Comment on Silicon Valley takes on the flying car

More than a dozen startups backed by deep-pocketed industry figures like Larry Page, a Google founder — along with big aerospace firms like Airbus, Uber and even the government of Dubai — are taking on the dream of the flying car. The approaches by the companies vary, and the realization of their competing visions seems far in the future, but they have one thing in common: a belief that one day regular people should be able to fly their own vehicles around town. The company has attracted intense interest because of Page and its chief executive, Sebastian Thrun, an influential technologist and self-driving-car pioneer who is the founding director of Google’s X lab. The flight, just 15 feet above the water, circled over the lake about 20 or 30 yards from shore, and after about five minutes Robertson steered back to a floating landing pad at the end of a dock. The company hopes to create an audience of enthusiasts and hobbyists, who can now pay $100 to sign up for a $2,000 discount on the retail price of a Flyer to “gain exclusive access to Kitty Hawk experiences and demonstrations where a select few will get the chance to ride the Flyer.” Two years ago, Thrun recruited two other pioneers, Robertson and Todd Reichert who were aerospace engineers from AeroVelo, a University of Toronto spin-off company that won a coveted prize for a human-powered helicopter and set the land speed record for a bicycle last year. Two years ago, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration began developing an air traffic control system meant for managing all sorts of vehicles. While electric propeller-driven motors seem promising, today’s battery technology cannot support flights of a reasonable distance, say a 30- or 50-mile commute. “How is this going to work?