The Future Will Not Have Flying Cars, But Who Needs Them?

Technological and regulatory innovation are driving a boom in aviation that’s an echo of its past.

Transportation is one area where the advances in manufacturing and technology is most obvious. The world has been completely transformed by the last 150 years worth of transportation developments — chances are, wherever you are right now, if you look outside you’ll see automobiles or a road designed to accommodate them. Of course, you can only build so many roads, and it is in the realm of flight where we may be seeing an echo of 20th century innovation.

It’s hard to overstate the explosive rate of development that followed the invention of airplanes. From first flight in 1903 to first combat in 1911, first commercial passengers in 1914, through a breakneck sprint that brought humans from a puttering few yards along the shore at Kitty Hawk, to Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier less than 50 years later.

The insane acceleration of aircraft development was thanks to an intersection of enabling technologies emerging at the same time. The first powered flight was made possible by the new gas engines and insights into aerodynamics. Once flight was proven possible, new tools for design and experimentation drove the development of more complex and capable aircraft, making it possible to move more things further and faster until, thanks to the parallel emergence of new manufacturing technologies, before long the global society came to depends on flight. The development and refinement of technologies like boats, wheels, shoes, and other fundamental means of transportation spans millennia; airplanes covered more developmental ground in just a few decades.

“I like to say all the cool stuff and every idea in aerospace was envisioned somewhere between the 1930s and 1960s,” says Billy Thalheimer, CEO of REGENT, a company that’s part of a gathering wave of innovative new aviation companies. The company is also an excellent example of how opportunity and innovation are intersecting in this emerging aero-space. The company is building electric-powered aircraft that take off from, fly over, and descend back to water. You might be thinking, seaplanes have been a thing for a long time, but there are some key differences. For one, instead of operating like a boat with something like pontoons, it operates like a hydrofoil, with fins underneath the water that mean it nearly hovers until takeoff. When airborne, it acts as what is called a wing-in-ground craft, flying low enough so that the air displaced by the wing creates a cushion of air that helps keep it aloft. These designs add a lot of efficiency, but require recently developed flight control software to keep the plane stable. In fact, calling it a plane is something of a misnomer.

“We build something that looks like an airplane,” Thalheimer said. “But there is a human captain at the helm of this vessel. They’re not going to be doing stick-and-rudder stuff, so all the airplane controls and the things that make it dangerous — roll, pitch, altitude control, takeoff, landing — that’s automatically governed by the digital flight control. So the only controls we give to the captain are boat controls: left and right, fast and slow.”

Making something transition from water to air and back smoothly with controls more simple than most video games is, in fact, an incredibly complex challenge. Though the idea has been around for some time, new technologies made it possible, not just computer controls, but batteries that replace the need for carrying heavy fuels. The other example for innovators, though, is in the much less sexy space of regulations. By operating as a boat, the company is able to navigate a regulatory environment that is less complex and onerous than the ones governing air travel. It’s a subtle kind of disruption, innovation by way of niche-building and weaving between regulatory frameworks.

Uber famously developed and shipped their product faster than regulators could react, but there’s also immense untapped potential in finding ways to leverage regulation to serve a new conceptual category. An airborne craft, regulated like a boat, can be built to different standards than an airplane rated to fly at higher altitudes, utilize highly refined fuels, and share the sky with other craft heading between airport. A new category of high speed, semi-aerial water ferries could bring passengers to and from any destination with access to a dock, and since most people live near water, that’s a big potential market — little wonder the company already claims some 6 billion dollars worth of back orders for its craft, impressive for a company that’s only been around for about two years.

They are just one example, though. A raft of new aircraft companies are angling on everything from vertical takeoff and landing taxis to drone-based logistics to electric airborne ride sharing. The coming generation of flight is powered by electric motors, operated by smart computer control systems, and fly in ways or under conditions that have the potential to forge new lines connecting points A and B. A new ‘S curve‘ for aviation could reinvent the way we conceive of transportation overall. Even NASA is getting in on the game, with their Advanced Air Mobility Mission, which aims to make local, regional, intraregional, urban and other untapped opportunities for air transit, “using revolutionary new aircraft that are only just now becoming possible.”

We were taught to expect a future of flying cars. In reality, with new computer, electrification, engineering and manufacturing technologies intersecting with traditional modes of transport in dire need of update — both to be more sustainable and to serve growing populations — we may get a future where the car isn’t the model against which we compare every other form of transportation. 200 years ago, people raced steamboats up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany, about 150 miles. A century ago, people were covering the same distance in just over an hour by train. Things have slowed down since then, but in just a few years we may be back on the Hudson River again, and then over it, outpacing the fastest Amtrak.

The upshot of all this is that even areas where immense development has already occurred — whether in aircraft or sea craft — the possibility for a paradigm shift still exists. Sometimes it just takes the maturation of other enabling technologies, like computers, flight control systems, or just an innovative read on the regulatory landscape. When airplanes first emerged, it was into a clear blue sky where no rules had been written. Nowadays, the networks of transportation, technology and regulation are thickly interwoven, so the challenge is finding where new ideas can fit and thrive. For an innovator, constraints are sources of creativity, and it’s more exciting vision for the future than anything the Jetsons ever came up with.