To Sinclair Research. On the day the new Typhoon is announced, the project to find the next generation of fighter aircraft is awarded to Sir Clive 'Blue Sky' Sinclair.

I fear the future of transport is horse-drawn...

Half the drivers on the road have enough difficulty coping with what is in font of them and behind them.

Now we're going to give them the added burden of having to worry about what is above and below them?

Maybe it's just me, but I can't stand the bloke. He personifies everything that was ever wrong with the British electronics industry and I'm not just talking about the C5.

Everything he ever made was over-hyped shoddy tat. Remember the Black Watch? One of the first digital watches, except the batteries lasted about 10 days and it couldn't tell the time properly.

And they gave him a knighthood.

Won't work.

Imagine the airspace above home county town centres on a Friday night, full of 'ladz' (tm), buzzing around in the sky in their souped up Citroen Spitfire GTIs.

Or commuting traffic full of BMW Fokkers. (Not much change there)

Or school run mums landing on top of each other at the school launch pad with their Honda VTOLs

On the plus side, we could all grow handlebar moustaches and start saying stuff like 'Chocks away', 'Tally Ho' and 'Back to Blightly' again...

Birdstrikes could be an issue without a full on canopy methinks - best be careful out there.

Steven R

Aside from the fact they are awesome flying cars are a terrible idea- look how much trouble we have on the roads and that's only working in two dimensions. Until the majority of people cease to be halfwits, flying cars will never be viable.

CLive Sinclair (before he became, Sir Clive) was really into the Zilog Z80 processor family - all his little, er, 'computers', were based on it.

In Z80 Assembly language, C5 was PUSH BC, which could be construed as 'Push ByCycle' if you take a mental squint at it. However, I prefer to think that it was simply his initials, in that 1980's sort of computer font C5 would have looked almost exactly like CS.

Mine is the one with the big furry hood.

It will fly at 30mph and get sucked into most 747 engines without the pilots even noticing anything.

otherwise he would have been more likely to have know about the Skycar

http://www.moller.com/

Interesting ideas, mostly crap products, but at the end of the day, what was the point of either of them?

'the air force holds roundel rights only for "non clothing items"'

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/12/raf_vs_next_in_battle_of_the_bedspreads/

Better take that RAF roundel off the wing PDQ...

With the speed of the C5, Bird strikes won't be a problem, you'll have plenty of time to get out of their way.

Pigeons laughing at you might be embarrassing though.

The pic is missing the mains cable.

"If some quarterwit is going to buzz me then I'm entitled to defend myself. With large calibre ordonance"

Would that be ordinance?

quarterwit......

You wowed us with the LED wristwatch, the ZX80, ZX81 and of course the Speccy....then "that" was released and you became just another eccentric, millionaire British inventor who appeared to have finally flipped his lid. Sorry Clive old son, but no-one's gonna listen anymore...unless you get James Dyson to build it for you of course!

I watched a movie `The AbsentMinded Professor` once and he invented a flying car. He used a revolutionary substance which he invented called Flubber. I think this Flubber stuff is the way forward.

Why has no-one harnessed its power? He invented it in 1961. Robin Williams also more recently discovered it. Only Robins dances around and stuff.

The wonders of electric cars, flying or not, forever seem to cover up the truth about them - they're no more eco friendly than the trusty combustion engine.

If we all go "Electric", where do we get the 'juice' from? From coal fired/oil fired/gas fired (or worse still) neuclear powerstations. Yeah, that makes real eco-sense....NOT!

Maybe we'll all have little windmills mounted on the bonnets? Hey, what about those dumb looking hats with the helicopter blades on them? Maybe Sir Clive could programme one to take us wherever we want???

... and no - I'm not a tree-hugger, just well and truly pissed off with all these "lets be green and have an electric car" types. And as for fuel cells - oh sure, pumps out H2O at the back end, but how much power did it take to actually charge the cell in the first place, never mind build the vehicle....

The only true eco friendly power source for cars is either to WALK, CYCLE or if you must have 4 wheels; go solar powered.

grump grump grump, moan moan moan.

ordinance

1. an authoritative rule or law; a decree or command.

2. a public injunction or regulation: a city ordinance against excessive horn blowing. (ooh err)

3. something believed to have been ordained, as by a deity or destiny.

4. Ecclesiastical.

a. an established rite or ceremony.

b. a sacrament.

c. the communion.

ordnance

1. cannon or artillery.

2. military weapons with their equipment, ammunition, etc.

3. the branch of an army that procures, stores, and issues, weapons, munitions, and combat vehicles and maintains arsenals for their development and testing.

You're both 1/8 wits.

But then you never managed to build a (working) ZX81 from the kit, did you?

I always had a soft spot for Uncle Clive, what's wrong with a little craziness sometimes? :D

I bet you all had C64s. Or BBCs! :P

@ Kenny Millar - I think you're drawing parallels where there are none!

We already have (unmanned) high altitude endurance aircraft that use solar power as their main power source; and with a number of the recent nanotech breakthroughs promising 10x more power from the same size solar panel I think it's not unreasonable to expect that we could see solar powered personal "aircraft" in the next 10-15 years.

As for the piloting, he's already said "fully automatic"; so other than the usual issues involving defective IT projects that's covered too.

I think he could be on the money this time!

As for those of you who can't see the difference between Sinclair and Sugar... Hint, one is an inventor and scientist, the other is a pile it high sell it cheap uber-salesman.

Did Clive ever really invent anything?

His one succesful product the zx80 and Spectrum computers were hardly original. The TRS80 was available 3 years before anything from Sinclair.

He was first with the "pocket" calculator, but calcualtors were steadily shriking in size -- and it had seriously limited functionality compared with the HP-35 launched a few months later. (Texas Instraments holds the first patent on hand held calculators).

The crappy "Black Watch" came out a full five years after the first digital watch.

...is all the more likely to hit on the next quantum leap,so don't write off a man who eschews participation the Internet hive mind.

If Einstein had attended properly to the new, improved cuckoo clock designs crossing his desk at the Swiss Patent Office, he wouldn't have had time to dream of looking at his image in the mirror while travelling at the speed of light.

As for practical personal flying cars, an elite group of Hollywood scribblers have had them for years (I refer, of course, to the famous Ghost Writers in the Sky).

Well it might seem irrational but seriously, the American, Japanese and Korean electronics industries weren't headed by people who you needed to "have a soft spot for".

Instead, they made products that actually worked and that people wanted to buy. Then by and large they used the profits from these and invested them in the next generation - and so on.

Which is why they have electronics industries and we, broadly speaking, don't.

For those who are too young to remember this marvel of electronic engineering, here is a dispassionate account of this wonder-product:

http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/other/blackwatch.htm

Paris - because she ought to watch it...