Next on my wish list - A helicopter that is almost a motorcycle

While I love motorcycles with a deep passion, I've always wanted to fly a helicopter. Unfortunately, they're quite expensive, and I'm not sure one would fit in my garage. But this might.

The PAL-V One is a two seater hybrid car and personal gyrocopter. In other words, you could technically drive it out of the garage to the airstrip, open the blades and fly to whereever you want to go. And it'll do it up to 180mk/h (112mph) from it's gasoline powered engine, whether it's airborne or on the tarmac.

A gyrocopter is supposedly the safest (and easiest) form of flying. It cannot stall, apparently, and even if the engine does fail, the craft may still be steered and landed as the rotors will not stop rotating. I'm assuming that's something to do with the the rotors turning as the craft descends otherwise it sounds like some sort of magic.

According to their literature, it handles like a sportscar. From the shots, it looks more like a bike (OK - one of those BMWs or even a tuk-tuk) and has some ability to lean. Yes, it's three wheeled and thus you're not getting your knee down but handling is quoted as razor sharp. And did I mention IT FLIES...

Best of all is the licensing - it requires on a peronal pilots license/recreational pilots license to fly. That means a ceiling of no more than about 4000ft, but it also means you don't need a flight plan. Unfortunately, it also means you'll need to do about 20-40 hours in licensing. Sounds worth it to me.

Conversion from street mode to flight mode takes around ten minutes and can be completed by one person. Unlike a helicopter you will need some lead up to take off - 165m of it. Once in the air, you'll have a range of between 350 and 500km and can fly as slow as 50km/h.

Coming back down, you'll need about 30m to land and another ten minutes to stow the rotor.

Interested? Like me, you'll be looking at http://pal-v.com/ constantly to see when they add the "buy one now" link to their page