Flying to Timbuktu - in a car

Neil Laughton is what you’d expect from a classic British adventurer. The boxes are all ticked with a flourish: Royal Marine Commando; SAS; Everest; the Seven Peaks; North Pole; Shackleton Memorial Expedition. It would be intimidating if it weren’t for the man’s chummy, schoolboy enthusiasm for pushing himself in a variety of stupendous and far-flung challenges. His last challenge was about as far-flung an idea as it’s possible to get: flying a car from London to Timbuktu. It’s pure Phileas Fogg. Add in a precociously daredevil inventor as co-pilot and the picture is nearly complete. WideWorld spoke to Laughton on his return from the SkyCar expedition to hear how they got on…

"It was originally my idea – a dream of mine - to build a car with the capability to fly. I’m what you could call a veteran of expeditions, having been to the Antarctic, Sahara, Everest, and having a military background.

I’d met Giles, the designer of the SkyCar, a while before and knew of his genius in this kind of engineering. He’d been to Everest with Bear Grylls and had designed the parasailing kit that took them over the peak. He had experience in building things that seem impossible - he has that daredevil streak. I trusted him from the start. Giles is a genius inventor and a great engineer. Also he was going to be flying with me, so I knew he wouldn’t take too many unnecessary risks!

The SkyCar is basically a converted high performance beach buggy that has been equipped with a parasail for flying. It’s an incredible piece of kit, and handles just as well on the road too. It’s very light, thanks to the way that Giles built it so it could get in the air successfully, so it has many unnecessary things stripped from it to keep it simple. For safety, there’s a spare parachute in a compartment: if anything should go wrong with the main ‘chute, you can release the back up and float back to earth.

How to get a car airborne

When you find a flat piece of ground that is long enough to use as runway, around 200 metres or so, you remove the sail from the boot of the car and lay it out, then as you drive up to around 60kph the sail catches the air and you take off. The controls in the car change when you fly; instead of using the wheel to steer, there are extra pedals in the foot well that you can use to steer the SkyCar left and right. It’s a strange feeling, and you find yourself trying to manoeuvre using the wheel to begin with – panicking that the car isn’t responding - before remembering that it won’t work when you’re 2000 feet in the air!

We tested the SkyCar’s flying abilities on a secret beach location in Britain before leaving. That location is going to have to stay a secret, because technically we probably weren’t allowed to be flying it there at all! The aviation authorities have quite strict rules about flying in the UK, and we found ourselves quite constrained about what we could do, but we managed to bend the rules enough to try it out to our satisfaction. We originally hoped to fly across the channel to France, but as it turned out that was just impossible – it’s an incredibly busy area to travel through with air traffic above and shipping below.

The SkyCar comes into its own

Even though we’d begun the journey, the car was still being tested as we travelled through France, Spain and Africa, with refinements being made as we went. It was still very much a work in progress when we left, and along with the damage the car sustained on the journey we found we relied quite a lot on the brilliant team of mechanics we’d taken along with us.

Our first amazing experience was the border between France and Spain: flying over the Pyrenees was the most incredible feeling. Then the next was trying to cross the straits of Gibraltar to Africa. We had many problems with the weather - and also finding somewhere we could actually take off from.

One team went across on the ferry, hoping to find a suitable landing place on the other side, while we waited for the right time. We were waiting for a support crew from a British Navy vessel that was due to arrive nearby; it was going to be a risky crossing and we weren’t sure what might happen without proper support.

Crossing the Straits

If we landed in the sea, we were going to sink. No doubt about it. But we tried not to worry about that. With a support boat we’d hopefully get picked up - if we survived the landing in the sea.

Eventually the Navy arrived in position and we could make our crossing attempt. On an earlier test run on the beach in Spain I’d actually veered off course during a take-off and ended up with the car in the sea – we had to salvage it out and dry everything off, so it was quite worrying whether we’d get across. When we did take off it was incredible, seeing the water far below and shipping crossing the straits. It took around 15 minutes to get across, and we were headed for a small area where we’d organised the landing.

Crossing the borders in Africa proved to be a nightmare. Not many African border police really understood the idea that we were just driving over in a flying car: they just took a look at the car and heard that it could fly, and we shook their heads – they all thought we definitely had to be spies with this thing. What eventually happened was that Giles would take off the fan at the back of the car each time we had to cross a border, so the SkyCar just looked like a regular vehicle, and then once we got over we had to put the whole thing back together again!

Caught in the crossfire

There were a few shots fired at the support vehicles one night in Morocco. Someone had to stay out on watch all night after some locals started taking pot shots at us. They only dented a few panels, nothing too bad – we think they were just having target practice rather than trying to kill us.

It’s a little strange being up there: you feel slightly like a huge pendulum, swinging around, but basically safe. You’re attached to a parachute already, so if anything cuts out you’d hopefully glide back to earth – if you can find somewhere to land. Because there’s no attitude adjustment, just speed and left and right controls, it’s actually very simple when you’re in control and used to the feeling of it, the main thing is coping with weather and wind.

One particularly bad crash was when Giles was trying to take off in the desert – just as he got in the air he got hit by a nasty crosswind, skittered across the road for a while and then wrapped the car round a tree. He managed to survive, but the car needed quite a bit of work. It’s an amazing testament to the engineering that even though the SkyCar took this kind of battering all through the journey, we managed to make it. By the end of it we’d smashed the suspension, broken the windshield, totalled the front end – but The SkyCar is an incredible car and aircraft. It’s happiest on the most rugged terrain, beautifully simple to fly and has proved remarkably resilient on what is probably the most demanding road test any car has had to endure.

One question people ask me is: have I ever seen the emergency parachute deployed? Well, no, I haven’t. But I’m sure it would have worked. In fact I’d be happy to buy a SkyCar to use all the time. We’re trying to get the SkyCar licensed for flight in the UK right now, and the production model has been announced for anyone with around £50,000 who wants one."

For more on the SkyCar, go to www.skycarexpedition.com