aviation pioneer

Popular Science has been daydreaming about the flying car for decades. (Seriously, I’ve been to the office. You think an editor is working diligently, and then you glance over his shoulder – and there’s the proof. Dozens of doodles of flying cars.)

Burt Rutan, the visionary aircraft designer who created the first privately funded manned space vehicle, SpaceShipOne, told me a story recently about his EV1 electric car. He had happily driven the vehicle for years until General Motors decided not only to take it off the market but to take back all the leased vehicles that were on the road. â€The day they came to get it, I was on the verge of hiding the thing in a cave,†he recalled.