The date is sometime around 2012 and you’re doing a bit of high-intensity lounging somewhere deep in the keys. Warm and wonderfully enjoying the majestic vision of a giant orange ball of a sun slowly descending into the bottomless depths of the Atlantic with a gorgeous 93 percent-naked significant someone of your preferred gender second-skinning against your side.

And this dude comes stumbling over. Not from the left side of the beach, not from the right side of the beach, but from right in front of you — seriously blocking your view of the sunset. He looks kinda like an affluent beachcomber. He’s barefoot and shaggy haired, but his Hawaiian shirt, straw hat, and draw-string beach pants are neither ripped nor worn. Plus he’s clean shaven and pleasantly devoid of bottle brushes of wayward ear and nose hairs.

He smiles, leans toward you and says, quite distinctly, “How’d you like to check up on Fidel for a few hours? Gimme $350 and I’ll take you and your friend over for a visit and some cigars and get you back here in time for the last 30 minutes of Happy Hour at Crabby Dick’s.” He straightens up, broadens his smile, and waits for a response.

You make a quick scan for guys in white coats, but there don’t seem to any. Finally, you say something on the order of “Ah, but I think it’s still illegal to visit Cuba from the states and even if it was legal, there isn’t any room to stuff a thing next to our privates in these minimalist bathing suits so we left our passports back home in Toledo. Even if we did have our passports, we don’t happen to have visas from the Cuban government.”

The intruder’s smile stretches even bigger. “Not to worry,” he says, “we’ll just hop over in my rig, set down in the Bay of Pigs, walk around a bit and come back. Nobody official will ever know we were there or, for that matter, know we left here.”

Welcome to the latest evolution of the air taxi industry, the dawn of the gypsy air cab era. A new age empowered by advanced technology so “disruptive” that it’s difficult to even comprehend it without giggling. A technology so “out there” that it’s almost guaranteed to eventually change the definition of a word that’s been in common usage since at least the days of Queen Victoria.

The word CAB, which future generations may know only as an acronym for Car/Airplane/Boat.

For the dubious blessing this technology will confer upon a somewhat less-than-widely enthusiastically waiting world, we should thank an inventor named Moulton B. Taylor, who built the first — and apparently to date only — FAA-certified flying car (or drivable airplane, if you prefer) back in the mid-’50s. (Note for trivia buffs, Taylor’s Aerocar turned up in some James Bond movie or other a few decades later.)

The second acknowledgment should go to the FAA, which in 2004 created the Sport Pilot license to enable people to take up flying without going through all the tedious learning processes previously required to become a pilot. (Think of it as a rather edgy equivalent to the FAA’s decision to issue Ham radio licenses to folks who just can’t master sending and receiving Morse code.)

Anyway, the FAA decision to create a category of semi-pro pilots seems, at least in theory, to offer the promise of a commercial market for what might otherwise have been strictly experimental aircraft. Several entrepreneurs, therefore, picking up where Moulton Taylor left off, have established companies to build multi-tasking vehicles for the masses.

(In the interests of full disclosure, the triple-play CAR (Car/Airplane/Boat) referenced above is not, at least publically, on anyone’s current production schedule. But it does seem an inevitable refinement of vehicles currently undergoing prototype testing. )

Icon Aircraft’s folding wing Light Sport Aircraft, for example, is a combination trailer, land plane and seaplane. Putting aside silly issues like legalities for the moment, you could hook it up to your car, trailer it to a strip of highway or boat ramp, unhook the trailer hitch, fold out the wings, take off and fly pretty much wherever you wanted as long as you kept under the radar.

In other words, the prototype LSA could — technically speaking — be towed to Florida behind a standard sedan (since it has wheels, it requires no trailer) right now, put into the water in the Keys, taxi to the shore of our mythical beach, pick you up, and land you in the Bay of Pigs in about 40 minutes. The only part of our scenario it can’t perform is taking you, your pilot and a companion because the current prototype only holds two people. (But you can always become your own pilot — Icon says you can learn to fly the LSA in a mere two weeks.)

The Terrafugia Transition is another twin-mode vehicle that could someday spark development of a true “CAR.” Called a “roadable aircraft” by its developers, the Transition is a front-wheel drive automobile that can also fly at over 110 miles per hour (ground speed in car mode has not yet been established, apparently.)

Perhaps the neatest thing about the Transition is that stowing its folding wings for road use and deploying them for flight is controlled from inside the cabin by an automatic electromechanical system.

“This unique functionality,” Terrafugia says, “addresses head-on the issues faced by today’s private and sport pilots.”

Perhaps so, but it does seem to us that deploying the wings and getting off the ground fast enough to avoid a “head-on” with an oncoming semi would require something more like a catapult-launched F14 than an LSA with a 100 horsepower Rotax engine.

Be that as it may, you’re probably sitting in front of your computer thinking that the original premise of this post is pretty stupid. That Sport Pilot license holders can’t operate air taxi services with LSA equipment. That requires things like Part 135 certifications and commercial pilots licenses.

The truth is we agree with you. The idea is pretty silly. Outrageously stupid, even. Air taxi operators have to have all kinds of expensive, hard-to-obtain licenses. Just like hack drivers in every major city from New York west to the Pacific do.

Or did … until all those gypsy cabs started picking up passengers everywhere from Old Broadway to New Market Street.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.