Neil Laughton flying the SkyCar in Tarifa, southern Spain before heading across the Strait of Gibraltar The wind is a little gusty but otherwise
it’s an unremarkable January morning on the military base in Ceuta, the Spanish enclave at the northern tip of Morocco. The guards are smoking cigarettes, drinking hot chocolate and discussing the weekend’s football fixtures. Occasionally, one peers out across the Strait of Gibraltar at the passing warships, tankers and mega yachts cruising in and out of the Mediterranean. Suddenly a ‘pan-pan call’, or safety alert, comes over the radio. From the excited shrieking, the guards can tell that something is seriously wrong, but the voice isn’t Spanish, it’s English. The man insists he is ‘coming in to land’ but the grey sky appears empty. As the startled Spanish soldiers race down the runway to detain the intruder, a wind-burned Englishman in a flying suit leaps from the car and starts jumping up and down like he’s scored the winner in the FA Cup final. In fact, he has just flown from Tarifa in southern Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar on surely one of the first landmark adventures of the 21st century. He’s piloted a prototype flying car – the first roadworthy vehicle to take to the skies. On the edge of the Sahara. The expedition began in London and will travel to France, Spain, Morocco, Western Sahara and Mali Over the Strait of Gibraltar. The SkyCar can reach altitudes of up to 15,000 ft Of course, the car he’s just landed doesn’t look like most people’s idea of a flying car – this is not the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang of childhood dreams. It’s called the SkyCar, and it’s a souped-up buggy with a giant paraglider wing. It’s the latest development in paramotor (powered paraglider) technology. The car, weighing nearly half a ton, is the heaviest object ever to be carried under such a wing. A fan motor drives it forward and the wing takes it up to a maximum height of 15,000ft. The buggy itself is a modified Rage Motorsport off-roader. It’s four-wheel-drive and powered by a 140bhp Yamaha R1 superbike engine that’s been converted to run on bioethanol.
The SkyCar’s maverick pilot is the gentleman adventurer Neil Laughton, an ex-Royal Marine and SAS soldier who at 45 still has a nose for derring-do. One of his previous expeditions was the Seven Summits challenge (climbing seven peaks in seven continents, including Mt Everest).