The next century of flight: inventing the Jetsons' car

One hundred years ago, the Wright Brothers looked to the skies above a thin strand of North Carolina sand and imagined something that the world had never before seen: a machine that could actually fly. In that spirit, Eric Feron looks to today's skies and imagines something slightly less bold, yet perhaps nearly as profound: a plane delivering his pizza.

On the centennial of humankind's first controlled flight - which lasted all of 12 seconds and extended 120 feet - a host of 21st-century Wright brothers are pioneering new forms of flight.

By the end of the second century of winged travel, they suggest, a handful of futuristic dreams will likely become a reality. Computers will be pilots, wings will change shape mid-flight, and yes, everyone could have a flying car.

The ideas range from the intriguing to the obvious, the far-fetched to the almost certain. Yet among many physicists and futurists, there is a growing sense that the ultimate arbiters of how far flight will progress this century will not be governments or scientists. Everyday Americans, they say, will determine the shape of science with their pocketbooks.

"The changes are going to come because of economic impetus," says Dr. Feron, an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

That has not always been the case. To the contrary, the great advances of 20th-century aeronautics have been shaped by war and the threat of war - leading the federal government to dump billions of dollars into research and design. World War I advanced the world from cloth biplanes to steel-hulled aircraft. Jets emerged from World War II. And the entire American space program resulted from the Cold War.

In this emerging era of relative peace and prosperity, though, Americans' concern over their pocketbooks may prove to be more important than national pride or politics. If the past century was about winning military superiority and exploring the frontiers of flight, then the coming 100 years could be more about making flight more accessible to all.

Andrew Hahn thinks about that constantly. As a member of the Personal Air Vehicle project at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., his job, essentially, is to invent the Jetson's car. Like many of his colleagues, Mr. Hahn's aim is to turn the Technicolor dreams of past futurists and reshape them into something that could actually make its way into garages by 2103

It is, technically speaking, not a car at all, but rather a very small plane. It could seat five comfortably and take off and land in a field no larger than a baseball diamond. Hahn confesses that the laws of physics have confounded any hopes of instant levitation. But the prospect of taxiing a small air "car" with fold-up wings on neighborhood roads to the tiny local airfield doesn't seem too far-fetched.

He's heard of airport shops becoming malls for local residents. Why couldn't big malls add landing fields to serve as local airports for rural shoppers? Commuters could live farther from work and ease highway congestion. The goal, says Hahn, is to find a way that flying can fit into Americans' daily lives. "Before the Model T [introduced mass production], cars were toys for the rich," says Hahn. "Essentially what we're trying to do is invent a Model T for the air."

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