By TIM TRAINOR

Redmond Spokesman

Sam Bousfield has spent hundreds of hours in a simulator, driving and flying his invention. He’s driven down virtual highways, flown over virtual mountains and landed on a virtual football field.

Later this month, the virtual will become reality.

“At some point you just have to get in the air and see how this thing flies,” he said. “That’s where we’re at right now.”

The Samson Switchblade, what Bousfield hopes is the world’s first commercially viable flying car, is set to take to the sky for the first time. Whether that happens in Central Oregon or not remains to be seen, as test flights often happen closer to sea level. A professional test pilot will have first-flight honors, though the Redmond inventor hopes to take the controls as soon as safely possible.

Liftoff, should it occur safely, will mark a momentous change for his company.

“The moment will be … hard to describe,” said Bousfield. “I don’t even know what it’ll feel like.”

Samson Sky crews have spent years working to design and manufacture a prototype, tinkering with it at every step of the process and rethinking everything from what kind of engine to use to the location of the smallest bolt.

But once the plane goes up and they clear the last few bars from the Federal Aviation Administration, all that tinkering must end.

“We have to put our game faces on now,” said Bousfield. “This is a real aircraft now. We have to treat it differently.”

What is this machine?

Bousfield can picture it.

A customer purchases their $170,000 Samson Switchblade and spends a little more than a week working with Samson Sky employees to build it. Once they get it home, the customer parks it in their garage, where it fits neatly alongside their everyday car.

The driver can then hop behind the wheel, throw their bags in the fronk (front trunk) and drive the three-wheeled vehicle on city streets and interstate highways to the nearest airport. On their way, they can stop at a gas station for a cup of coffee and top off the tank with premium unleaded. Once they arrive at the airport, the customer presses a button, releasing wings tucked below the passenger compartment. They hit the gas, the propeller fires up behind them, and the Switchblade tears down the tarmac at speeds well past 100 mph. It then takes flight, heading off in the direction of a lunch meeting or vacation spot.

A recent customer survey indicated strong demand from recreational pilots, though Bousfield thinks business travelers will flock to it once they see how much shorter travel time can be in the Switchblade. There are more than 5,000 public-use airports in the country, he noted, which opens up a wide range of travel options.

“We wanted to make something that people will buy, something they will want to use .. and is useful,” he said.

The Switchblade will need an 1,100-foot runway to take off and, thanks to its automotive-style brakes, just 700 feet to land and stop.

Many companies have built vehicles that both fly and drive, but Bousfield said none have been practical or able to be mass-produced and mass-marketed. Many required multiple people and hours to attach or remove the wings, which made everyday use impractical.

The engineering trick here is those wings, which can fold out from the passenger compartment with the click of the button. The wings operate on a hinge, sort of like a switchblade knife, hence the name.

And although the Switchblade is driven like a car, the three-wheeled vehicle is technically a motorcycle, allowing the company to bypass some of the safety features required of cars, such as airbags.

Central Oregon connection

Bousfield began experimenting in aviation design more than 20 years ago and spent years working with Boeing engineers before heading out on his own.

He founded Samson Sky and put down roots in rural Northern California. But the engineering team quickly learned that carbon fiber would be the only way the invention could both fly and pencil out economically. Bousfield decided the company needed to be relocated near a hub of high-quality carbon manufacturing.

“There’s really only four or five places across the country that specialize in that and Redmond is one of those,” said Bousfield.

Composite Approach in Redmond has been their main supplier, though Samson Sky has relied on numerous other local aerospace manufacturers. They also utilize the variety of small airports in the area.

Most of the building and testing has been done at the Prineville Airport, where Samson Sky operates out of three buildings. The runway there, however, is a touch too short for a first flight. They trucked the vehicle over to the airport in Madras for acceleration testing, where Bousfield said the machine clocked in at well over 100 mph — more than 10 mph faster than needed to take flight.

There may be massive economic opportunities for the region, should the Switchblade continue to move forward. If it does, the company will make prototypes and then likely expand to smaller, regional manufacturing places where customers can work with employees to build their own Switchblade.

The “kit aircraft” model is common for many types of new planes, though Bousfield said he is energized by FAA-approval that allows the company and customer to build with a semi-automated process. That process trims build time down from a few months to just a week.

The first major factory would be a 130,000-square-foot “multi-million dollar investment” with at least 200 employees and likely closer to 300. He said they would start out buying parts from suppliers, but would likely bring that in-house to keep prices down and ramp up production schedules.

Making it

Bousfield said that while “flying cars” are a staple of science fiction, there have been many naysayers who think combining the two modes of travel just won’t work.

“One of the biggest hurdles we run across is the misconception that a flying car has to be a car that is mediocre, or a plane that is mediocre, or a combination of both,” he said. “From the get-go, we decided that it has to be high performance in both modes, or it won’t (work).”

Take, for instance, the air conditioning. It’s easy for an aircraft to stay cool, but not so much for a car driving around in Central Oregon in the summer. So they are using an automotive-style AC unit that can keep the vehicle cool while on the ground.

“We’re packing it around when we fly,” he said. “We don’t need it.”

But that’s been their style from the beginning, to design for the worst-case condition so the Switchblade is comfortable both on the ground and in the air.

The quality of that comfort — and perhaps the viability of the Switchblade — remains to be seen. They’ve tested the machine over and over again in computer models, in wind tunnels and in the real world. It will fly. But there’s still a lot to learn when it does.

“You can’t tell in a wind tunnel how fast you can go, you can’t tell how high you can go,” said Bousfield. “You can’t tell the quality of the flight … how it feels to the pilot. To do that, you’ve got to go up.”

— Previous CO Media Group reporting contributed to this story.

For a video of the Switchblade preparing for takeoff at the Madras Airport, visit redmondspokesman.com.