Robert E. Fulton Jr., 95, Dies; Inventions Included Flying Car

Robert E. Fulton Jr., 95, who died of congestive heart failure May 7 at his home in Newtown, Conn., was coy about his family's relation to the steamboat pioneer Robert Fulton. But he insisted that by name (his middle name was Edison) and creative temperament, he was suited to become one of the more intriguing inventors of the 20th century.

He devised an early form of combat gunnery simulator, a flying car that went 12,000 feet and got reasonable gas mileage, and an inflatable balloon meant to aid stranded spies and military personnel. The Skyhook, as that contraption was called, was featured at the end of the James Bond film "Thunderball."

"The main thing is to see the need for something and then fill it," he told The Washington Post in 1967. "Most people go through life looking but not really seeing."

Mr. Fulton was born in New York. He got his first taste for design when he was 10 and his father, president of the Mack Truck Co., asked him to redraw the timeworn blueprints for one of the truck engines.

After graduating from Harvard University and receiving a master's degree in architecture from the University of Vienna, Mr. Fulton found himself at a dinner party in London. He told the other guests that he planned to return to New York via the Orient to see great monuments -- maybe by motorcycle. "You don't see much architecture through a steamship porthole," he said.

The boast was met by a dare from an older man who happened to own the Douglas Motorcycle Co. He refitted a motorcycle for Mr. Fulton with an extra gas tank and some protective devices, including a steel underplate and a hidden compartment for a gun, just in case.

Mr. Fulton left England in 1932 and traveled through dozens of countries on the way to Japan. He then sailed to San Francisco before heading home to New York in time for Christmas 1933.

Despite a bout with jaundice in Baghdad, he considered his trek a success. He had had only six flat tires by the time he got to Japan.

He recorded his journey with a 35mm camera and wrote a book, "One Man Caravan" (1937). Decades later, he told CNN that he was struck by the superstitions from village to village in the Middle East.

"They were always warning me about the next place to go, and the next place to go was warning me how lucky I was to get through the last one," he said.

He was a self-taught pilot, training on his first wife's Luscombe seaplane, and was an aerial photographer for Pan American World Airways in the 1930s.

Bracing for the war in Europe to reach the United States, he invented the flight and combat gunnery simulators by taking a panoramic view of the sky from the Empire State Building. He placed the photo in a fake Corsair cockpit with a working instrument panel. The Navy bought 500 aircraft gunnery simulators, called the "Gunairstructor," for $6 million.

He began work on the Airphibian flying car out of frustration with traveling to remote parts of the country for his military work. Taxi drivers, concerned with wartime gas rationing, would not take him from an airport to a far-off military installation.

In 1945, with a group of assistants based at Danbury Airport in Connecticut, he fashioned a two-seat vehicle that resembled the front of an airplane fuselage. To fly, it attached to a rear fuselage with high-set wings and a tail.