For decades, flying cars have been a symbol of collective disappointment—of a technologically splendid future that was promised but never delivered. Whose fault is that?
Gideon Lewis-Kraus, a staff writer at The New Yorker who has spent 18 months researching the history, present, and future of flying car technology, joins the show. We talk about why flying cars don’t exist—and why they might be much closer to reality than most people think.
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In the following excerpt, Derek and Gideon Lewis-Kraus explore the origins of the flying car, both as an idea and as a practical mode of transportation.
Derek Thompson: We’re about to get into the technicalities of flying cars, the physics of flying cars, the regulations, the experience, the history of flying cars. I want to start by asking you about the idea of the flying car. I feel like in Silicon Valley and the broader tech and progress world, the flying car has served as a kind of symbol of disappointment. “Where’s my flying car?” is asking both a literal question, like, “Where’s my sedan with wings?” but also, maybe even more importantly, a metaphorical question: something like, “Why has innovation in the physical world not matched innovation in the digital space?” Why do you think the flying car has this sort of symbolic power to represent such huge ideas about technology and progress?
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Well, I mean, part of it, if you want to be a little bit cynical about it, it’s about a lot of these boomers like Marc Andreessen sitting around watching The Jetsons when they were little kids. And how could that not capture your imagination, zooming around, being sent off to school in a tiny little pod? But also, this was in so much of that mid-century sci-fi, this idea that of course we are going to be getting around by flying cars. It was just completely obvious. And one of the things that’s interesting about that whole discourse is that so many of these other predictions at the time—we’re going to get plastics or we’re going to have pocket-sized, handheld radios—these did come true. And so a lot of this stuff was not particularly far-fetched, and flying cars just seemed like a natural extension of what the world of abundance of the future was going to be like.
Thompson: The paradox of the flying car is that it’s broadly assumed that flying cars do not exist, and today it seems like a futuristic technology, but the history of the flying car, as you write, is really about 100 years old. So take me back 100 years to the beginning of the invention of things that we can sort of, kind of call flying cars. Tell me about Juan de la Cierva and Waldo Waterman.
Lewis-Kraus: Well, I think one of the things that we have to do is we have to put “flying cars” in quotes here the whole time, because we’re talking about a lot of different flying contraptions that may or may not be adjacent to what we think of as cars. So really the category itself is pretty vaporous. Especially when you go back about 100 years, this is still really the dawn of aviation. I mean, people are starting to work on this stuff in living memory of the Wright brothers. This is two and a half decades after the first flight. So flight in and of itself is still already being figured out, and frankly, cars are still being figured out. I mean, this is the dawn of the mass car era. So I think both fields were nascent, and both fields were experimental.
And also one of the things that—of course, by the time we get to The Jetsons, when we’re thinking about flying cars, we already imagine contemporary jetliners. But back then, there wasn’t any obvious thing to be comparing these things to. So even the idea of a flying car didn’t exactly make sense because we were still figuring out what a car was and figuring out what a flying machine was. There’s a whole long-forgotten history of what you would call, essentially, ingenious flying contraptions that kind of worked and kind of didn’t work, and they were cool experiments. There was this Spanish aeronautical genius called Juan de la Cierva, [who] invented in the ’30s something called the Autogiro, which looks like a low-rent helicopter. It functioned on perfectly sound principles and largely led later to the development of the helicopter, which got taken over by the military once the war years started.
And then there were other things. An inventor called Waldo Waterman had something called the Arrowbile, which was a flying car, and then later there were examples where you had a roadable vehicle that then you could buy as a regular car and you could drive it to the airport and you could get outfitted with wings, and then you could take off and fly to another airport and land and drive away. I guess one could say that the line, in a sense, between cars and airplanes was a little bit blurrier then as this was all getting figured out.
Thompson: So the 1920s and 1930s, they’re still trying to figure out flying. They’re still trying to figure out cars. They’re making things that are like flying cars, but maybe neither of them. Let’s move up to the 1950s, where you write that it was almost a given for people living through this decade that future sedans would come with wings. Summarize for me: What’s the state of, let’s call it, individualized flying vehicular development in the 1950s? What’s going on in this decade?
Lewis-Kraus: Well, so some of this is inseparable from just the rise of what’s called general aviation, which is just dudes flying, or people flying, little planes around. General aviation had a real boom time after the war because you had veterans coming back from the war with pilot training. You had a radically high percentage of American men … who had pilot’s licenses, and so much of the aviation technology from the war found its way into commercial aviation, general aviation. I came across this great ad from the ’50s; Cessna used to run advertising [for] what they called their “family car of the air”, which was a little airplane the size of a Cessna 172 that somebody might recognize. They advertised you could keep it in your garage, and it was just going to make life so much easier.
The ad copy was terrific. It’s about how the missus, when she goes shopping, she’s going to travel 600 miles in a day, and she’s going to fly. Part of the understanding here was that flight in and of itself wasn’t that hard to learn. This was also in a time when America had just gotten used to the idea that, initially, people thought cars were going to be impossible to drive, and then everybody figured out how to drive a car, and then by the ’50s, there was an idea that, yeah, it wasn’t crazy to think that lots of people could have pilot training. Now, of course, one of the provisos there is it’s relatively easy to learn how to fly a little plane in beautiful, windless, sunny conditions, but that’s not going to cover all of your use cases unless you live in Palm Desert or something like that.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Subscribe: Spotify
