Nearly everyone has been in a traffic jam. It is one of the most frustrating experiences of modern life. One sits in a car on a freeway while is slowly, agonizingly inches forward in a river of other cars, jammed and grid locked, breathing in the fumes of the car ahead. Many people in modern cities spend an hour a day or more in such conditions, just for the privilege of going to and from work.

Who has not dreamed of rising above the traffic, of flying over the jammed freeways in some futuristic vehicle out of the Jetsons, and getting to work in a few minutes? Who has not imagined of being in that place, famously suggested in the movie Back to the Future, where, “We don’t need roads.” There are people who are working toward realizing the day when that place is every place, where people travel the skies in flying cars more easily than they drive to work.

The History of the Flying Car

Ever since the beginning of the 20th Century, when the airplane and the automobile came into their own, people have dreamed of combining the two technologies into a vehicle that anyone can own and fly. As early as 1917, Glenn Curtiss, the aircraft designer who was the rival of the Wright Brothers, built a vehicle he called the autoplane. It never really flew, but did manage a few short hops.

There were a number of other attempts to build a flying car in the 1930s and 1940s that foundered because of lack of funding or, in the case of the ConvAirCar in 1947 because it crashed on the third flight. Many people lost their shirts or even died trying to test their flying car prototypes. In the 1950s and 1960s, Moulton Taylor’s Aerocar, designed to drive, then fly, then drive after landing came very close to being marketed by the Ford Motor Company. The energy crises of the 1970s put and end to those plans. The Aerocar was also hard to fly in bad weather and was, in any case, very expensive.