GM Made This Bizarre 20-Foot-Tall Vehicle to Predict the Future

The raised portion on the top is made to mount and illuminate a banner that would wave upon arrival of the parade. Barrett-Jackson

The raised portion on the top is made to mount and illuminate a banner that would wave upon arrival of the parade.

Barrett-Jackson

The Futurliners travelled the country as part of GM's Parade of Progress. GM Heritage Center

The Futurliners travelled the country as part of GM's Parade of Progress.

GM Heritage Center

The Futurliner showed off exhibits like "Miracles of Heat and Cold." GM Heritage Center

The Futurliner showed off exhibits like "Miracles of Heat and Cold."

GM Heritage Center

The funky vehicle was a real crowd-pleaser. GM Heritage Center

The funky vehicle was a real crowd-pleaser.

GM Heritage Center

The Futurliner, before Pratte restored it and added whitewall tires. Barrett-Jackson

The Futurliner, before Pratte restored it and added whitewall tires.

Barrett-Jackson

The car in front is another Pratte acquisition, the 1954 Pontiac Bonneville Special, which he bought for just over $3 million in 2006. Barrett-Jackson

The car in front is another Pratte acquisition, the 1954 Pontiac Bonneville Special, which he bought for just over $3 million in 2006.

Barrett-Jackson

A side shot of the Futurliner with the Pontiac Bonneville Special. Barrett-Jackson

A side shot of the Futurliner with the Pontiac Bonneville Special.

Barrett-Jackson

The Futurliner in Pratte's garage, with photos from the Parade of Progress tours that the bus made across the United States. Barrett-Jackson

The Futurliner in Pratte's garage, with photos from the Parade of Progress tours that the bus made across the United States.

Barrett-Jackson

In 1940, General Motors wanted to wow the American public with its vision of the future. To showcase those ideas, it designed one of the strangest automobiles you’ll ever see. The GM Futurliner resembles an RV. It weighs 30,000 pounds, has a top speed of 38 mph, and is as tall as a two-story house. Now, one of the nine Futurliners still in existence is going up for auction, and it’s expected to fetch a hefty sum.

The automaker used the funky ride as part of a traveling show called the “Parade of Progress.” At towns and cities around the U.S., GM employees would show off novel inventions like the jet engine, radar, television, and microwave. For the tour that started at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, GM created the Futurliner, which carried animated exhibits like “Miracles of Heat and Cold.” When it was time to hit the road again, the exhibits folded back into the vehicle.

The 1950 Futurliner in question is currently part of Ron Pratte’s enormous collection of mostly American automobiles and memorabilia, which includes historically significant vehicles like the Shelby Super Snake and first production Ford Thunderbird. Pratte is selling his entire collection at the Barret-Jackson Scottsdale auction in January 2015, and he’s not telling anyone why.

Whatever the answer is to that mystery, the Futurliner is a remarkable vehicle. “I remember thinking, ‘What the heck is that?’” says Craig Jackson, CEO of Barrett-Jackson auctions, which originally sold the car to Pratte in 2006. “I was intrigued right away.” That’s means a lot coming from a man whose company brokered the sale of the original George Barris Batmobile (for $4.2 million), and a 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4*S N.A.R.T. Spyder (for $27.5 million).

The Futurliner was designed by Harley Earl, one of the shining minds of the United States’ greatest design eras — he took inspiration from old streamliner trains. “This was a major auto manufacturer with a special place in time,” Jackson says. Only 12 examples of the vehicle were built, and the last Parade of Progress was cancelled in 1956.

Pratte bought this Futurliner in 2006 for $4.1 million, after its Canadian owners brought it down on an oversized flatbed for sale through Barrett-Jackson. The auto industry and the country as a whole have been through a lot of turmoil since then, but Jackson says the once futuristic vehicle is as relevant as ever. “Car makers had their troubles back in ’08 and ’09 … but the world still copies us as soon as we innovate. This was an era where we were the manufacturers of the world.”

Turns Out It’s Pretty Easy to Shoot Down a Passenger Jet

Wikicommons

American officials believe the missile that destroyed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was fired by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine, using a Russian-made system designed for bringing down fighter jets. That brings up the question: How easy is it to bring down a passenger jet with a weapon that’s meant to used by trained soldiers?

Turns out, it’s pretty easy. As in, take a three-day course and go for it easy.

The weapon in question is the SA-11, a radar-guided surface to air missile (SAM) system. It’s been around since the Soviets deployed the first-generation model in 1979. The mobile system (it sits on a tank chassis) is made to serve near the front lines to protect ground forces from air attacks. Operated by a crew of four and designed to attack fighter jets, it can fire multiple missiles simultaneously. It fires high explosive proximity fuse warheads, which home in on their targets and detonate just before reaching them, to maximize damage. Targets 20 miles away and over 70,000 feet in the air are fair game. It’s a “big, heavy vehicle that has big missiles,” says Randal Cordes, a military intelligence analyst who has worked at the CIA and Pentagon. “To use an SA-11 against an airliner, it’s brutal overkill.”

Inside of a Buk-SAM. Wikimedia

The training required to properly operate the system can take weeks or months, which may explain why the Malaysia plane was destroyed in the first place. The problem with the SA-11 is that it’s difficult to properly identify and track targets, but easy to fire missiles. “The skill comes in knowing what you want to shoot at,” says Cordes. That’s because the SA-11’s radar system shows the same “blip” for all different targets. The operator sees an aircraft’s altitude, air speed, and vector, but not it’s size or type, says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Airliners broadcast a four-digit transponder known as an IFF code that identifies them as civilian aircraft, and the SA-11 system is capable of picking up that information. But the training that goes into properly identifying aircraft takes months, especially since the window for acquiring and firing on targets is just a few minutes.

“You can’t take a crew, stick ‘em inside the cabin, and say here’s the on switch, and here’s the button you hit,” and expect them to operate it properly, says Wesley Paul, a former intelligence research analyst for the Air Force.

“Ready” and “aim” are difficult. “Fire” is easy.

But say someone dropped off the SA-11 and did all the basic work of getting it up and running, another complicated task. And say you decided on a target that popped up on your radar, whether or not you knew what it was. In that case, destruction comes easy. It would take three to four days at most to teach someone to use the system well enough to shoot down a 777, Cordesman says. That’s partly because passenger planes fly at steady speeds and altitudes, and have no defense systems. They cruise higher than fighter jets do, at heights where they’re more easily picked up by radar.

“Once the radar picks up a target, it is a matter of telling the system that it should engage the target and issuing a fire command,” says Paul Huter, an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin. That involves following a checklist and selecting the target, either by clicking on a screen or pushing a button (or clicking with a mouse on a screen, depending on the system model). Training would consist of running through that procedure in various conditions, and would be so straightforward, Huter says, that “it is certainly possible for someone with no training to read through the checklist and successfully engage a target.”

Cordesman compared it to firing a gun: “Pulling the trigger is easy. Judement is hard.” And once the missile’s been fired, there’s no way to divert it, he says. “You press the damn button and it’s gone.”