by R.U. Serious — May 17, 2025
The idea of the flying car has never gone away. It drifts in and out of popular consciousness like a recurring fever—promising escape, speed, vertical transcendence—then receding when physics, regulation, or economic reality reassert themselves. It doesn’t matter how many prototypes stall or how many press releases dissolve into vapor; the fantasy is sticky. It survives because it tells a story people want to believe: that the way out of traffic, stagnation, and civic collapse is not reform or infrastructure, but altitude. Elon wants to go underground; everyone else wants to use the air above. Either way, the dream is the same: avoid the mess by moving through a dimension that hasn’t been fully privatized yet.
We know it will be a reality eventually—some form of it, at some scale—but what we don’t know is when. And when it does arrive, it’s unlikely to look the way its advocates currently imagine.
What’s changed recently is not the desire, but the machinery around it. Money is being allocated. Supply chains are adapting. Governments—some cautious, others reckless—are preparing the legal scaffolding for a future that moves above the sidewalk. From Shenzhen to Orlando, the language has shifted from “if” to “when,” and “when” has started appearing in bullet points with fiscal years attached.
This has created the illusion of imminence. It’s a convincing illusion, supported by glossy renders, advanced composites, and early-stage delivery timelines that seem to leapfrog political inertia. But timelines are not systems, and systems are what flight depends on. Quietly, the people who actually design and certify these aircraft still speak in longer arcs. Twenty years, if we’re lucky. Longer, if we’re honest. The engineering is easier than the governance, and the governance is easier than the choreography of trust. Likely, one day you’ll wake up to an eVTOL Uber idling three stories above your cul-de-sac, ready to carry you across town for the price of a latte. But it won’t be next week.
NetJets has committed to purchasing 150 aircraft from Lilium, a company whose press kits outnumber its flight hours. BETA Technologies is pouring concrete in upstate New York. Chinese automakers are developing autonomous aerial vehicles while simultaneously issuing provisional license plates for flying cars that do not yet have regulatory approval to leave the ground. There are startups marketing eVTOLs directly to consumers, no pilot’s license required—just a generous credit line and a willingness to operate in the legal gray zones of private airspace.
But beneath the confident renderings and executive keynotes lies a quieter complication, one that cannot be solved by investment or brute innovation alone. It has nothing to do with lift, or batteries, or materials science. The fundamental obstacle isn’t technical—it’s environmental. Not the climate, but the atmosphere of logistics, regulation, noise tolerance, and behavioral entropy we inhabit together. In short: air traffic.
The current architecture of flight control was designed to manage a relatively small number of vehicles operating along rigid corridors, moving between designated zones, under constant oversight. That system does not—and cannot—scale to accommodate thousands of asynchronous, semi-autonomous aircraft launching from parking garages, corporate rooftops, and residential lawns. There is no air map for that world. There is no authority prepared to orchestrate it. And there is certainly no public consensus about who should be allowed to participate in it.
In theory, this is where artificial intelligence steps in—not as a feature of the aircraft, but as the only imaginable operator of the sky itself. Without an omniscient, real-time system capable of interpreting position, speed, intent, and emergency response across a dense mesh of unpredictable actors, the network fails before it’s built. Human air traffic control can’t scale to this density. Political oversight can’t react at this speed. If the skies are going to open, they will only stay open under the careful, invisible pressure of software that doesn’t blink.
And if that sounds improbable—entrusting your morning commute to a machine intelligence monitoring five thousand other vehicles, three dozen weather fronts, and a rogue Amazon drone—it is. But it’s less improbable than any human alternative. As Sherlock Holmes was known to say, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
—Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
There are architectural consequences to a shift like this. A flying car isn’t just a mode of transport—it’s a zoning problem. What does an eVTOL landing site look like in Midtown Manhattan? In Paris? In Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Singapore? These are not helipads. They are multi-use nodes that must accommodate charging infrastructure, enforce restricted access, and conform to local building codes, liability protocols, and decibel thresholds. Every landing becomes an event—electrical, legal, acoustic, social.
And still, the question of the last mile remains. You can descend onto the roof of a high-rise, but unless the rest of your route has been accounted for—elevators, access points, security gates, weatherproof corridors—you haven’t solved the commute. You’ve just shortened it and added new points of failure.
Complicating this further is the existing aerial ecosystem. The drones are already here. Not the military kind, but the consumer kind—the ones flown by teenagers filming skate videos, amateur delivery pilots, and real estate agents trying to capture sunsets over developments that will never be finished. Their presence is constant, unregulated, and invisible to most airspace managers. Multiply that behavior by a few million and you begin to see the friction that awaits any serious commuter network.
And then there are the birds.
Sure, there’s the half-serious meme about birds not being real—but literally. The organic, ungovernable population of migratory wildlife that will never read an air traffic bulletin or install a firmware update could derail the whole system. A single Canadian goose can disable a commercial jet engine. That’s not folklore; it’s baseline reality. Now imagine a lightweight, battery-powered commuter craft intersecting a flock of disoriented crows over a suburb where no one agreed to any of this.
We’re building an aerial infrastructure atop an environment that still doesn’t know how to distinguish between a multimillion-dollar aircraft and a confused pigeon.
It’s not that the future is impossible. It’s that the air is already occupied.
Filed from a grounded airstrip once reserved for Cold War bombers, now leased to a VC-backed startup beta-testing hoverboards for dogs.
—R.U. Serious
