberglass and aluminum for the saucer-shaped shell, as well as engines cadged from military target drones and whatever spare parts he could hustle from local junkyards. Jeanne, who commuted to Berkeley to finish her studies, remembers long hours holding tools and materials for her tireless husband. “I did it for as long I could tolerate,” she says.

While juggling the twin demands of teaching and research, Moller achieved a significant milestone in 1965: the first flight of the XM-2. Three graduate students held the craft down with ropes to keep it from flipping over. The XM-2 only flew 12 inches above the ground and was almost uncontrollable, but Moller considered it a success anyway. “I expected it to fly and it flew,” he says. “It was never as good as I wanted it to be, but it flew.”

More test flights followed, but the craft never flew higher than six feet since Moller had not yet developed a mechanism to keep the craft stable while hovering. An eight-minute demonstration of the XM-2 for the press in 1967 made Moller a local celebrity in Davis and a curiosity everywhere else. Popular Science magazine wrote about his project, as did a weekly supermarket tabloid. Mail addressed simply to “Flying Saucer, Davis, California” found its way to his house on B Street.

By then Moller was alone in the house. Jeanne had found her husband’s overpowering energy too difficult to live with. She felt overshadowed and resented his outbursts when his patience was tested or his efforts blocked. They divorced in 1966.

“Near the end, I thought I would like to be his friend or his sister or his neighbor, any relationship at all because I really wanted to continue knowing him,” Jeanne says. “Anything but his wife.”

Moller and Jeanne still talk regularly. Last year, when she underwent chemotherapy for leukemia, she says his support helped her pull through. And like Moller’s second wife--with whom he had daughter Jennifer and son Jason, 25--Jeanne remains an investor in his company. “I believed in him when I married him and I believe in him now,” she says. “If any one man can pull this wonderful dream off, it’s Paul.”

*

MOLLER SAYS HIS GREATEST TRIUMPH TO DATE WAS THE 1989 TEST flights of the M200X, the last version of the Skycar before the one he’s about to debut. The M200X made nearly 200 flights, most with Moller on board, and reached heights of 50 feet.

Moller isn’t the first person to get a flying car off the ground. Since 1906, the fearless and the foolhardy have been strapping wings onto road-bound vehicles and gracing them with memorable names--”the Autoplane,” “the Planemobile” and “the Airphibian” come to mind. The U.S. government has more than 70 patents for flying cars on record. Of those, less than a dozen have actually flown, only two received full government flight certification, and none reached mass production.

Moller’s Skycar differs from most of them in that it is intended primarily for flight, and it takes off and lands vertically and doesn’t need a runway. “Moller’s got the most technically daring concept of all. He’s out there on the ragged edge of technology,” says Palmer Stiles, a historian who edited the book “Roadable Aircraft: From Wheels to Wings.”

Even on the ragged edge, Moller operates through a gradual process of technology building--what he calls “a series of evolutions which give way to a revolution.” No single, sudden moment of inspiration will take the M400 airborne; rather, it is a succession of small breakthroughs that keeps the project moving forward.

Last summer, for example, Moller struggled with a technical problem that delayed the Skycar’s debut yet again. The vehicle’s prototype nacelles--four streamlined metal housings, each containing two compact rotary engines that generate extraordinary power--were experiencing transitory stall, in which the fan blades would stop momentarily. (If one engine in the nacelle fails, the remaining one can generate sufficient thrust to keep the vehicle in control. Vane systems redirect thrust to provide vertical lift and then horizontal flight.) The problem was wreaking havoc with the computerized stabilization system, which depends on precise control of the engines’ revolutions per minute. It made the Skycar flyable but not entirely stable.

Moller spent three months working through the problem. By day, he had his engineers run the nacelle next to a patch of well-tended grass behind the building that houses Moller International. Fastened to an anchored test stand, the nacelle howled with the might of its combined 240 horsepower, ejecting a furious thrust that bent 30-foot-high trees behind it like soggy vegetables. As it roared, the engineers tested and retested. At night, Moller lay awake in bed, his worry pulses keeping his third and current wife, Rosa, awake as well.

Finally, Moller arrived at work one Monday morning and announced, “These are the last two tricks in my bag. I got nothing else.”

Moller’s team placed sandpaper on the leading edge of the blades--”to trip the boundary layer” and “energize” the air in front of the fan. He says the problem “disappeared to an acceptable level” and final assembly of the Skycar could begin.

*

OVER HIS FOUR DECADES DEVELOPING THE SKYCAR, MOLLER HAS RECRUITED a legion of supporters--not just fans, but strong believers in his technology and vision. Most vocal among them is Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia. “The tremendous information technology revolution we’re going through both changes and amplifies the markets for this class of vehicle, and makes possible the technology to enable its effective deployment,” Bushnell says.

Although not everyone shares Bushnell’s optimism, he believes the Small Aircraft Transportation System--a proposed joint program between NASA and the FAA to develop a type of freeway system in the sky--will someday bring about the digital infrastructure needed for automatic aircraft travel. He predicts that developing countries might choose to leapfrog a ground-based transportation system in favor of a Skycar-driven one.

Henry Lahore, a Boeing Aircraft Corp. engineer who currently sits on Moller International’s technical advisory board, has twice pitched the Skycar concept to his company’s commercial division but was rejected both times. Although Boeing policy prevents the company from commenting on business decisions, Lahore says, “There are quite a few people in Boeing who think this is inevitable because they’ve looked at the technology, the capabilities. But at this point, management does not.”

Despite Moller’s ingenuity and engineering expertise, the delays in the Skycar’s debut have fueled his critics. “It’s very hard for me to believe that we will ever come to the point where someone can walk into a showroom, buy a flying car and fly it away,” says Stephen Petranek, editor in chief of Discover magazine and a Moller observer for three decades. “As much as I admire his energy and his creativity, I just think this is nuts. If this vehicle works, do something with it. Get in the thing and fly from Los Angeles to Denver.”

Others cite practical considerations. It’s one thing to make the Skycar fly, but quite another to get Joe Toyota Camry to buy into it. “Just getting people to change car lines--from a Ford to a Honda, say--is like moving a battleship,” says Jim Piechocki, an automotive marketing specialist. “Moller needs to develop an understanding of the market for this thing. Get out of the engineering mode and start running focus groups.”

To get the ball rolling for the Skycar market, Piechocki suggests setting up a racing league to demonstrate the vehicle’s performance and reliability. “I’d also give one to a celebrity. Get fun people to fly around in it.”

Moller isn’t fazed by skeptics, but in more reflective moments he admits that his project has turned out to be more complex than he originally anticipated. He has accepted the possibility that he may not live long enough to fully realize his vision, although he monitors his health so carefully that he has samples of his hair sent to a Chicago lab every six months to be analyzed for mineral deficiencies.

“In my mind, I’m 20 years behind where I expected to be with the Skycar. I’d better get those 20 years back somehow if I want to be around when it’s finished,” he says, adding, “I suppose if I do contribute anything, it would be to wake people up to the fact that this is possible. Even if my vehicle doesn’t turn out to be a major player, I think I will have shown that there is something beyond what we have now. My technology is real, the possibilities of it are real.”

*

MOLLER LIVES ON a 90-acre ranch in Dixon, Calif., just west of Davis, with Rosa and her mother. Almond trees line one half of the property and he plans to install an organic farm on the other. The house, which he designed, is modern with wood paneling that lends a rustic touch.

He cherishes the serenity of country life, and says part of his vision involves giving the citizens of the future the opportunity to live as he does. “If the Skycar becomes a reality, then people won’t have to live in the cities. They can live in rural communities, and if they have to go to the city, they can fly there.”

Moller draws inspiration from those who had to work relentlessly to bring their vision to the world--Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, the Wright brothers. But the most important influence on his life, he says, is Edgar Cayce, an early 20th century clairvoyant who reportedly made 14,000 psychic readings. “The source of a lot of my personal knowledge comes from studying Cayce,” Moller says.

His bookshelves are filled with tomes about UFO abductions, alien technology and government cover-ups. “There’s a lot of information out there from very credible people,” he says.

By studying accounts of alien encounters, Moller says he’s figured out that the UFO propulsion system is “an electromagnetic system that requires controlled fusion and superconductors to make it all work.” He also notes that the system is “not much beyond our current technology, but it’s not suitable for personal transportation because it costs so much and requires machines the size of football fields.”

He pauses, suddenly self-conscious. “This is a subject that I have to be careful about if I’m going to be taken seriously about the work I’m doing. It could detract from the fact that I’m dealing with very fundamental technologies that work in this world . . . I would like to someday publish a book about these topics, go public about my beliefs and what I’ve discovered about my previous lives, but now is not the time. My main priority is to maintain the credibility of the Skycar project.”

Moller regrets that he has had to spend so much of his life raising money for the Skycar. He would much rather have spent that time in his workshop, crafting the vehicle’s shell, boosting its engine. Of course, it’s tough to secure funding for any research and development business, let alone one with such a high crackpot quotient. “I’ve never had the luxury of getting an investment when I didn’t need it pretty desperately,” he says.

One afternoon last fall, Moller met with a consultant from a second-tier investment banking firm to discuss possible financing. Moller has soured on such meetings because they rarely lead anywhere. Usually it’s just some young guy, like the consultant that day, whose engineering expertise consists of a subscription to Popular Mechanics and a flying-car fantasy.

“I saw the Skycar on the news last week,” began the boy banker, who asked that he not be identified by name or organization. “I grew up on ‘The Jetsons’ and I must say I’m really enthralled by the idea. How can we help?”

Moller stared for a moment, his hands forming a steeple under his chin. “What size are you?” he asked.

“Of sufficient size but small enough to take care of you.”

“We need $18 million,” Moller said.

The boy banker said he was skeptical about the Skycar’s viability, but suggested that a company based on the engine itself could probably raise that much capital in a public stock offering. Moller tried to refocus on the Skycar. He outlined its uses, quoted Dennis Bushnell and emphasized the importance of the upcoming debut.

The boy banker, alternating between bouts of seriousness and giddy enthusiasm, asked some questions (“When will it fly?” “What about safety?” “Do they work like Harriers?”). Finally, Moller said, “I’ll take the money any way we can get it. But I’d prefer our shares went out to those who believe in the project.”

The boy banker nodded.

After the meeting, Moller’s gut told him the young banker “doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell” of rallying financial support for the project, and he was right. No offer was forthcoming.

So Moller carries on, selling the dream. He’s even taken a few stabs at attracting angel investors. He once sent a letter to Ross Perot but got no response. Moller says he’d surely send Bill Gates a query if only he had his e-mail address. He thinks technology billionaires might be more willing than most to fund a futuristic project such as the Skycar. In his dreams, a big company such as General Motors or Boeing swoops in and takes over the project.

*

AT AN AGE WHEN MOST people are ready to retire, Moller has no savings or pension to draw on and says, “I’ve mortgaged most of the things I have of substance” to help finance the Skycar.

“We have a tacit agreement that things have to start going somewhere--a major breakthrough--within the next year,” says Moller’s wife Rosa, an economist with the California Research Bureau. “We need to save for our old age.”

Wifely admonishments aside, Moller’s attention is fixed more on the world’s future than on his own. He figures he can keep the Skycar project going with the extra time that regular exercise and a healthy diet have bought him. He would chafe at a life without activity and building.

“Retire? I don’t think anybody who loves life ever really retires,” he says, lowering his voice to a whisper so Rosa can’t hear.