Where's my flying car?

PJ Vogt
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Searchengine today im going to tell you a story about a road trip. A road trip that took place in 1885. Until that year, if you wanted to go somewhere, you could walk, you could take a horse or you could take a train. At the time, a lot of people simultaneously were trying to invent the motorized carriage, but none of the prototypes were ready for market. One of these would be inventors was a german man named Carl Benz.

His vision for this, the Benz patent motor car, most people agree, not the superior prototype automotive. It only had three wheels. It was closer to a bike than the competition. But Benz was fortunate in one of the more important ways you can be fortunate in that he'd married the right person. This woman named Bertha.

Bertha Benz had been the primary investor in the project. She'd also helped design some of the car's components, and she felt like Carl was being too precious, tinkering with the design for too long. She thought it was ready for the world to see, and she was gonna do something about it. I read about all this in a piece by Brian Appleyard, author of the car the rise and fall of the machine that made the world. One day when Carl Benz was asleep, Bertha stole the car.

She took their two sons on the first automotive road trip in history. Berthas road trip from Mannheim south to her mothers house in Forzheim ignited the german imagination, really the worlds imagination to the possibility of what automotive travel would be. Supposedly, there were people who saw her on the street and were annoyed, who yelled, get a horse. Which. Incredible.

But there were also people who, when they heard what Bertha had done, they just got it. Berthas drive represented the possibility of freedom, the ability, even with your kids in the backseat, to move faster and further alone than you ever could have before. Distance in our world was about to collapse. The funny thing about that trip, though, is everything else Bertha invents. By happenstance, the prototype car runs into problems, some of which she can macGyver.

She uses a hat pin to clear the fuel lines, a garter for insulation. But along the way, she runs out of fuel, so she has to stop at a pharmacy to pick up more that pharmacy. Now the worlds first gas station. A chain breaks, so she stops at a blacksmith. That blacksmith, now arguably the worlds first auto mechanic, the Benz patent motorcar was a success.

Just a few years later, in 1903, Ford would release the model, a precursor to the t the carb middle class people could actually afford, which would spawn a world of Berthas. Also in 1903, the Wright brothers made their first successful flight. Which feels like a coincidence, but to a lot of people, was not. Inventors throughout the 20th century believed that we would inevitably combine these two technologies, that we would one day build a car that could also fly. That dream seemed attainable in the thirties and forties, visions of the future reliably included the suburban dad hopping in his flying car to commute some workplace.

It disappeared in the 1970s. And afterwards, the flying car really just existed in our culture as something to fight about. Wheres my flying car these days? You have some people who say overregulation has stopped us from getting there. You have other people who believe corporate short termism is the problem.

No one, as far as I know, has raised the possibility that perhaps we just need another bertha, someone to steal a prototype and head for the skies. But writer Gideon Lewis Krauss has been looking into this, and he has answers both about why we haven't got flying cars yet and how close they are. He's even flown one. He mentioned all this at a bar. We wanted to talk to him about it in a studio.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Did you bike here from Brooklyn? Yeah, sure. That you're semi intro questions, so we made him commute to the search engine hq. Can you just introduce yourself, say who you are and what you do? I'm Gideon Lewis Krauss, and I'm a staff writer at the New Yorker, so.

PJ Vogt
Okay, so question I have for you is just like flying cars feels like something that one could be interested in at any time, but you decided to become interested in it. Like you decided to spend time on it. What's the origin story of you getting curious about this? So, on the one hand, doing a flying car story just seemed like kind of a lark. And there's a long history of stories that are like, flying cars are just a couple years away.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
So to me, I needed to figure out a way that this story was gonna be interesting, kind of irrespective of when flying cars are coming and in what form, although, as I discovered, they really are kind of coming, if not in the form that people anticipated. Right. So before we get into all that, I just want to define terms. Like, when you say, flying cars are closer than we thought, what are you saying when you say a flying car? It's not a Honda Accord with wings.

No. Okay, so that's a great question. The first thing to say is that there is a long history of attempts to build what you would consider an actual flying car, meaning something you can drive down the street and then fly away. And there were plenty of examples, even dating back to the thirties, of kind of proto helicopters that plausibly could have turned into a flying car. So much of this stuff is also tied up with the history of general aviation.

General aviation meaning non commercial hobbyist pilots and people flying themselves around in little cessnas and stuff. And there really was, especially after the war, so many men came back from the war experience with pilot training. And so there was this big boom in general aviation in the fifties. And in fact, in one of the books I read, I came across these ads from the fifties for the Cessna flying car of the air that talked about how, like, every middle class family was going to have an airplane parked in their garage. And like the misses was going to, when she went shopping, she was going to fly there.

PJ Vogt
This whole era that Gideon is talking about, of american inventors pursuing the dream of the flying car, produced some of the funniest, most AI generated looking contraptions I've ever seen. If you're on your phone or at a computer, please just pause for a second so you can be prepared to search these as we go. I present to you the Waterman rotable aircraft from 1935, a combination automobile and airplane that can make 70 miles an hour on the road. A three wheeled coupe without wings, powered with a regular six cylinder auto engine. You see this car pull out of a driveway?

It looks like somebody took a VW bug, smushed it from the side, so it'd be more narrow. And then scotch taped. The result to a helicopter's tail rotor. When the driver wants to take to the sky, he simply rolls into the nearest airport, where he's parked his wings and has them attached. In a matter of minutes, you watch this goofy device actually take off and fly.

It strikes me as an adorable way to probably die. And then there's a newsreel clip of the 1949 Taylor aero car. Have you ever been caught in a traffic jam and wished you had wings and could fly away from it all? Well, you're not the only one. But Moulton Taylor of Longview, Washington, did something about it.

Narrator
He designed and built the aero car. This one looks like a standard single engine, single pilot plane, except the cockpit has been replaced with what looks to me like the car from Mister Bean. The conversion takes but a few minutes. No more trouble than changing a tire. And a lot more fun.

PJ Vogt
This one also takes off and flies a real flying car. Before my dad was born, the absolute best one, also from the forties, was the Convair car. There's just images of this. No video, but a plane clutches underneath it. A tankish sedan.

A car which looks like it's about to be dropped like a bomb on the landscape below. All of these designs inspire a smile. None of them inspire confidence. Every image is the same visual joke. What a car wants to be, big and sturdy, and what a plane wants to be, light and aerodynamic are just fundamentally at war with each other.

It's like all these dreamers are desperately trying to mate an elephant and a hummingbird. The core engineering problem that will doom this entire generation of flying cars, the. First thing that people in aviation will tell you is that the very idea of a flying car, in the pure sense, meaning a rotable aircraft, something you can drive on the road and then take off and then land and then drive, is just that. On a basic level, cars and airplanes have different missions and different requirements. You want different things out of them.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
You want the car to grip the road. You don't want the car to take off from the road. That's why a spoiler, for example, is basically the opposite of a wing. It is using air pressure to push you down to get more purchase on the ground. I didn't even know it did anything other than look funny.

PJ Vogt
Gideon pointed out to me something about the story I told at the top of this episode, the story of Bertha Benz and the various genius, improvisatory fixes she'd made on her motorcar's maiden voyage. Bertha Benz could afford to stop and make tweaks, because, crucially, she was not flying through the air. When you're in the air, there's no just, like, pulling over by the side of the road to stop and fix something. So just, like, it's so much harder to do that kind of iterative work once you have people inside an aircraft, right? Had Bertha Benz done the exact same stunt with a flying car, even that first stop where she runs out of gas, she crashes.

Presumably she dies. There's no Mercedes Benz company. There's a Mercedes company, maybe. And people aren't like, oh, this looks great. It's like the margin of error on flight is just way, way, way more punishing.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Way more punishing. But in the example of the Convair car, there was this famous test flight where the test pilot looked at the wrong fuel gauge, and instead of looking at the airplane's fuel gauge, he looked at the car's fuel gauge, and he ran out of fuel in the air, and he crashed, and he walked away from that accident. But the project didn't survive that. Like, all you needed was, like, one big, high profile crash, and that was just lights out for these projects. Got it.

The technology was there. It just wasn't robust enough and cheap enough and reliable enough for it to become a mass product.

PJ Vogt
The technology that was becoming robust enough and cheap enough and reliable enough for the masses was commercial flight passenger planes like the Boeing 707. The way we would fly, it turned out, would not look like cars with wings. It would look like buses with wings. Big tubes crammed full of hundreds of people. Expensive mass transit in the sky, a migraine, but also a miracle.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Commercial aviation got cheap and efficient and safe. And so then why would you take the risk of flying around in a little plane if your family could afford to fly commercially? Got it. Okay, so pre war, it's like there's sort of this, like, bubbling moment of invention where maybe we stick wings on our cars. Post war, you have one of the weird side effects of a country at war is that a lot of people were trained to fly.

PJ Vogt
Some of them come home, and they have this vision of, like, I liked flying. I could imagine an America that is connected by a bunch of small planes instead of exclusively many highways and cars and trains. And so there's a moment where it looks like the future is a lot of individuals flying. And then you're saying, just like, commercial air travel just gets much better. I mean, there are a lot of factors involved, but that is the big one.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
And the other thing is that anybody can be taught to fly a plane. But there's a big difference between flying a plane on a beautiful, clear, sunny day where you can look out the window and see where you are, and flying a plane under what are called instrument flight rules, which is you can't rely on visual inputs, and you have to look at your instruments to know where you are. And so part of it is just reliability that people wanted something that would allow them to reliably get around in any weather, and like a little airplane is much harder for them.

PJ Vogt
This reliable little airplane, something that can be flown from our homes without pilot training, really the flying car of our dreams that would one day appear, Gideon would fly in it, but that would take a couple generations. In the 1970s, the dream of the flying car disappears for a while. In the early aughts, the idea of flying cars becomes this rallying cry in Silicon Valley for people who believe we've lost our ability to imagine the future, or at any rate, a future we'd actually want to live in. Good evening, everybody. Thank you for your patience.

Narrator
The lights are sufficiently bright that we can't see any of you, so I hope that you can see us. In 2012, Fortune magazine throws a dinner and debate. Eventually on stage, Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, in a big white button up, versus Peter Thiel, PayPal co founder. Peter, maybe sit next to me. The moderator has a little fun introducing teal.

I won't make any jokes about who's on the right or who's on the left. We've got plenty of time for that. You see that Thiel is dressed in chinos and a blazer with a shirt that I have to say is somewhat rakishly unbuttoned. The debate tonight is about the technology industry. What has it done for us lately?

PJ Vogt
Here's how the moderator introduces Peter Thiel's position. You have said that the problem with elites is that they are skewed in an optimistic direction. You say that America has lost its belief in the future. And lastly, and I believe this is the slogan of your founders fund, founder's fund states, we wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.

D
Yes. Peter Thiel. Well, I don't, you know, I think, Eric, you do a fantastic job as Google's minister of propaganda, and you said you were going to be nice, and I. Well, he does a fantastic job. Gideon, you talk about in your piece, this debate between Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Yeah. You describe how Peter Thiel begins explaining the flying car problem to the crowd. He tells a story about the good old days in America. He says, like, if you looked at how people did from 1932 to 1972, you had a six fold improvement, and. It was matched by incredible technological progress.

D
Cars got better. You had the aeronautics industry got started. You went from no planes to supersonic jets. You went. You had the computers were invented.

You had all sorts of incredibly important dimensions in which progress took place. And then he says, like, and it's sort of stopped. The moderator asked him why. He says, I'm libertarian, so I'm libertarian. I think it's because the government's outlawed technology.

We're not allowed to develop new drugs with the FDA charging $1.3 billion per new drug. You're not allowed to fly supersonic jets because they're too noisy. You're not allowed to build nuclear power plants or say nothing of fusion or thorium or any of these other new technologies that might really work. So I think we've basically outlawed everything having to do with the world of stuff. And the only thing you're allowed to do is in the world of bits.

And that's why we've had a lot of problems. You and I both live in Brooklyn. We're not gonna go on a podcast and suggest Peter Thiel's ever been right about anything. Do you think he has a point here? How much of this is a problem of regulation?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
So I think one of the things that interested me about the story as I went along is that there's a very big difference between the attitudes of the kind of, like, self appointed mandarins of Silicon Valley who make these big oracular pronouncements, and then the people who actually build stuff among the rank and file. I just don't think you hear a lot of conversations like this. They don't complain about regulation. I think that they're just focused on solving actual problems and not in coming up with these grand metanarratives about why we don't solve problems anymore. So the second that you start to apply actual kind of domain specific analyses to these things, Peter thiel is saying, like, you know, the FDA thing is completely wrong.

It's not like the FDA charges companies, like, a billion dollars, and it's not even like the FDA is slow to do this stuff. Like, the FDA approval times have gotten dramatically faster over the last, like, 30 or 40 years. It's just that it costs a lot of money to develop a drug, not to get a drug approved. That's just, like, a really basic category mistake. So that is kind of like old conservative talking point that's just not accurate.

If you know anything about drug approval in America. But the nuclear thing, he's right about. And I think for a lot of these people who complain about how we've regulated ourselves to death, nuclear is what they're really thinking about. Because as of starting in the early seventies, but then decisively, with the meltdown at Three Mile island in 1979, it becomes virtually impossible to build new nuclear power plants in America. And this is something that a lot of the environmental activists at the time were just wrong and alarmist about.

And now it seems like, well, it would have been nice if we had built a lot of those nuclear power plants back then. So I think part of the frustration, a lot of it for them, comes down to just energy. And so Thiel's whole story, and part of his explanation for why we don't have flying cars is that we ran out of, I mean, oil in 1970, and then you have the oil shocks in 1973. And then his story is, like, instead of kind of, like, boldly inventing our way out of these problems, we just, like, cowered in anxiety. But, like, then, when you come around to aviation, the minute that you tell anybody who knows about aviation this kind of, like, Peter Thiel story, they just laugh at you.

I mean, I talked to this one guy who's the CEO of one of these aviation companies and, like, a lifelong aeronautical engineer, and he was just like, I hate when people say, like, planes look the same as they did in the 1960s, and they go to same speed. And he was like, but they do. Look the same as they did in the 1960s. Well, I mean, they look the same because, like, there are certain principles of aerodynamics. And he was.

PJ Vogt
But you're not gonna put a spoiler on an airplane. What he said to me was like. He was very blunt. He was like, look, if you're a four year old and you're holding up, like, you know, a picture of a Boeing 707 and a 787, sure, they kind of look the same from the outside, but actually, they're completely different machines. And in the meantime, they fly so much farther.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
They're 80% more fuel efficient. They also fly themselves now in a way that they definitely did not used to, and they're infinitely safer. The last fatal commercial crash in America was in Buffalo in 2009, and that's completely insane. It's very easy to take that for granted, because planes used to crash a lot, and now they don't. And so for people in the aviation industry, they're like, what are you talking about?

Technological stagnation? This is a miracle that we move millions of people through tubes in the sky and never lose anyone anymore. Yeah, that's a good point. It's funny because I find myself surprised at how easy a mark I am for the, like, I like technological progress, and I like the idea that I will see things in my lifetime that I wouldn't expect to. It's weird that you can get me pretty quickly.

PJ Vogt
Like, yeah, deregulate the airplanes. It's like, obviously we should regulate the airplanes. All the things that you would want to be enmeshed in regulation and safety, like, the planes that fly in the sky for profit, are probably something where you don't want to just, like, let industry run crazy, but, yeah. Okay. So when you actually talk to the people who understand the details of this, what they'll say is, no, there's been, like, tons of technological innovation.

The thing just doesn't look that different. But the experience of the thing is different. Yeah. And also, then, like, this is one of those things where you kind of, like, take a step back and you're like, okay, well, what are we actually even, like, arguing about here? Like, are we saying that, like, our lives are so terrible because it takes us 45 minutes to get to JFK and not 15?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Is that, like, the. The biggest problem you have is that it takes you 30 minutes too long to get to the airport, so that's where you have to go back. And you're like, well, they're complaining that we were sold this jetsonian fantasy that never came to pass. But then you're like, okay, George Jetson had a flying pod car that literally folded up into a suitcase. And what did he do with this?

He used it to get to work. Right. So was this really, like, that exciting of a dream in the, like, it's just a dream that was sold to, like, affluent suburbanites who were just used to ever greater convenience. Right? He worked at a sprocket company.

PJ Vogt
He didn't seem that happy. I remember an ad, a Jetsons ad for not littering, where they said the reason that they lived in the sky was because pollution was so bad they'd had to push their houses above the smog. The 21st century is really terrific, with just one exception. Smog. Holly, want a gift?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Miss? Fortunately, my house can rise above the air pollution, but your lungs can't. We can all use it, so that's not so good. So you're saying, like, the thing that the sort of anti regulation, pro technology people who are using flying cars as their centerpiece, miss. Is, like, regulation might not be the main problem, and we actually have a lot of technological progress.

Yeah. And again, this is something that you kind of hear in the booster ish ideological circles is you have people basically saying, we're making bad cost benefit decisions as a society. And you'll hear people say, we tolerate 40,000 road fatalities a year and we tolerate zero aviation deaths. So shouldn't we kind of loosen up on the aviation side, and maybe we should allow some more experimentation, and you will just pay the cost with some extra deaths. And I find that argument provocative.

It's provocative, but no pilot, no person who died will ever make this argument, ever. Like, no serious person in the industry will make this argument. And if anything, you talk to people and they're like, well, it's a good point, but the upshot should be the opposite, which is, like, it's great that nobody dies in planes. Like, why do so many people die in cars? Like, we actually do know how to solve these problems.

But again, like, those are largely political problems. So generally speaking, it's safe to say in the argument about why we don't have flying cars. Yet your reporting has led you to a place of skepticism that regulation is a primary problem. Yeah, I mean, I don't think regulation is the primary problem, but also, I mean, like, regulation certainly is part of it. There was a flying car design in the 1970s that seemed, you know, the guy was talking to the FAA for years and years and years, and the FAA kept kind of sandbagging him.

But also, I mean, those regulations didn't come out of nowhere. I mean, those regulations came out of the fact that we wanted to empower this agency to help make flight safer. I mean, so, like, there was a real mandate here. This was not an example where people were being stifled by these, like, faceless, overly cautious bureaucrats in Washington. It was like, flight safety is something that concerns all of us.

And we actually want our regulator here to be, like, pretty aggressive in pursuit of making this activity more safe. Right. The free for all wild west do whatever you want version where flying cars are just crashing in american cities constantly is not, like, most people's idea of a future utopia. Right? So there are a lot of reasons why the available technologies just did not seem to make a kind of, like, mass commercial version of a private aerial vehicle plausible until about 15 years ago.

PJ Vogt
After the break. For the last 15 years, inventors have been reimagining how human beings might fly in something like the flying cars we imagined, who did it, why they did it, and what they've been able to build.

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Gideon says that around the same time some people were arguing about why we don't have flying cars, other people had just started figuring out how to make them. And when this new generation of investors surveyed the landscape. They discovered that a lot of recent tech innovation would make these new craft much easier to build than what had come before them.

The two new big innovations, batteries had gotten powerful and lighter, and could now be used in flying machines. Plus, distributed electrical propulsion had advanced. That's the ability to use electric motors to provide liftoff and thrust. The same technology that was being used to power drones, these inventors thought, might now power something slightly larger, with room for a human or four. This new kind of device, if you want to sound smarter than me, you don't call it a flying car.

You call it a vtol vertical takeoff and landing craft. But it's a flying car the way Netflix is tv, podcasts are radio. When you look at them, many of them strongly resemble George Judson's whip. These flying cars dont need runways because they dont have wheels. Theyre tiny little craft that you can park at a home vertiport, like a tiny helipad.

They take off straight in the air like a helicopter, but then rotate into a position where they fly forward like a plane. They fulfill the promise of the flying car, because you can pilot one from your house alone and go anywhere you want, the way a car does, but, you know, in the heavens. Gideon says, as far as anyone knows, the first manned flight of one of these vehicles was flown by essentially a home inventor about 15 years ago. So there's this guy called Marcus Lang. He's a canadian inventor, and he had been flying since he was a teenager.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
And, like, this is the story of almost everybody you meet in this industry. These are people who got their first flight lessons when they were 11, 12, 15 years old, and just have always dreamed of flying and invention of new aircraft and also bringing flying to more people. And so he had dreamed since the early eighties of the perfect airplane, which was going to be this little single seat thing that was going to be simple and easy to control and wasn't going to require pilot training. Marcus Lang invents this craft in his basement in a rural area north of Lake Ontario. A prototype.

PJ Vogt
I can only find one photo of it. It looks chunky, sort of like it's built in Minecraft, an awkward looking machine with lots of propellers. You can see the pilot's helmeted head poking out over the unenclosed top, like. It looks both kind of sleek and sort of ungainly. Like, you look at it and you think, like, is that gonna fly?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
He invites a bunch of friends over to his house, and he tells them to, like, hide behind a row of parked cars, and then he fiddles around, does a couple of little hops to try to get the controls dialed in, and then he eventually rears back. It hovers a meter off the ground, and then he flies forward, and he tries to do this cool skidding turn like a skier. And in the process of banking, his wing catches on the ground. And he thinks to himself, oh, this is not going to end well. But the flight controls were so stable that it.

It stabilizes, it digs, was a 30 foot divot into his ground, and then, like, comes to arrest, and he walks away. That was in 2011. Around the same time, Larry Page, co founder of Google, the 7th richest person in the world, per Bloomberg, a billionaire many times over. He gets involved. According to Gideon's reporting, when Larry Page noticed that drones were getting stronger and batteries were getting lighter, he did the math and thought the time of the flying car had arrived.

PJ Vogt
He began creating something like a distributed R and D network, secretly funding multiple companies, including the one created by Marcus Lang, the canadian engineer. In the first five years of his project, Page poured more than $100 million of his own fortune into one company alone. He kept investing, and Gideon says, as flying car technology matured, more traditional institutional investors got in the game. Boeing, Airbus, the US Department of Defense. So now, kind of 15 years into this, there's something like 400 different companies that are trying to make craft like these, and they vary a lot.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
I mean, they all kind of have, like, a general arthropod vibe. What's an arthropod? With kind of articulated exoskeletons, like, sort of menacing insect like, a lot of them just look like kind of giant bugs. But there are a lot of different designs, and they're being developed for different uses. Gideon laid out three big categories for how these flying cars may be used.

PJ Vogt
The first, personal use. Basically, rich people who want to have fun. So some of them are actual personal aerial vehicles, which are, like, they exist under this carve out in federal regulations for ultralights, which means that basically, it's like a federal concession to the idea that they can't stop somebody from, you know, affixing a lawnmower engine to a kite and just flying around their backyard. You can't fly it in controlled airspace, so you can't fly it anywhere near an airport. You can't fly it over a certain altitude, and you can't fly it in a congested area.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
So congested is actually an ill defined term, but, like, you can't fly it over houses and buildings in places where people are. I mean, you can fly it, like, on a ranch, if you have a ranch. Right? So it's like, if you won the lottery and you had a ranch, you could buy this and you could just have your friends over and be like, look, we can fly technically, right? And somebody from one of the companies was like, imagine that you need to survey your vineyard from above.

PJ Vogt
Imagine. Imagine. So if you have a vineyard that needs surveying, this would be great. But it's kind of the same way on these big, wealthy properties. People have a golf cart, or they all have a polaris.

It's like, you could also have a golf cart in the sky. Yeah. In terms of functionality. Yeah, yeah. So that's use case one.

Golf carts in the sky. Use case two is that some of these flying machines might serve essentially as flying taxis. So an air taxi model, I mean, it's essentially just an electric version of a helicopter that they hope is gonna be kind of like, will, like, democratize what's now helicopter transit. So there's one company that has a deal with United Airlines that in theory, next year is gonna start flying from midtown to Newark. Really?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
But also, this is not exactly revolutionary. I mean, like, in the seventies, there was a helipad on top of the Pan am building, and it had something like 48 scheduled flights a day from Midtown to, like, area airports. But then, and this is, like a lot of people's, like, one of their favorite examples of how any misstep shuts down a whole flourishing branch of the industry, which is that in 1977, the landing gear on one of these helicopters failed. Five people, four of them waiting to board, and one of them on the ground, all got killed by flying helicopter rotors. And then the helipad was shut down.

PJ Vogt
Got it. And so we had, you can go to a building in Manhattan, and it'll take you to the airport in New Jersey. And it's not that it got shut down because it's technologically impossible. It got shut down because people died. Yeah, because people died.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
And of course, now if you pay enough money, you can take a blade to JFK or whatever, but I think it's like $200 a seat. So the idea behind these companies is that they're going to do first, probably kind of midtown helipads to use existing infrastructure, but, like, take you to the airport in seven minutes. It's really quiet. It's much quieter than a helicopter and also much more reliable than a helicopter because helicopters have single points of failure, and these things have multiple redundancies. They're much safer craft.

And that the idea is, even if they debut this at more or less the seat cost of a helicopter, that at a certain point in the next ten years, they want to. Once it becomes a volume business, they would want to bring it down to basically the cost of a rideshare. So, like, $3 a mile or something like that. To fly. To fly.

PJ Vogt
Interesting. Okay. Okay. So that's, like, another lane people are pursuing with this, basically. Yeah.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
And that seems, according to the industry, people I talk to, like, actually pretty plausible that within ten years, people will be flying around in these air taxis. So in ten years or less, they want a world where you and several other people will get in a thing and it will fly somewhere. You will not touch a steering wheel or throttle or anything. It'll be like the way drones are operated by the american military. Yeah.

There are going to be on ground supervisors who are essentially private air traffic controllers, who are just observing a bunch of these things flying around at once. And you're going to book the whole thing through an app, the way you would a ride share, and you're going to book it and walk a couple blocks to your local vertiport, and seven minutes later, you're taking off.

PJ Vogt
So use case one, flying golf carts for the rich and famous. Use case two, rideshare for the Icarus family. The last use case we talked about, the most unlikely one, but the most interesting one. Individual commuters using flying cars. The George Jetson dream.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
People definitely talk about, you know, this is gonna, like, be a new form of commuting, and you're going to be able to live in Scranton or Binghamton or, like, some kind of, like, de industrialized. Like, it's going to breathe new life into these deindustrialized places. Because a person living in Scranton could, in theory, if this work, commute to New York. Yeah. But that's pretty far away.

And also kind of hard to imagine how it pencils out, because you have something, like, I think before the pandemic, you had something like 400,000 people crossing the Hudson river every morning. So, like, right now, these things carry, like, a max of four people. So then you just try to do the math, and you imagine, okay, you would need, like, tens of thousands of these in the air at any given time. And, like, would people tolerate, like, the noise? How could that possibly be done safely and reliably?

Like, we're a ways away from that, although, like, it's kind of in the air, so to speak. But you could imagine a hell where one version of this, if like, you have, like, the sort of libertarian, technologist deregulated future, is like a day in Manhattan where you look up and this guy's like blotted out with drone like, noisy, buzzing hell machines taking people from their McMansions in Scranton to midtown. Right? So that's not gonna happen.

PJ Vogt
Here is what is going to happen after the break. Gideon Lewis Krause, a man who today commutes by city bike, flies a completely transformative experience my favorite story I've heard anyone tell in quite a while search engine is brought to you by spot pet search engine listeners know that I love my dog more than anything else in this world. I want to be buried in a pyramid with him when he dies or when I die. Whoever goes first, we're going together. I want to share a message from our trusted companion in helping you be ready for any unexpected vet visits.

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Welcome back to the show.

One of the companies that had been trying to build a flying car is called Pivotal. That's the one founded by Marcus Lang, the Canadian who made his own flying machine in his basement and almost crashed it in front of his neighbors. He has since professionalized his company. Pivotal is now based in Silicon Valley. And when Gideon was reporting the story, he got a tip that he should reach out.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
So somebody had told me I should call up this company, pivotal, and I sent them an email, and, like, three minutes later, I got a call from their PR person, and she's like, you know, our new craft goes on sale, like, for pre sale in two weeks. And, you know, we like, have you ever played video games? And I was like, well, you know, I used to play, like, a lot of Goldeneye in, like, 1997, but, like, not really since then. And she was like, oh, well, you'll probably still be okay even if you're not a gamer. And everything about that line of inquiry, so disturbing.

Well, she was like, her first two questions were like, are you a gamer? And are you, like, over 200 pounds? And I was like, where is she going with this? And then she was like, so our typical training curriculum, they call it a bespoke white glove experience takes, like, seven to ten or 14 days, but we've developed this abbreviated curriculum, and we think we can probably get you in the sky in three or four days of training. She just comes out with us, and I was like, wait, what?

I was not prepared for this because I thought I was gonna go watch one of their people fly. She was like, no, no, we can do it. And she's like, come as soon as you want. You know, was it an option to. Do the full training?

PJ Vogt
Like, I feel like, were it me, I would be like, I can do seven to 14. You don't have to do the cutting edge abbreviated flying card training for me. My time's not that valuable. You know, actually, like, that didn't even occur to me. I was like, sure, if we can do it in three days.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Like, let's do it. I mean, I guess my attitude was like, they really don't want to go bankrupt. Yes. I really don't think they're gonna risk killing me. Killing you would be very expensive.

It would be very bad for them for me to die. Yeah. And I go and I try to explain this to my wife. I'm like, well, I'm gonna fly this experimental aircraft made of plastic, but they're gonna train me. They're gonna train me in a simulator.

In three nicks. I'm gonna be able to do it. And she was like, wait, what? They asked me if I played gold in.

I was like, come on. Well, what? I said, I was like, look, you know, I'm gonna go out there for five days, there in Palo Alto. I was like, I'm gonna go out there for five days. The plan is they're gonna train me for the first four days, and then if I'm not ready, they're not gonna let me fly.

And if I am ready, I'm gonna believe them because they don't wanna go bankrupt. And so what did your wife say? I mean, my kids were really excited about it. Yeah. Yeah.

My wife just didn't even really wanna talk about it. Cause I think she knew wasn't going to talk me out of it. Yeah. But she didn't want to hear about it. And I think she really just hoped that I was going to fail the training.

So I go out and, I mean, I should say, like, everybody who worked for this company was great. Like, I liked everyone there, but they were only just setting up their customer training center. And, like, the whole thing was a little bare. And then they show me the simulator room, which had a couch and a snack table and, like, two dentist chairs with joysticks attached to them and, like, VR headsets. I will say I've noticed that at some point, all the tech companies realized that white glove service was a really good thing to say.

PJ Vogt
But there's never, like, a butler with a white glove. It always just means you can talk to a human being and not a robot. That's all they mean. Well, and my. I mean, like, my flight instructor is, like, a certified flight instructor, although he's too big to fly the black fly.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
So right away, I was like, oh, is it, like, fun to fly? And he was like, flown it. I'm a little big. And I was like, wait, you've never flown this thing? And he was like, whoa.

But, you know, flying an aircraft is flying an aircraft. Like, it's not that different than, like, flying a Cessna? And I was like, okay, meaning he. Felt like he'd already had the experience, but also, he's training you on something he hasn't done. Exactly.

And so I look at this like Dennis Chanon. Like, I didn't say anything, obviously. Cause I didn't want to be a jerk, but clearly, like, I was communicating, like, some level discomfort with, like, the jankiness of the setup. Did you feel like you write about technology, which means to some degree, you have to be excited about it. You have to think that more new things, generally speaking, are better.

PJ Vogt
And that means often encountering all the people who are like, no, we shouldn't do this. This is going to happen, blah, blah, blah. Did you have a moment of having more sympathy for those people when you're like, oh, the cost of the flying car might be my life? You know, I try to go into these things suspending judgment, and I will say this whole story really defied my expectations for it, because I sort of expected, like, oh, there are going to be these companies that are full of really well intended, smart people who are good engineers, who are designing things we kind of don't need because we know how to solve urban mobility problems. We've had the same technologies for a long time.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
It's about, like, a. Bikes and trains and sidewalks, and these are just political problems. They're not technological ones. So I went in a little bit skeptical of the kind of air taxi we're all going to be buzzing around because it just seemed like, is that really the best use of our resources to put enormous amounts of money into getting people to JFK 15 minutes faster? Shouldn't we just be building more subways?

So I went into that, with that kind of general skepticism. I think a lot of urban planners share about the sector. And then with this one company, I was like, okay, well, this is almost explicitly just like a toy for the landed gentry, but whatever, if I have the opportunity. I mean, I talked to. So they had just done this abbreviated training for a road and track journalist, and they gave me his phone number, and I called him because they were like, well, he'll tell you what the training is like.

So I call him, and like, this is somebody who test drives Bugattis for a living. And he was like, it's the coolest thing I've ever done in my life. And I was like, okay, fine, I'm sold. But then he, too, was like, what kind of gamer are you? I was like, they should have sent me.

So I went into it thinking like, well, you know, I'm gonna keep an open mind about this. And then the second I got into the simulator, I was like, oh, this is cool as hell. They sort of dispensed with a lot of the initial training of, like, we're gonna go over checklists and do ground exercises. They were like, we're just gonna get you in the simulator, see what it feels like. So they plunked me down in Central park and had me like, fly over midtown to my house.

PJ Vogt
And there's like, virtual reality. Yeah, virtual reality. So they're strapping goggles on, and then you're controlling the thing. Yeah, but that part wasn't that hard. I learned that pretty quickly.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
But then the problem is, of course, they have to train you on, like, a million contingencies, so they have to train you on, like, what's the manual recovery procedure for, like, loss of gps or loss of radar altimeter? And, like, what happens when, like, the lights are flashing yellow or the lights are flashing red, or the lights are flashing purple and, like, they have to train you on the parachute, even though the parachute doesn't really work under 200ft, and I was gonna be flying at 100ft. If the lights are flashing purple, what is it? Purple means pull the parachute. Yellow means land as soon as it's safe.

Red means land even now. Purple means pull the parachute. So a lot of it is just, I mean, a lot of flight in general is just task management and just dealing with the cognitive load of paying attention to what's my speed, what are my battery levels at? Especially because the main thing is that when you're taking off and when you're in a hover position, the batteries get hot quickly, and if the batteries get over a certain temperature, if they get over 180 degrees, they burn out and it falls. So a lot of it was just training for these potential failures and also just having me do the loop that I was going to be doing at this airport 5 million times so I would get used to it.

And then after about three and a half days, they brought in another flight instructor, this tattooed former marine who'd flown reconnaissance drones in Iraq and Afghanistan to test me. And we went through 3 hours of tests where he would be like, I'm going to kill one of your motors now. You gotta make sure you recover, land as quickly as possible. Or, you know, by the way, none. Of these things happen in modern video games.

PJ Vogt
It's not like since Goldeneye, all video games have been turned into like, I guess they just meant, you know, how to use a joystick. Yeah. They meant, you know how to use a joystick. Okay. Yeah, well, no, but I think it was also a cognitive load thing.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Like, can you pay attention to a million different things at once and, like, not lose your cool, right. Because, like, flying, it really is all about, like, just not losing your cool, right. And then at the end of the testing, he gets very solemn, as if he were sending me into combat. Someone's like, okay, you're cleared to fly tomorrow. You're gonna be a true aviator.

You're gonna see what it's like to fly because it's not like the thing flies itself. You do have to fly. So he got really serious. And then the next morning, I drove out to this airstrip in the Sacramento delta, maybe 40 miles east of the Bay area. And they gave me a flight suit, they gave me a little patch.

There was a lot of ceremony attached to it. And then the first flight was just like, going up and down. Just like, get a sense for, like, the ignition feeling the up and down. Yeah. How high up?

Like, those first flights, like, just the kind of hover flights were like 40ft. 45Ft, which is actually kind of already crazy. You're in a flying machine. Yeah, yeah. Well, and especially because, like, first of all, it's very loud.

It's much louder than just like a bumper of a drone. It's like leaf blower loud. And you're inside this vibrating thing. It's a very embodied experience. That's the part that's not like a video game.

You really feel like you're inside this machine that's shuddering against gravity and is. Your brain telling you, are you feeling. Get the fuck out? Yeah, for sure. It was terrifying.

I mean, it was absolutely terrifying. So the first one, I just go up and, like, kind of look around. The guy had been like, don't forget to breathe. I definitely forgot to breathe. And then, like, came down.

Then the next one was, like, going up and doing like, a little box pattern over the pad. Like, just like left, right, back, forward. And that was fine. But in the meantime, like, everybody's having idle chat about, like, various plane crash survivals. Like, oh, there was that serbian stewardess who survived the fall from 30,000ft.

And finally my flight instructor was like, yeah, maybe let's not talk about this right now. So then the third flight was like an actual flight. So I had to take off vertically. I had to do like a twisting yawing ascent.

PJ Vogt
What's the yawing? Like? Yawing is turning and, like, rotating around like the z axis. Okay. And so I had to, like, ascend, but also turn away from where the hangers are.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
So I wouldn't, like, overfly, like, the people on the ground or the hangers. Yeah. And then at about 45ft, you level off forward and then you keep climbing to, like, 110ft. I flew over, like, ponds and black cows below me and, like, hills, like, and it was like, the second that I was up there, it was just like, like, breathtaking. And I was like, oh, I get it now.

This is magical. This is amazing. Then all of a sudden, I was like, who cares about all the other shit attached to this? Who cares about the regulatory story or the technology story? This is just cool as hell.

It really wiped me clean of so much of the stuff that I'd come in with because I was like, this is just an incredible experience. I never want to land. I just want to take off light out for the hills. And it was so beautiful. Like, it was really green because it had been raining and there were, like, the windmills against the hillside.

I could see Mount Diablo in the distance, and I really understood why people fly once and it just takes hold of their imagination and so it just made everything else feel kind of irrelevant, all this. Well, who's gonna really use this? And what's the deal with municipal landing and IFR conditions? All the sort of cerebral armature of the piece kind of just, like, disappeared and palsy. I was just like, this is fucking cool as hell, and I love this.

PJ Vogt
And you think that's what's probably driving most of the people doing this. It's like, yeah, this is certainly theoretically useful in all these ways, but really it's like the human desire to experience actual flights. Yes, yes, definitely. Cause these are all people who, for the most part, have devoted their lives to aviation, and they just want more people to be able to do it. And like, even though that seemed like at first I was like, yeah, yeah, whatever.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Like, if people say cheesy stuff, like unlocking the third dimension or whatever. But then I was just, like, so caught up with all these arguments about how, like, why don't we just build trains instead? And, like, don't get me wrong, these are good arguments. Like, I sympathize with that. But then also, once I was in it, I was like, oh, no, this is so cool.

PJ Vogt
It makes me so happy that there's still an experience where technology can communicate wonder. Oh, absolutely. And also not just wonder, but, like an embodied wonder, like, feeling like the machine as an extension of your bot.

Gideon Lewis Krauss. He wrote a piece this week in the New Yorker, a local magazine here in the city, with more about this experience and video of his flight. Go check it out. It's called our flying car is finally here.

Surge engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw productions. We are off next week on this feed, but if you're a subscriber to the premium version of our show incognito mode, we have a little bonus episode for you next Friday. It also involves flight of a different variety and my old roommate Anthony Perowski from queer Eye. If you've signed up for incognito mode, thank you. If not, go to search engine show to learn more.

Search engine was created by me, PJ Vote and Shruti Pinimanini. It is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking this week by Mary Mathis. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss Berman and Leah Reese Dennis.

Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Parello and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutcheson, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis Kirk, Courtney and Hilary Schaff. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at Uta. Follow and listen to search engine with PJ. Vote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening.

See you on the other side.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus
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Where's my flying car?

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