Search Engine - Where's my flying car?

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Since not long after the car was invented, we have wanted to stick wings on them and fly them through the sky. This week, we interview writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus about the surprisingly long history of actual, working flying cars in America. Plus, what it's like to actually fly in a modern flying car. Read Gideon's article! Support the show! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Serval AI. If you ever worked with an IT team, you know how quickly their day gets eaten up by repetitive tickets, password resets, access requests, onboarding. It all adds up, and as your company grows, those requests just keep piling higher, pulling your team away from the work that actually moves the business forward. That's where Serval comes in. Serval can cut up to 80% of your help desk tickets, and it's not just another tool layering on AI as an afterthought, while Legacy platforms bolt AI on, Serval was built for AI agents from the ground up. Here's what that looks like. Instead of a new higher onboarding taking hours or even days, a manager just drops a request in Slack and server handles everything instantly. No back and forth, no bottlenecks, Serval even writes automations in

seconds. Serval powers the latest growing companies in the world, like perplexity, Mercore, Verkata, and Clay. Get your team out of the help desk and back to the work they enjoy. Book your free pilot at serval.com slash search. That's SERVR. I'm 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 Ben's Pans'

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 going to 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. Bertha's road trip from Monheim south to her mother's house in Fortsheim ignited the German imagination. really the world's 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. Bertha's drive represented

the possibility of freedom. The ability, even with your kids in the back seat, 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 makeover. 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 world's first gas station.

A chain breaks, so she stops at a blacksmith. That blacksmith, now arguably the world's first auto mechanic. The Ben's patent motor car was a success. Just a few years later, in 1903, Ford would release the Model A, precursor to the T, the car middle-class people could actually afford, which would spawn a world of Bertha's. 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 30s and 40s. Visions of the future reliably included the suburban dad hopping in his flying car to commute to some workplace. It disappeared in the 1970s. And afterwards, the flying car really just existed in our culture as something to fight about. Where's my flying car? These days, you have some people who say over-regulation 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. Did you bike here from Brooklyn? Yeah.

I'm sure that you should send my 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, 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.

Like, what's the origin story of you getting curious about this? So, you know, on the one hand, doing a flying car story just seemed like kind of a lark. And, you know, there's a long history of stories that are like, flying cars are just a couple years away. So to me, I need to figure out a way that this story was going to be interesting, kind of irrespective of when flying cars are coming and in what form. Although, you know, 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. And even dating back to the 30s 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 find themselves around in little Cessna's 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 50s. And in fact, in one of the books I read, came across these ads from the 50s for the Cessna flying car of the air that talked about how every middle-class family was going to have an airplane parked in their garage, and like the missus was going to, when she went shopping, she was going to fly there. 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-Rodable aircraft from 1935. A combination automobile and airplane that can make 70 miles an hour, 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 has 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 Arrow 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. He designed and built the Arrow 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 Mr. Bean.

The conversion takes but a few minutes. No more trouble than changing a tire and a lot more fun. This one also takes off and flies. A real flying car before my dad was born. The absolute best one, also from the 40s, was the conveyor 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. It's just that on a basic level, cars and airplanes have different missions and different requirements. You want different things out of them. 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. Gideon pointed out to me something about the story I told at the top of this episode.

The story of Bertha Bens and the various genius improvisatory fixes she'd made on her motorcars maiden voyage, Bertha Bens 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 like once you have people inside an aircraft. Right. Had Bertha Bens 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 like 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. Way more punishing. But in the example of the Converer car, there was this famous test flight where the test pilot looked at the wrong fuel gauge. And instead of looking at the airplanes 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. 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. 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. 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 commercial? 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. Some of them come home and they have this vision of, like, I liked flying. I could imagine in 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. 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, you know, 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, you know, people wanted something that would allow them to reliably get around in any weather. And like a little airplane is much harder for that. 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. 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 event. Onstage, Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, and a big white button up, versus Peter Teal, 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 Teal is dressed in Chino's and a blazer with a shirt that, I have to say, is somewhat rickishly unbuttoned. The debate tonight is about the technology industry. What has it done for us lately? Here's how the moderator introduces Peter Teal's position.

You have said that the problem with elites is that. 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, states, we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. Peter Thiel.

Well, I don't, you know, I think, Eric, you do a fantastic job as Google's Minister of Propaganda. And, 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. 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. Cars got better. You went, 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 super-sonic.

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 going to go on a podcast and suggest Peter Thiel's ever been right about anything. Do you think he has a point here? Like how much of this is a problem of regulation? So I think one of the things that interested me about the stories I went along is that there's a very big difference between the attitudes of the kind of like a self-appointed mandarin of Silicon Valley who make these like 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 like coming up with these grand metanarrations. about like why we don't solve problems anymore. So, you know, the second that you start to like 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. need 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 like 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 like how we've regulated ourselves to death, nuclear is what they're really thinking about because as of, you know, starting in the early 70s, but then decisively with the meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, like, it becomes virtually impossible to build new nuclear power plants in America. And this is something that, like, a lot of the environmental activists at the time were just wrong and alarmist about. And, like, 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, like a lot of it for them comes down to, like, just energy. And And so Teal's whole story, and part of his explanation for one, I don't have flying cars, is that, like, 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's 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 the same speed.

And he was like... But they do look the same as they did in the 19th. Well, I mean, they look the same because, like, there are certain principles of aerodynamics. And he was... You're not going to 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, like, a 787, like, sure, they kind of like look the same from the outside, but actually, like, they're completely different machines. And in the meantime, like, they fly so much farther.

They're, like, 80% more fuel efficient. They also fly themselves now in a way that they definitely did not use to. And they're infinitely safer. The last fatal commercial crash in America was a lot of. in Buffalo in 2009. And like, that's completely insane. It's very easy to take that for granted because, like, 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? Like, this is a miracle that, like, we move millions of people through tubes in the sky and, like, 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 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, you know, there's been like tons of technological innovation. The thing just doesn't look that different. Yeah, the experience of the thing is. 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? Is that like the biggest problem you have is that it'll take you like 30 minutes too long to get to the airport. So like, 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 Jutson had a flying pod car that like folded, literally folded up into a suitcase. And like, what did he do with this? He used it to like get to work. Right. Right. Right. 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. Yeah. He didn't see that happy. I remember an ad, a Jetson's ad for not littering, where they said the reason that they

lived in the sky was because pollution was so bad. They had to push their houses above the smog. The 21st century is really terrific. Um, with just one exception. Smog. Um, All they want a gift?

So that's not so good. Fortunately, my house can rise above the air pollution, but your lungs can't. We could all use it. So that's not so good. So you're saying, like, the thing that this 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, like, this is something that you kind of hear in the, like, boosterish ideological circles, is you have people basically saying, like, we're making bad cost-benefit decisions as a society. And you'll hear people say, like, we tolerate 40,000 road fatalities a year. And we tolerate zero aviation deaths. So, like, shouldn't we kind of, like, loosen up on the aviation side? And, like, maybe we should allow some more experimentation. And, like, we'll just pay the cost with some extra deaths. And-

I find that argument provocative. It's provocative, but no pilot. No person who knows about any. 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 like 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 there, like, there was a real mandate here. This was not an example where people were. 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 to, just did not seem to make a kind of like mass commercial version of a private aerial vehicle plausible until about 15 years ago. 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. That's after some ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Instaccar.

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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 V-Tol, vertical takeoff and landing craft. But it's a flying car, the way Netflix is TV, podcasts or 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.

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. And like, this is the story of almost everybody you meet in this industry.

Like 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. It looks chunky, sort of like a... 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 anything 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 a rest and he walks away. That 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 engineering. year. 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 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. Gideon 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. And 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. Yes. 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. So, you know, if you have a vineyard that needs surveying, this would be great. But it's kind of like the same way on these 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, it's, 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. Really? 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 year 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. 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. 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 halopads 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 10 years, once it becomes a volume of business, they would want to bring it down to basically the cost of a ride share. So, like, $3 a month. 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.

So 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 ride share. 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. So, use case one, flying golf carts for the rich and famous. Use case two, ride share for the Icarus family. The last use case we talked about, the most unlikely one, but the most interesting.

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, deindustrialized, like, it's going to breathe new life into these deindustrialized places. Because a person living in Scranton could, in theory, in 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, 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, 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 technologists, 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 McMansions and 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

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you a better deal. So bring us your bill. Walk in, running, pogo sticking, teleport if you can. Ride on the back of a rollerblading yak or flying on the wings of a majestic falcon. Any way you can, bring your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal on the best on the best overall mobile network performance U.S. second half 2025, all rights reserved. Must provide a very recent postpaid consumer mobile bill in the name of the person redeeming the deal. Additional terms, conditions, and restrictions supply. 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. 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 golden eye 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 said is starting. 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 are 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, seven to 10 or 14 days.

But, 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 trained. She just, like, comes out with us. 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, 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? Like I feel like we're at me, I would be like, I can do seven and four. You don't have to do the cutting edge abbreviated flying card trading 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 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 in and I try to explain this to my wife. I'm like, well, I'm going to fly this experimental aircraft made a plastic. But they're going to train me. They're going to train me in a simulator and three niggies. I'm going to be able to do it. And she was like, wait, what? They asked me if I play golden iron. Yeah.

And I was like, come on. Well, what I said were I was like, look, you know, I'm going to go out there for five days. They're in Palo Alto. So 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...

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. Because 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. 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 bear. And then they show me in the simulator room, which just like had a couch on 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. It's 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. So right away, I was like, oh, is it like fun to fly? And he was like, oh, I'm never flown in. 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. It's not that different than 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 Sharon on, like I didn't say anything obviously because I don'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 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? You 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, they're 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. So 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 money until 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. And 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 rodent, rack 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, like, this is somebody who, like, test drives Bugatti's 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, like, the second I got into the simulator, I was like, oh, this is cool as hell. Like, They sort of dispense with a lot of the initial training of like, we're going to go over checklists and do ground exercises.

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 there's strapping goggles on and then you're controlling the thing with you. 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.

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 200 feet now it's 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. Purple means like 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 like the cognitive load of paying attention to like what's my

speed what are my battery levels at especially because like this 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 five 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, 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, by the way, none of these things happen in modern video games. It's not, like, since Golden Eye, all video games have been turned into, like, I guess they just need. meant you know how to use a joystick. Yeah, they meant you know how to use a joystick. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, no, but I think it was, I think it was also a cognitive fluid 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 the thing. flies itself. You do have to fly it. So we got really serious. And then like the next morning, I drove out to this air strip, like in the Sacramento Delta, maybe 40 miles used to 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 the sense for like the ignition feeling, the up and down. Yeah. How high up? 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. Yeah, 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 blow or 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? 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.

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, like various plane crash survivors, 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. I had to do, like, a twisting, yawing ascent. What's a yawing ascent? Like, yawning 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. And then 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 was just like breath-thinking 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 of the sudden?

And I was like, who cares about all the other shit attached to this? Like, who cares about, like, the regulatory story or the technology story? Like, this is just, like, cool as hell. It, like, really, like, 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. Like, I never want to land. I just want to, like, take off the, like, light out for the hills, you know? 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, like, they just made everything else feel like kind of irrelevant, all this. Well, who's 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 flights. Yes, yes, definitely. Yeah. 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 and set? 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, like, this is so cool. It makes me so happy that there's, like, 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, like, an extension of your bond. 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 Cars 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 Shruthy Pinnaminani. It is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking this week by Mary Mathis. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bizarrean.

Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Burman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perelo, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Nora Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schaft.

Our agent is Orrin 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. Hey, business owners. The NFL season is a big revenue driver. Now there's a smarter way to get ready.

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