The Future We Want Is Not the Future We Get

Face it: flying cars are one sci-fi staple destined to remain the province of Hollywood fiction. But that doesn’t mean aviation has stalled.

- Jeff Wise

In 1945, long before anyone had managed to launch a spacecraft into orbit, science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke realised that if you could place an object with just the right velocity at just the right distance above the equator it would remain suspended over the same spot. Put a transceiver on it and you could bounce signals between any two points in the hemisphere. Seventeen years later, a US Delta rocket launched the first Telstar communications satellite. Voila: worldwide telephone service.

Imagination can bring us the future, but it isn’t infallible. Envisioning a technology isn’t enough to bring it into being.

The ultimate example of this phenomenon is the flying car, the archetypal overpromised innovation. The Jetsons zipped around in a flying-saucer station wagon, Luke Skywalker piloted a floating hot rod and Rick Deckard chased replicants in a levitating cop car. Naturally, most of us assumed we, too, would be gliding and hovering at some point. Yet here we are, deep in the 21st century, still rolling on rubber tyres.

It’s not for a lack of effort. Countless engineers have tried their hand at flying cars over the years. In the 1950s, Piasecki Aircraft Corporation built a test vehicle for the army called Airgeep, which flew on two large, enclosed (or ‘ducted’) fan blades. It only ever reached a few feet above the ground. (A few years later, Airgeep II managed to reach an altitude of 3,000 feet but wobbled as it hovered, had trouble flying forward and was quickly axed.) In the 1970s, inventor Paul Moller unveiled a UFO-like contraption called Discojet, propelled by eight ducted fans. It remained earthbound, too, though a later iteration, the Moller Skycar, lifted offin 2003 only briefly while attached by a tether to an overhead crane.