Even though you'll park it IN your garage, drive it to your nearest airstrip, and pilot it to your destination, don't think of the Transition as a flying car. Carl Dietrich, the MIT aeronautical-engineering graduate student who is designing the vehicle, prefers the term "roadable aircraft"meaning a plane that drives, not a car that flies. "We try to steer away from The Jetsons," Dietrich says. "It's a step in that direction, but a baby step."

Aviation experts are brewing an aggressive plan to create a new generation of small planes that would be guided by a computerized flight control network and provide inexpensive air taxi service among the nation's more than 5,000 rural and suburban airports. These planes would have to be cheaper, possess simpler avionics, and fly faster than comparable aircraft available today. Eager to jump-start these revolutionary designs, NASA's Langley Research Center held a student competition. Shown here are the first- and second-place winners in the Technology Innovation category.