This Company Is Promising A Flying Sports Car In Just Two Years But There Are A Ton Of Catches

For decades, science fiction fans have dreamed of shortcutting heavy traffic by taking to the air in a flying car. It seems everyone wants a Jetsons-style future, and startup companies haven’t been afraid to promise it. Samson Sky is yet another outfit promising the future and this company making big promises. Samson says it’ll not only have a flying car in production in just two years, but it will also be a sports car that’ll revolutionize mobility. Oh boy.

If you’re getting a sense of déjà vu right now, it’s because every flying-car startup seems to say their vehicles are just a couple of years away. These companies may even have working prototypes, yet production is perpetually two years off. I mean, click here, here, or here for three different companies all promising the same timeframe for some kind of life-changing vehicle. Those headlines took literally 30 seconds to find.

Those flying vehicles also never seemingly reach the market. Remember the Terrafugia Transition? Yeah, that thing took its first flight back in 2009 but it took until 2021 for the roadable aircraft to receive its airworthiness certification. You won’t be surprised to read that you still can’t buy one.

Back in March, aviation blog Simple Flying published a list of all of the flying cars you can buy right now. But here’s the wild thing: all of the vehicles on the list aren’t actually in production or aren’t flying cars. Weirdly, Simple Flying slaps the Pivotal Helix on the list and while Pivotal has reached production, it’s selling electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOLs), not flying cars. There’s a pretty big difference there that Simple Flying is somehow missing. At any rate, everyone else and their grandma seems to be developing a flying car and almost all of them want you to pony up some big money on the promise you’ll get a flying car maybe one day.

Another company doing this is Samson Sky, and things sound promising until you start digging.

Always Just Two Years Away

EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2024 is full of historic aircraft as far as the eye can see. You’ll find everything from replicas of historic Junkers aircraft to the aircraft that helped win World War II. You’ll also find everything fresh in aviation from electric aircraft and eVTOLs to companies promising to change the future.

Samson Sky is here at AirVenture and sliding into that last category. The company brought its latest prototype to the great air show and the company is writing big checks I hope it can cash.

Samson Sky is the work of Sam Bousfield and I’ll let him hold the mic:

I have been an Architect for most of my career with over 25 years of experience in that field. Near the end of that time, I had begun creating and pursuing inventions, several of which were patented. One was a trowel tool to set anchor bolts into concrete and finish around the bolt at the same time. I was also Scoutmaster for Boy Scout Troop 6 in Meadow Vista, California for ten years. I truly enjoyed working with young adults, and assisting them to increase their self-confidence and skills in the outdoors.

Between 2000 and 2003, I hired a group of Boeing engineers out of the Long Beach facility as consultants on a side project to design a propeller aircraft that could break the sound barrier in level flight. Not even NASA had been able to do that. The engineers were granted the use of Boeing’s computers after hours, and with the help from Stanford University Professor Antony Jameson’s iteration program, we designed a very sleek pusher propeller plane using proprietary body shapes that I had designed.

This aircraft design was the subject of four separate AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) scientific papers. The design caught the attention of a number of organizations including the Swedish government, which used my designs to recalibrate their wind tunnel through Mach 1.3 (hoping to gain business from Boeing). My designs also came to the attention of world renowned adventurer, Steve Fosset, who chose this aircraft design as his next project once he finished with the ground speed record he was attempting at the time. Tragically, Steve was killed during a sightseeing flight in Nevada on September 3, 2007, and our project was never completed.

Bousfield now feels the future is not in breaking records, but in revolutionizing transportation. He believes the future is in vehicles that can slice point-to-point travel time down as far as possible.

His vehicle for this future is the Switchblade. This flying car is trying to set itself apart by being both a good airplane and a good sports car. Samson Sky has been developing this since 2009 and finally flew a prototype in November 2023. The company used its findings to refine the design into the proposed future prototype below.

Speaking to Oshkosh Northwestern Bousfield said:

“The new design destroys the misconception that a flying car has to be a mediocre car or a mediocre plane, or both.”

Here’s where I start taking issue with the concept. On paper, things initially sound great. The max takeoff weight of the vehicle is said to be 1,850 pounds, which isn’t bad! It also has a 210 HP three-cylinder engine (though I’ve also seen a 200 HP engine in another brochure), an electric hybrid system, and acceleration to 60 mph in just 5.6 seconds. Alright, that’s not lighting the world on fire, but it sounds plenty sporty. The hybrid system is also neat in that it can use regeneration to slow you down during a landing.

Then you start looking deeper. First, you’ll notice how the vehicle is in a standard trike position. Samson Sky says this flying car will be a true canyon-carving sports car, but the single narrow front wheel seems to betray that notion. If you’ve driven any road vehicle with a single front wheel before you know they’re known best for heavy understeer and roll in taller vehicles. It’s part of why the major sellers of three-wheelers from BRP to Polaris choose to build reverse trikes.

To be fair to Samson Sky, I haven’t driven its trike, so maybe the company figured out how to make standard trikes drive better. But then you get to payload. The Switchblade is marketed as having either a 40-gallon fuel tank, a 30-gallon fuel tank, or 36-gallon fuel tank. Oh yeah, the specs seem to vary wildly depending on the brochure you’re looking at, and the physical brochures here at AirVenture show renders of the older prototype.

The 40-gallon version seems to be for the new twin prop prototype, which for some reason isn’t yet published on the Samson Sky website or in the brochures being handed out. Let’s just use the numbers on the website for our purposes.

Samson Sky quotes a 575-pound payload, and that’s two people, their luggage, and fuel. A gallon of gas weighs about six pounds. Take the full fuel load out of the payload and you have 359 pounds of weight to play with. That’s two 180-pound occupants and no luggage. Yep, that’s a payload worse than a Honda CR-Z and just as bad as an Alfa Romeo 4C Spider.

If you’re light enough, Samson Sky says you’ll enjoy a 190 mph or 200 mph top speed in the air, a top speed of over 125 mph on the ground, 33 mpg on the ground, and 9.5 mp9 in the sky. Technically, the huge gas tank should mean a land fuel range of 1,188 miles! Samson Sky also promises a ceiling of 13,000 feet.

You also get disc brakes, air-conditioning, control redundancies, and a crash structure. However, this will be legally be a motorcycle, so don’t expect any IIHS crash testing.

Admittedly, these claims are a little harder to believe when you look at the prototype at AirVenture, which has the overall build quality and feel of a high school shop project. But to Samson’s credit, this prototype is a real vehicle that has flown.

Speaking of projects, this roadable aircraft will be an amateur-built vehicle, requiring buyers to assemble 51 percent of their own vehicle. Included in the Switchblade’s price is a $20,000 build program that can cut build time down to a “week” or so.

Is It A Revolution?

Now we arrive at the other problem with these flying car concepts. They all promise to change the future, but I’m not sure who they’re supposed to change the future for. The Ford Model T, Volkswagen Beetle, and Vespa scooter helped the masses in their respective regions get on wheels. The Tesla Model S proved electric cars can be sexy, go a relatively far distance, and charge relatively quickly.

The Samson Switchblade starts at $170,000 (or $195,000 to fly IFR. Prices go up to $770,000 for a limited edition with luxurious materials and equipment. So, it’s not going to mobilize the masses. It also requires a pilot license and can take off only from airports. So, it’s not like you’re going to be flying the Switchblade to beat traffic into the city. Really, the Switchblade solves one problem, and it’s having a car to drive when a private pilot lands their plane somewhere. Instead of renting a car or getting an Uber, they just take three minutes to put the vehicle into road mode before driving away. Is that a revolution?

At least some people think so. The Samson Sky has over 2,600 reservations, but this doesn’t seem to be enough. The company is running a Wefunder crowdfunding campaign to raise another $300,000 to help the company build three more prototypes and complete the Production Engineering phase. However, Samson Sky also indicates that it’s going to need investment from venture capital to really reach the finish line. In other words, the product is two years out and it would appear the money isn’t totally lined up yet. Take that as you will.

I’m not convinced the Samson Switchblade is a revolution, but at least it’s something different, and I like that. I just wish all of these companies were a bit more realistic in their promises.