Samson Sky aims high with Switchblade flying car

Samson Sky, the makers of the Switchblade flying sports car, are targeting multiple production sites in the United States and others elsewhere in the world under an ambitious growth plan.…


samson-FFimage

Samson Sky, the makers of the Switchblade flying sports car, are targeting multiple production sites in the United States and others elsewhere in the world under an ambitious growth plan.

Their high-performance vehicle completed its maiden flight in Washington State in November. 

Sam Bousfield, designer of the vehicles and founder and CEO of Samson Sky, said with “large backlog” of orders, and marketing studies that show “such a large market potential”, the company is pushing to get into production as soon as possible.

He told FINN: “We plan to do sufficient testing with the production prototypes to weed out imperfections before starting large production.

“Then as our initial production facility is perfected and starts to ramp up, we build out a second, third, and probably a fourth facility scattered throughout the US to serve the US market over a period of a few years.

“In addition, we can see that foreign markets might be best served by establishing new production facilities in suitable countries that could handle the rest of the world.

“The Switchblade was designed to be capable of right-hand or left-hand driving/flying to be useful wherever you go on the planet. A truly capable point-to-point vehicle like none other on earth.”

Samson Sky recently announced that it had begun fundraising to get into the production phase, using the crowdfunding platform Wefunder as the first step.

Bousfield explained: “The crowdfunding is ongoing and the funds are held by Wefunder until we hit minimum goals. That keeps people’s money safe and is a good thing.

“These things usually take three months on average to complete, and we made a good start despite an interruption due to the holidays, and are now re-engaging our people to take it to a done.

|These are the first of our production funding to finish production engineering (how to make thousands of these) and then set up the parts manufacturing for three production prototypes to prove out the final design and construction techniques prior to beginning production – an important step.”

Samson Sky says it has accrued more than 2,300 reservations from 57 countries for its aircraft, which has a maximum driving speed of 125+ mph (201 km/h), and an estimated maximum flight speed of 190 mph (305 km/h).

Bousfield added: “We set a pretty high bar with the idea that we wanted a high-performance vehicle in both driving and flying modes.

“There may be a lot of ways to design a flying car, but only very few will deliver performance in both modes.

“We tried many of these to even determine what are the main considerations that govern such a vehicle, and then finding the way that gave those high-performance figures but also was easy to fly has taken a bit longer.”

Image credit: Samson Sky
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