The Rise of Flying Cars and Drone Vehicles

Up in the Air

By: Richard Murch

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The desire to escape the constraints of earthbound travel is as old as the automobile itself. Less than a decade after the Wright Brothers lifted off at Kitty Hawk in 1903, inventors were already sketching blueprints for machines that could both drive on roads and take to the air. In 1917, Glenn Curtiss — one of aviation's early pioneers — unveiled the Autoplane, a triplane fitted with an aluminum body that could, in theory, carry a driver and two passengers both on the ground and aloft. It never truly flew. But it planted a seed that would refuse to die for the next hundred years.

For the flying car, the implications were revolutionary. The central constraint that had defeated a century of engineers — the impossibility of storing enough energy in a light enough package — had not been eliminated, but it had been dramatically loosened. Electric motors, meanwhile, offered advantages that went beyond energy storage. They produced no exhaust, could be made extremely small and light, operated efficiently across a very wide power range, required almost no maintenance, and could be controlled with extraordinary precision by software.

A small electric motor could spin up to full power in milliseconds, could be throttled to any speed instantaneously, and could be integrated into a flight control system in ways that were simply impossible with mechanical linkages and combustion engines.

The second transformation was digital. The revolution in computing power, sensor miniaturisation, and software sophistication that had already transformed smartphones, autonomous vehicles, and commercial drones gave aircraft designers tools that their predecessors could not have imagined.

Fly-by-wire control systems, which had existed in military aircraft since the 1970s, became cheap enough to use in small commercial vehicles. Inertial measurement units — the tiny chips that tell a smartphone which way it is pointing — could now be produced for a few dollars and combined with GPS, accelerometers, and gyroscopes to give a vehicle real-time, millimetre-level awareness of its position and orientation.
Artificial intelligence could monitor hundreds of sensors simultaneously, predict mechanical failures before they occurred, and adjust flight parameters faster than any human pilot could react.