The roadable aircraft is nothing new. It’s essentially an airplane with folding wings and four wheels, allowing it to be driven like a car. It’s so old, in fact, that working examples have been in existence since 1949 in the form of the eponymous Aerocar. Which begs the question: why haven’t we tried to militarize these things? After all, we’ve successfully militarized the motorcycle, the automobile and the airplane.
As anything is possible when you have a defense budget that rivals the GDP of East Timor, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is providing Terrafugia, builders of the world’s only (in more than one sense of the word) working roadable aircraft with US$65 million of funding to build a four-seat roadable aircraft known as the Transformer / TX.