Is it a bird, a plane or a car?

Samuel Schweighart, vice president of engineering and co-founder of Terrafugia, says that the engineering team used the software to make the calculations needed to meet both aircraft and road vehicle safety and performance standards. He explains that, as a double-duty vehicle, the Transition has to be light enough to get off the ground, yet sturdy enough to pass government regulations for crash safety. That meant reducing the amount of material wherever possible, without compromising performance, which Terrafugia did, using SolidWorks Simulation. The result: in addition to its flight assemblies, the Transition has a full automotive suspension, crumple zones, and roll cages to meet safety standards for road vehicles. Its wings fold to the side with the push of a button in the cockpit. Schweighart says Terrafugia's design team used SolidWorks to model the Transition's major assemblies and ensure they would fit together properly before the company committed to physical construction. And he adds that the machine shops that manufactured components for the aircraft also used SolidWorks 3D models to build the parts. "We put all our designs into SolidWorks, then used the finite element analysis features to determine how much material we could cut out of the design without compromising Transition's integrity as a road vehicle. SolidWorks let us be very precise, which was important because every ounce counts in this design," says Schweighart. "It's interesting how much reality matches what's in SolidWorks. All the little details we see on the screen end up in reality, so we can modify the design to eliminate whatever we don't want in the finished product. If we were working with just physical prototypes, we'd end up sanding those unwanted details off the parts by hand."