The flying Ford Pinto
October 27, 2006 9:27 PM   Subscribe

Henry Smolinski and Hal Blake had a great idea: bolt the wings and engine of a Cessna to the body of 1971 Ford Pinto. Fly the Pinto to an airport near your destination, unlatch it from the wings, and drive it where you want to go. No need for rental cars...

It worked. Until the day it failed. Sometime late in 1973, Smolinski and Blake climbed aboard the "Mitzar" and rolled down the runway. During takeoff, the peculiar marriage of wheels and wings divorced, and the Advanced Vehicle Engineers found themselves sailing through the California sky in a very un-advanced vehicle, a wingless Pinto.
Pics here: 1, 2, 3
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese (36 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Awe. Some.
posted by wobh at 9:41 PM on October 27, 2006


Great ideas and poor (or maybe I should say, thrifty?) execution are generally a bad combination. Sheet metal screws to hold the wings on? Sorry but that's just stupid.
posted by fenriq at 9:43 PM on October 27, 2006


Fucking awesome.
posted by ibmcginty at 9:43 PM on October 27, 2006


When I was in college, a fellow student told me the Pinto was a "rolling hibachi".
posted by Tube at 9:51 PM on October 27, 2006


After The Son Set

"Yeah, but it’s a dry heat," Icarus quipped, even as the wings ripped from his sleek, young back, plunging him headfirst into the sea about a mile outside of Crete. We dutifully collected and catalogued the debris. Listed whiteboard bullet points at the Post Mortem Debrief:

Lessons Learned
• All test pilots get parachutes
• You can't tell kids anything
• Paraffin makes a piss-poor weld at 30,000 feet
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:53 PM on October 27, 2006 [4 favorites]


"A suddenly wingless automobile"

I saw that too, but didn't click. Thanks for posting it.
posted by lee at 9:54 PM on October 27, 2006


Great post. As ways to shuffle off this mortal coil go, it's a pretty awesome (if stupid) one. I also love the use of the phrase "sailing through the air". "Plummeting like a brick" - or indeed a Ford Pinto - is what I would have picked, but still...
posted by greycap at 9:59 PM on October 27, 2006


Wow.

Just wow.
posted by bumpkin at 10:52 PM on October 27, 2006


"The world is still waiting for production of a commercial roadable aircraft."

What is it, 2000 and effing SIX and we STILL do not have a commercially available roadable aircraft?
posted by _sirmissalot_ at 11:07 PM on October 27, 2006


When I was a kid, about this time, I had one of those SSP cars (YouTube link to commercial for the "Smash-Up Derby" version) with the massive wheel in the middle; you inserted a geartoothed strip and pulled it out hard, like a ripcord, and the wheel would spin hard. Put it on the ground and it would take off, fast.

This one was in the form of a Pinto, and the packaging material included a flimsy plastic mount that unfolded like a pair of wings. This piece was meant to be discarded, but I remember playing with the things and imagining this car could be mounted to a pair of wings and flown, and dismounted and driven... It would have surprised me a lot to learn that someone was building precisely this at more or less the same time.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:16 PM on October 27, 2006



"The world is still waiting for production of a commercial roadable aircraft."

"What is it, 2000 and effing SIX and we STILL do not have a commercially available roadable aircraft?"


What about the skycar?
posted by YoBananaBoy at 11:18 PM on October 27, 2006


Didn't that thing show up in one of the James Bond films? ("The Man with the Golden Gun"?)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:31 PM on October 27, 2006


That was an AMC Matador. The flying one was a miniature.

All the cars in that film were AMCs (formerly Rambler), which by that time was almost a joke brand that survived mostly through government fleet sales before briefly becoming Eagle and eventually being purchased by Chrysler who really only wanted their Jeep division.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:38 PM on October 27, 2006


I don't know about the James Bond thing. But other things from the same creators (Moller and Freedom Motors), have shown up on Hoth.
posted by YoBananaBoy at 11:40 PM on October 27, 2006


Didn't they know by 1973 that Pintos were lemons?

My family certainly did by 1975, but then again, we were poor and didn't really want to fly the thing anyway so maybe we can be excused.

Maybe they deserve a retroactive Darwin Award. Kinda cool though it may be.
posted by a_green_man at 11:46 PM on October 27, 2006


I WANT MY FLYING CA--

Uh, actually, you can keep it.
posted by sourwookie at 11:58 PM on October 27, 2006


k. my old man smoked alot of dope in the seventies and made art.... thanks for sharing what some others fathers were up to. ALOT OF DOPE.
posted by specialk420 at 11:59 PM on October 27, 2006


Genius, stupidity, meet your friend here Mr. Thin Line.
posted by bardic at 12:12 AM on October 28, 2006


a wingless Pinto

Well, now, that's gotta suck.
posted by dirigibleman at 12:53 AM on October 28, 2006


The Mitzar, which takes its name from the next-to-the-last star in the Big Dipper and means, "horse,"

"Mitzar" is the name of the car, but the next-to-last star in the Big Dipper is "Mizar": the etymology is Arabic, meaning "girdle", not "horse". And why the "t" in there?

/pedant
posted by exlotuseater at 1:27 AM on October 28, 2006


My guess is it was Mitzar instead of Mizar because it sounded nice and didn't sound so much like 'miser'. There are a lot better star names, though, so I dunno why they didn't pick one of them. Alnitak? Bellatrix? Albireo? Capella? Antares? Arcturus? Deneb? Mintaka? Meissa? I dunno.

Hell, even Alcor is better.
posted by Mitrovarr at 2:38 AM on October 28, 2006


"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp.
Or what's a heaven for?"

Andrea del Sarto
Robert Browning
posted by rdone at 2:41 AM on October 28, 2006


When I was in elementary school in the 70's I had a book on custom cars that had the flying Pinto in it. I always thought it was a cool idea, but little did I know that by the time I got the book that the thing had killed both of its inventors.
posted by cropshy at 3:57 AM on October 28, 2006


> Sheet metal screws to hold the wings on?

The FAA approved that thing? Even as a homebuilt/experimental?
posted by jfuller at 4:40 AM on October 28, 2006


Using inferior fasteners? Flying car doesn't.
posted by loquacious at 5:24 AM on October 28, 2006 [1 favorite]


"Mitzar" is the name of the car, but the next-to-last star in the Big Dipper is "Mizar": the etymology is Arabic, meaning "girdle", not "horse". And why the "t" in there?

/pedant


pendant on...

The article in the FPP uses "Mizar." Many semitic words transliterate directly into the latin alphabet using a "z" but are pronounced with a "tz" sound. The city of "Hazor" from the Bible is pronounced "Hatz-or," and Israelis who come to the US with the surname "Schwarz" occasionally end up adding a "t" to their last name to make the canonical pronunciation clear.

/pedant
posted by deanc at 5:31 AM on October 28, 2006


Nerd fight! Wooooo!!!
posted by loquacious at 6:01 AM on October 28, 2006


> Many semitic words

such as "pizza"
posted by jfuller at 6:47 AM on October 28, 2006


The Pinto was choosen probably because it was light, cheap and readily available in America. All thing important if your planning on distributing a flying kit car.

Besides in 71 it hadn't yet got it's reputation.
posted by Mitheral at 7:00 AM on October 28, 2006


> Many semitic words

such as "pizza"
posted by jfuller


Pizza, you will notice, has a double-z in the middle. The words referred to upthread--Hazor, Schwarz, Mizar--all have a single z, thus making the writer's comment about the semitic origin still a valid point, and yours...not.
posted by beelzbubba at 8:23 AM on October 28, 2006


"A suddenly wingless automobile"

I saw that too, but didn't click. Thanks for posting it.
posted by lee at 12:54 AM EST on October 28


Lee is referring to this very interesting page where I came across the first article. Lee, how could you not click that?!
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 8:42 AM on October 28, 2006


Here's the Taylor Aerocar, another attempt at the car/plane hybrid. It's on display in Oshkosh, WI, and is excellent to see. The footage of it cruising around on streets with the wings folded behind is also great.
posted by COBRA! at 9:15 AM on October 28, 2006


I'm going to hell for this but I can't be the only reader who pictured Henry Gibson's demise in The Blues Brothers.

There are a lot better star names

Ladies and gentlemen, we present the 1973 Zubenelgenubi! (Damn Cessna already registered Zubeneschamali.)

Mizar is the "horse" in the "horse and rider" visual double; that's gotta be the source of the error. But of course "Mizar" doesn't mean horse any more than "Rudolph" means reindeer. It's the kind of mistake a dumb stoned hippie would make (which makes sense in this context.)

"Ascella" (Zeta Sgr) means armpit. That's what I'm naming my plane.
posted by Opposite George at 9:32 AM on October 28, 2006


deanc: I appreciate the linguistic clarification of the spelling. I did see the "mizar" in the first link, but the other three use "mitzar", and I was trying to figure out what was going on.

Alioth, Kitalpha, Kurhah, and Markab all have Arabic roots that relate to horses in some way... I guess they just don't have that je ne sais quois that "Mitzar" does.
posted by exlotuseater at 9:45 AM on October 28, 2006


quoi.

that damn "s" is sneaky.
posted by exlotuseater at 9:46 AM on October 28, 2006


I can't be the only reader who pictured Henry Gibson's demise in The Blues Brothers

Indeed you are not.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great honour to present to you a wonderous dramatization of The Wingless Pinto.

Youtube, at exactly 7:00 in, but the whole sequence is worth it. First time time I saw many years ago this I laughed so hard I ached.
posted by CynicalKnight at 12:34 PM on October 28, 2006


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