The Future of Flight

eVTOL—electric Vertical Take-off and Landing Aircraft—Projected to Revolutionize Urban Transportation

By James Patterson

For as long as humans have wanted to fly, they have wanted to fly better. In the first instance of success, in 9th century Andalucia, the inventor Abbas ibn Firnas attached feathers to his arms, and glided some indeterminate distance “faster than the phoenix.” He afterwards decided a tail would have helped. Six centuries later, Leonardo da Vinci realized humans would need an exterior device to get off the ground, and sketched diagrams for the aerial screw and the hang glider. Not long after, in the Ottoman Empire, scientist LagârI Hasan Çelebi pioneered jet travel by jumping on a winged cone stuffed with 50 pounds of gunpowder. (Adding, in that way, crewed flight, along ...