The appropriately named missionary, Steve Saint, has recently built the first ever FAA certified flying car. Saint is the head of I-Tec, or the Indigenous People’s Technology and Education Center and works among the Waodani tribe who live right at the edge of the Amazon in Ecuador. In this work, Saint has found that transportation problems are one of the biggest obstacles the tribe has to overcome. His solution? Build a flying car. In an interview with Kate Bolduan and Eric Marrapodi from CNN.com, Saint explains exactly how and why he went about this project.
Bolduan and Marrapodi describe Saint as “one part Christian missionary, one part pilot, one part inventor.” Saint’s father, also a missionary pilot, was speared to death by the tribe he now lives among.
"I was just a little boy when my dad was killed, but I knew that my dad really cared enough about those people that he was willing to risk his life so that they wouldn't be killed by the oil company and the government," Saint said.
Saint’s aunt eventually broke through to the tribe and was invited to live among them, while Saint himself went back to school in the United States, forged a career and later married. When his aunt died, the tribe requested that Saint and his family return to them, which he did. One of the tribe’s requests was that Saint teach them to fend for themselves rather than having to depend on outside aid to survive. Out of this grew the small non-profit company that is now called I-Tec.
"What we're doing here at I-Tec is we're reinventing the technology so it fits the people so that they don't have to become like us," Saint said. "And it's taken a while. I retired from business 16 years ago, and people don't pay you to do this, and my wife Ginny and I just decided, 'hey let's do this.'"
The flying car is just one part of Saint’s larger work, although it has been very time consuming.
"We've been working on this particular project for six years," Saint said. "But it's just one, the bigger thing that we do is developing health care technology and tools and training systems so that we can train people that live out in the jungle areas, that don't have any formal education, and don't have access to doctors or nurses or midwives, or optometrists, or dentists, teaching them how to take care of these needs for their own people. That's really what we're doing."
Other I-Tec inventions include portable dentistry equipment that can be carried on your back through the jungle, and a specially designed hand-bike to assist the handicapped conquer difficult terrain in areas where a wheelchair won't work. But the most impressive innovation of all is the flying car, named the Maverick.
The Maverick had two main specifications in addition to being able to fly: It had to be rugged enough to drive in the jungle and cheap enough that non-profits could afford one.
The Maverick switches from drive-mode to fly-mode through deploying a mast and parachute. The chute is tucked away on the roof for the car and the mast is underneath the chassis when the car is in drive mode. The mast locks into place, the parachute is attached, and it is raised to over 25 feet. All the driver has to do then is switch the motor from drive to fly, pull back 100 yards, and take off.
Although it is rugged enough to survive jungle conditions, it is also light being only half the weight of a Smart Car. Logan Ward from Popular Mechanics was also impressed with the car’s firepower.
"The Maverick is not only a practical flying car but it's also a beefy car," he says. "They put a Subaru engine in this thing with 250 horsepower. It goes 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds. We were really impressed they gave it that sort of on-road performance."
Popular Mechanics are so impressed with the car that they granted it one of their coveted 'Breakthrough Awards'.
"This thing is poised to hit the market. They have plans to sell it, to manufacture it. They have a price tag. This is becoming a reality where so many flying cars have just been pie in the sky toys for billionaires," Ward told CNN.
I-Tec hopes the Maverick will go into production soon now that they have secured FAA certification for flight and road certification as a kit vehicle. Saint would like to reduce the costs of building the vehicles through using the commercial market.
"The commercial market will get the quantities up to get the cost down. Plus we're a non-profit company so we don't live to make a profit, but if the commercial market is successful we'll use that for more research and development and to make these available to people in frontier markets - people who don't have the resources to buy it at a commercial rate," he said.
Saint believes there are many different commercial applications for the Maverick.
"You can take it on really rugged terrain. So with this one, you can fly over, find somebody that needs to be rescued, and you can land and drive to them," he said.
"Border patrol, pipeline monitoring, out on the gulf, BP with the big oil slick. You could take off from the back of the fishing trawler. Get the fishing trawler going 20 miles an hour, and you could take off in about 20 feet, and then you could go out, what you can't see from the surface you can see from 1000 or 2000 feet. You see a huge expanse. Ranching and extreme sports - there's just all kinds of uses. I'm sure we'll be surprised by the uses people put this to."