In this age of eternal flight delays, traveling from New York to Miami in the scheduled three hours sounds like a fantasy. Yet within a decade, aircraft designer Abe Karem plans to fix that by bypassing congested runways in his tilt-rotor, vertical-takeoff commercial plane, the AeroTrain. Sitting on a helipad with its twin rotors tilted straight up, the craft can take off vertically and fly like a helicopter. Once the plane has reached a safe altitude of 50 feet, the pilot will tilt the rotors forward and fly the craft like an airplane.

In 1959, William Bertelsen became the unlikely star of a national science magazine.

He wasn't a scientist. He was the country doctor of Neponset, Ill., his hometown of 500 people; he was married, with three girls and one boy. In all his days at school, he hadn't taken a single class in aerodynamics, and only took one course in physics.

Then, at 38, his career in cooking up futuristic, unorthodox vehicles began.

At 4 PM on April 19, 1984, a team of air traffic controllers at an airport in the east of England reportedly watched a strange, bright, circular vehicle touch down, then blast off again at a tremendous speed and with a near vertical trajectory. Although they didn't want their names to be included in the report covering the event, they believed it was a UFO. And they were sober.