Where's my flying car?

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28:35Welcome back to the show.

28:40Gideon 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.

29:16The 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 don't need runways because they don't have wheels. They're tiny little craft that you can park at a home vertiport, like a tiny helipad.

29:52They 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. And, like, this is the story of almost everybody you meet in this industry.

30:30Like, these are people who, like, got their first flight lessons when they were 11, 12, 15 years old and just, like, have always dreamed of flying and, like, you know, new, like, invention of new aircraft and also, like, bringing flying to more people. And so he had dreamed, like, since the early 80s of, like, the perfect airplane, which was going to be, like, this little, like, single-seat thing that was going to be simple and easy to control and, like, 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. I can only find one photo of it.

31:08It 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 going to fly? 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 like fiddles around does like a couple of little hops to try to like get the controls dialed in and then he eventually like rears back it like hovers a meter off the ground and then he flies forward and he tries to like do this kind of like cool skidding turn like a skier and in the process of banking his wing catches on the ground and he thinks to himself like oh this is not going to end well but like it was so the flight controls were so stable that it, like, it stabilizes, it digs a 30-foot divot into his ground and then, like, comes to arrest and he walks away.

32:06That was in 2011. Around the same time, Larry Page, co-founder of Google, the seventh 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. He began creating something like a distributed R &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.

32:46He kept investing. And Gideon says as flying car technology matured, more traditional institutional investors got in the game. Boeing, Airbus, the U.S. 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. I mean, they all kind of have like a general like arthropod vibe. What's an arthropod? You know, like 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.

33:25Gideon laid out three big categories for how these flying cars may be used. 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.

34:01And you can't fly it in a congested area. So congested is actually an ill-defined term, but like you can't fly it over houses and buildings and 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 like have your friends over and be like, look, we can fly technically. Right. And like somebody from one of the companies was like, you know, imagine that like you need to survey your vineyard from above. Imagine. Imagine. So, you know, if you have a vineyard that needs surveying, this would be great.

34:36But it's kind of like the same way on these like big wealthy properties, people have like a golf cart or they'll have like 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 going to 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 going to start flying from Midtown to Newark.

35:18Really? But also, this is not exactly revolutionary. I mean, like, in the 70s, 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 and five people, four of them waiting to board and one of them on the ground all got killed by flying helicopter rotors. And then like the helipad was shut down.

35:55Got 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. 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.

36:28And 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 10 years, 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. Interesting. Okay. Okay. So that's like another lane people are pursuing with this, basically. Yeah, and that seems, you know, according to the industry people I talk to, like, actually pretty plausible that within 10 years, people will be flying around in these air taxis.

37:10So in 10 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 like private air traffic controllers who are just observing a bunch of these things flying around at once. And you're going to like book the whole thing through an app the way you would a rideshare. And like you're going to book it and like walk a couple blocks to your local vertiport and seven minutes later you're taking off.

37:45So 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. People definitely talk about, you know, this is going to, 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 de-industrialized places. Because a person living in Scranton could, in theory, commute to New York.

38:19Yeah, 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 like 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? Would like, like how, 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.

38:48But 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 the sky is like blotted out with drone like noisy buzzing hell machines taking people from their big mansions in Scranton to Midtown. Right. So that's not going to happen. 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.

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40:33Welcome 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. 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.

41:13And, 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. Everything about that line of inquiry is 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 like a bespoke white glove experience. It takes like, you know, 7 to 10 or 14 days.

41:48But like we've developed this abbreviated curriculum. And like we think we can probably like get you in the sky in like three or four days of training. She just like comes out with this. And I was like, wait, what? Like I was not prepared for this because I thought I was going to like go watch, you know, 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? And... Was it an option to do the full training? 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 car training for me.

42:17My time's not that valuable. You know, that actually, like, that didn't even occur to me. I was like, sure, if we can do it in three days, like, let's do it. I mean, I guess my attitude was, like, they really don't want to go bankrupt. Yes. So I really don't think they're going to risk killing me. Killing you would be very expensive for them. 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 going to fly this experimental aircraft made of plastic. But they're going to train me. They're going to train me in a simulator and three days I'm going to be able to do it.

42:50And she was like, wait, what? They asked me if I played Golden Iron. Yeah. and I was like come on well what I said where I was like look you know I'm going to go out there for five days they're in Palo Alto I was like I'm going to go out there for five days the plan is they're going to train me for the first four days and then if I'm not ready they're not going to let me fly and if I am ready like I'm going to believe them because like they don't want to go bankrupt and so how did what did your wife say I mean my kids were really excited about it yeah Yeah, my wife just, like, was very, like, didn't even really want to talk about it.

43:27Because I think she knew, like, she 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 just, like, 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 like a really good thing to say, but there's never like a butler with a white glove.

44:07It 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 Blackfly. So right away I was like, oh, is it like fun to fly? And he was like, I've never flown it. I'm a little big. And I was like, wait, you've never flown this thing? And he was like, well, 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.

44:36Exactly. And so I look at this, like, dentist chair, and I'm like, I didn't say anything, obviously, because I didn't want to be a jerk. But clearly, like, I was communicating, like, some level of discomfort with, like, the jankiness of the setup. Did you feel like, like, you write about technology, which means to some degree you have to be excited about it. Like, you have to think that more new things, generally speaking, are better. And that means often encountering other people who are like, no, like, 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?

45:15You know, I try to go into these things suspending judgment. And like, 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 like, full of like, really well intended, smart people who are good engineers, who are designing things we like, kind of don't need. because, like, we know how to solve urban mobility problems. Like, we've had the same technologies for a long time. It's about, like, bikes and trains and sidewalks, and, like, these are just, like, political problems. They're not technological ones.

45:47So I went in, like, a little bit skeptical of the kind of air taxi, like, we're all going to be buzzing around because it just seemed like, is that really, like, the best use of our resources to put enormous amounts of money into, like, getting people to JFK 15 minutes faster? Like, shouldn't we just be, like, building more subways? So I went into that with that kind of like general skepticism that 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.

46:20I mean, I talked to, so they had just done this abbreviated training for a road and track journalist. And they like 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 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? And I was like... They should have sent me. So I went into it thinking like, well, you know, I'm going to keep an open mind about this. And then the second I got into the simulator, I was like, oh, this is cool as hell.

46:55They sort of dispensed with a lot of the initial training of like, we're going to go over checklists and do ground exercises. as they were like, we're just going to get you in the simulator, see what it feels like. So they like plunked me down in Central Park and had me like fly over Midtown to my house. And it's like virtual reality. Yeah, virtual reality. So they're strapping goggles on and then you're controlling the thing with drugs. Yeah, but that part wasn't that hard. I learned that pretty quickly. But then the problem is, of course, they have to train you on like a million contingencies.

47:20So 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 200 feet. And I was going to be flying at 100 feet. If the lights are flashing purple, what is that? Purple means pull the parachute. Yellow means land as soon as it's safe. Red means, like, land now. Even if it's now. Purple means, like, pull the parachute.

47:52So, a lot of it is just, I mean, a lot of flight in general is just task management. and just dealing with like the cognitive load of paying attention to like, what's my speed? What are my battery levels at? Especially because like the main thing is that when you're taking off and when you're in a hover position, like the batteries get hot quickly. And if the batteries get over a certain temperature, if they get over 180 degrees, like they burn out and it falls. So a lot of it was just training for like these potential failures. And also just like having me do the loop that I was going to be doing at this airport like 5 million times so I would get used to it.

48:25And then after about three and a half days, they brought in another flight instructor, this like tattooed former Marine who'd flown like reconnaissance drones in Iraq and Afghanistan to like test me. And we went through like three hours of tests where he would be like, I'm going to like kill one of your motors now. You got to like make sure you recover, like land as quickly as possible or, you know. You know, by the way, none of these things happen in modern video games. 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.

48:58Yeah, they meant you know how to use a joystick. Okay, yeah. Well, no, but I think it was also a cognitive load thing. Like, can you pay attention to a million different things at once and like not lose your cool? Right. Because like flying really is all about like just not losing your cool. Right. And then at the end of the testing, he gets like very solemn, like as if he was like sending me into combat. Someone's like, okay, you're, you know, you're cleared to fly tomorrow. You're going to be a true aviator. You're going to see what it's like to fly. Because, like, it's not like this thing flies itself.

49:26Like, you do have to fly it. So it got really serious. And then, like, the next morning, I drove out to this airstrip, like, in the Sacramento Delta, maybe 40 miles east of the Bay Area. And they, like, gave me a flight suit. They gave me a little patch. You know, like, 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 40 feet, 45 feet. Which is actually kind of already crazy. You're in a flying machine.

50:04Yeah, yeah. Well, and especially because like, first of all, it's very loud. It's much louder than just like a buzz of a drone. It's like leaf blower loud. And you're like inside this vibrating thing. Like it's a very embodied experience. Like that's the part that's like not like a video game. Like you really feel like you're inside this machine that's like shuddering against gravity. And is your brain telling you like, are you feeling? Get the fuck out. Get the fuck out. Yeah, get the fuck out. Yeah, for sure. It was terrifying. I mean, it was like absolutely terrifying. So the first one I just like go up and like kind of look around.

50:37The 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 ,000 feet. 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 like take off vertically.

51:14I had to do like a twisting yawing ascent.

51:22What's a yawing ascent? 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. So I wouldn't like overfly like the people on the ground or the hangers. Yeah. And then at about 45 feet, you level off forward, and then you keep climbing to like 110 feet. I flew over like ponds and black cows below me and like hills. And it was like the second that I was up there, it was just like breathtaking. And I was like, oh, I get it now. Like, this is magical. This is amazing. Then all of a sudden I was like, who cares about all the other shit attached to this?

52:02Like, who cares about like the regulatory story or the technology story? Like, this is just like 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 and light out for the hills. And it was so beautiful. It was really green because it had been raining. And there were 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.

52:37All this, well, who is going to really use this? And like, what's the deal with municipal landing and IFR conditions? Like, all the sort of cerebral armature of the piece kind of just like disappeared. And I was just like, this is fucking cool as hell and I love this. 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 flight. Yes, yes, definitely. yeah and like and because these are all people who like for the most part have like 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 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 i don't know like this this This is so cool.

53:36It makes me so happy that there's still an experience where technology can communicate wonder. Oh, absolutely. And also not just wonder, but an embodied wonder. Like feeling like the machine as an extension of your bot.

53:53Gideon 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, Are Flying Cars Finally Here?

54:34Search 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 Porowski from Queer Eye. If you've signed up for Incognito Mode, thank you. If not, go to searchengine.show to learn more. Search Engine was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinamanani. It is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking this week by Mary Mathis. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian.

55:11Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Mirandy, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Nora Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vogt now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. See you on the other side.

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