When I first featured Paul Moller in my column it was back in 1997. I spoke to him in California and invited him to come to Kelowna to be a speaker in one of our many events whenever he was home in Fruitvale for a visit. I had just read about Paul and his team in Davis, CA working on their Skycar and I wanted to find out more about him.

Paul was born in Fruitvale. His many inventions when he was a young man included a Ferris wheel and a sports car. The Ferris wheel was used at the annual fair and he just drove the car around the town. Paul left Fruitvale to go off to school to study aircraft maintenance and engineering. He accepted a job at the world famous Canadair Aircraft in Montreal. He went back to school at nights at McGill University. Dr. Moller holds a Masters in Engineering and Ph.D. from McGill University. He was looking at a post with UBC to teach when the University of California at Davis offered him him a position closer to what he was after and he created the Aeronautical Engineering curriculum. But really, it was the flying car that was his dream.

Moller International in Davis has seventeen staff working full-time on many of his inventions. He has created a number of items that have been sold to other companies to continue to finance his flying car project. Their preferred terminology for this project is “roadable aircraft” because it is a flying machine you can drive to the airport, then with the push of a couple of buttons have the wings and motors in place to fly off. I spoke to his daughter the last time. She told me that her dad has been pursuing his version of the flying car since 1970.

USA Today in their research said that a pilot living north of Toronto found information on the attempts at a flying car and they were on the drawing board shortly after the Wright brothers. The first patent was issued in 1918. There are five or six companies still trying.

The Fruitvale inventor has worked on many projects including his current one, a saucer-like, ground-effect vehicle. Actually, it hovers at less than ten feet and travels for an hour at speeds up to 75 miles per hour. It is not a true plan and would not require a pilot’s license.

The company also invented a small helicopter-like vehicle that a photographer can use for shooting pictures from a controlled site by the ground crew. It gives the photographer angles he could never achieve any other way other than from a large helicopter which was impractical. Surveyors and engineers could also use it. For years we had one of them in the area that was used by a photographer. The engine technology developed for the Skycar has also been adapted as a UAV platform called the aerobot. The rotapower engine itself has been spun off to a separate Moller company, Freedom Motors.

Then came the SuperTrapp muffler from the garage of inventor Paul Moller. In the late sixties he was immersed in experimental trials of the XM-3, his early attempt at a flying automobile. In desperate needs of funds, Moller began looking for an intermediate, far easier target for his newly developed tunable disc technology. Eventually Moller turned to a passion of his – motorcycles – and the SuperTrapp muffler was born, soon becoming one of the most popular aftermarket accessories ever made for motorcycles.

My last conversation with them in Davis was about offering the first Skycars for sale. The Skycar is designed to take off and land vertically, in small spaces, like a Harrier Jet. It can reach a speed of 400mph and will cruise at 350mph with a range of 900 miles. Diesel, gasoline, alcohol, kerosene and propane can be used to fuel the Skycar. The price at the moment, about $900,000 and you can place an order.

While investing millions in this flying car project Moller has also made millions with a number of his other inventions.