Flying Car

"Roads? Where we're going we don't need -- roads."

—Doc Brown, Back to The Future

So your hero needs a Cool Car. But what do you do when missiles, Nitro Boost and ejector seats don't suffice to show just how much of a Badass he is? Simple: make it a flying car.

It's a quick way for writers to show just how super a Superhero is, particularly if they are a Badass Normal. Or sometimes it's just a lazy way to demonstrate a show is set in the future. Nothing screams "futuristic city-scape" better than giant buildings with all the space between them crammed with flying shiny specks! Either way, you need a flying car! Just ask Dante and Randall.

The lack of flying cars in Real Life is a common complaint. The fact that they would for all intents and purposes be personal aircraft, and require the same regulations and specialized skill as planes and helicopters is a big reason why we haven't seen any in our lifetimes. Several flying cars have been invented in Real Life, but the concept has always ended up getting scrapped because said flying cars used up a lot of fuel... and had a penchant for crash-landing when they ran out. Most fictional cars Hand Wave this by saying something about an Anti Gravity element in place.

Examples of Flying Car include:

Anime and Manga

  • Satsuki of Mahou Sensei Negima has a flying Dining-Car Restaurant. Having two Mad Scientist friends sure is handy.
  • Flying cars exist in Silent Moebius, but have yet to replace ground vehicles. The AMP uses 'spinner' patrol cars and Rally has a flying limousine.
  • Wallace's Air Car in Pokémon Special. It can even be controlled remotely, a fact Ruby exploited twice during the final battles of the Ruby/Sapphire Story Arc.
  • There's lots of flying cars in Dragonball Z.
  • Howl's Moving Castle shows us the Steampunk version, with flapping wings and steam engines.
  • Bakusou Kyoudai Let's & Go! has Magnum mini 4WD series' "Magnum Tornado", the Nitro Boost making them able to fly and spin in the sky for a short time.
  • Trinity Blood has an aerodynamics-challenged version.

Comic Books

  • The Fantastic Four's Fantasti-Car.
  • In the Marvel Universe, SHIELD has a small fleet of flying cars.
  • The Star Rocket Racer, the rarely-seen personal flying auto of both the Golden Age Star-Spangled Kid and Stargirl of the Justice Society of America. Ever since she got her Cosmic Rod she hasn't really had a need for it.
  • She Hulk once had a flying car (a gift from a benevolent alien) but later lost it.
  • The Supermobile was a flying car piloted by Superman. Why would Superman need a flying car, you ask?
    • The comics' excuse was that the Supermobile was invented by Superman at a time he'd lost his powers, and needed something to help him fight Amazo. The car was capable of duplicating most of his powers, was constructed of a super-hard metal, and could shield him from kryptonite.
  • The Batcraft flown by Jim Gordon III, in the computer-generated Cyberpunk Elseworld comic Batman: Digital Justice.
    • In Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin, Dick Grayson and Damien Wayne have a flying Batmobile.
  • A main staple in a lot of Antarctic Press comics. Asrial from Ninja High School converts a junked car into one as part of a challenge if she qualified for a job as a mechanic. It later used as the protagonist main transportation around town. Gina from Gold Digger patented (and often destroyed) "Gina Mobile" can turn into one when needed. And the heroes main transportation in the first half of I Hunt Monsters have one named Kirby that they use to get around the world.
  • Tony Stark´s flying Ferrari also counts.
  • The Batmobile itself became a flying car, as well as a submersible (!) in Frank Miller's All Star Batman and Robin.
  • Chassis was a comic book series built around the sport of rocket car racing.
  • The Whiz Wagon, used by Jimmy Olsen and the Newsboy Legion during Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" tenure at DC in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Fan Works

Film

  • The Spinners from Blade Runner.
  • In The Man With the Golden Gun, a villain escapes with a winged AMC Matador.
  • The Flying Car, a short film taking place in the Askewniverse.
  • Back to The Future Part II makes flying cars commonplace by the year 2015.
    • Apparently the writers really liked this idea, because it was one of the few things from the original script of the first movie to survive.
  • The Fifth Element had lots of these, of course.
  • In The Last Starfighter, Centauri's Cool Car is both a Flying Car and a starship.
  • Luke's speeder in Star Wars was only ever a few inches off the ground, but it did fly, technically...
    • Also, the Coruscant speeder chase in Attack of the Clones. Coruscant seems practically on the verge of having Flying Car traffic jams...
    • All sorts of military and civilian repulsorlift vehicles abound in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Speeder bikes (from Episode VI), airspeeders, hovertrucks, pod racers, swoops...
  • Lady Penelope's pink Ford limousine in the live action Thunderbirds movie.
  • Establishing shots of San Francisco in the Star Trek films usually feature vehicles flying across the skyline. Apparently, people can't just beam themselves to work.
    • Dude, it's the states. People there need the pleasure of driving like pedestrians need oxygen.
    • Subverted in the 2009 film with a young Kirk having a car which very decidedly could not fly, although he was still pursued by a cop on flying bike.
  • In Spaceballs, Lone Starr's flying Winnebago, the Eagle V. Princess Vespa's space car also qualifies. It was a Mercedes!
  • Perhaps the earliest example in film would be the small personal airplanes seen flitting amongst the buildings in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. They may not have looked like cars, but they seemed to fill the same function. This was probably also the Trope Maker for the whole "throw in some flying cars zipping between giant buildings to establish that we're in The Future" thing, and it remains popular to this day.
  • Repo Man and the 1964 Chevrolet Malibu.
  • Cars featured a fantasy sequence by Lightning McQueen where he becomes Dinoco Lightning Storm McQueen, flies through the air, and dispatches evil tripods with missiles. Given that his very next fantasy involves opening nights and the Hollywood Walk of fame, he may have been fantasising about film-star ambitions.
    • In Cars 2, espionage agent Holly Shiftwell can fly. Mater manages to do so when he deploys both his parachute and his rocket thrusters.
  • The French film Fantômas se déchaîne ("Fantômas Unleashed") ends with the titular villain escaping in a Citroën DS that converts into an airplane.
  • Howard Stark presented a prototype in Captain America: The First Avenger. It was still a couple years from being ready.
  • The students of Sky High go to school in a flying bus.

Literature

  • Sirius' flying motorbike from Harry Potter.
    • In the second book, Arthur Weasley enchanted a Ford Anglia to make it able to fly. Because of a loophole, it wouldn't be considered illegal as long as nobody flew on it.
  • Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
  • The Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein features one of the coolest cars of all time: Gay Deceiver. It doesn't just fly, it flies at hypersonic speed with retractible swing wings. It is capable of vertical take-offs and landings. It can even do semiballistic sub-orbital flights just past the edge of space. Oh, and it gets upgraded with a time machine that can visit alternate universes, some of them fictional ones, including Oz and Wonderland, as well as the ability to teleport within the same universe. Seats four, six if they're really friendly. Plus, it has a magic annex (thanks to one of those visits to Oz) with a pair of fully-functional bathrooms and a never-empty picnic basket. And a superintelligent talking computer autopilot with a wicked sense of humor and a sexy contralto voice. And a highly illegal (but well-hidden) laser cannon.
    • Pretty much all of Heinlein's "Future History" stories have flying cars. One of them (The Puppet Masters) even describes the North American radar net as being called the "No Sparrow Shall Fall" network that tracks every car (note there are about 250 million registered passenger vehicles currently in the USA). Despite the fact that he was considered one of the "kings" of Hard Science Fiction, he never would admit that flying cars are Awesome but Impractical.
  • The In Death series, set Twenty Minutes Into the Future. Then, as now, cop equipment is crappy.
  • The 3rd World Products series. Though those were van to small bus size and larger.
  • Philip K. Dick had "ionscraft" in The Ganymede Takeover.
  • Like most Speculative Fiction settings with mature Anti Gravity technology, Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga has a wide variety of flying vehicles:
    • Float bikes (flying motorcycle analog)
    • Lightfliers (2-4 passenger, high performance)
    • Aircars (4-8 passenger. Police/security models have varying armament options)
    • Lift Vans (mass cargo/passenger transport)
    • Anything larger will usually have orbital capability, moving into cargo shuttle or Drop Ship territory.
  • Dune's ornithopters (or just "thopter"s) probably count, although they may be more equivalent to helicopters. Note that ornithopters are a real invention, people have been attempting (and failing) to build practical ones for a century now.
  • Played hilariously straight in Good Omens when Aziraphale decides that 4-5 miles an hour on a small scooter is not fast enough to prevent the apocalypse. So he makes it fly. Very, very fast.
  • The aptly named SkyKar in Villain.net.
  • The volantors of Chasm City seen in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series. Their most explicit appearance is in the novella Diamond Dogs.
  • Lowly Worm from the Richard Scarry books apparantly drives an apple-shaped car that also serves as a helicopter since its "leaves" actually function as the helicopter's blades. Except how the heck is he able to drive it if he doesn't have any arms?

Live-Action TV

  • Flying Motor Bikes from Galactica 1980.
  • Professor McClaine's flying car in Joe 90 has about the most uncool design a flying vehicle ever had.
  • Supercar from the Gerry Anderson series of the same name.
  • One of the first things Billy did in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers once he started getting savvy with alien technology was make a flying Volkswagen Beetle he dubbed the "Rad Bug". Yes, they could, technically, teleport if they wanted to, but even Billy could tell that a flying car was cooler. And it did come in handy the times they couldn't teleport.
  • Automan could have Cursor instantly convert his Cool Car into a Cool Plane.
  • The third Doctor in Doctor Who (while grounded on Earth by the Time Lords) briefly used a futuristic flying car dubbed by fans as "The Whomobile".
    • More recently, the new series has "New Earth", which features flying cars. In its second appearance, the cars have the worst traffic jam in the history of the universe in "Gridlock".

Music

  • In Jaga Jazzist's Animated Music Video for "Animal Chin", the band travels in two ordinary-looking cars, which bounce wildly on the ground before inexplicably taking to the skies.

Newspaper Comics

  • Calvin and Hobbes: In one Sunday comic, Calvin daydreams that his parents let him drive the family car. He then makes the car fly simply by driving so fast that the speedometer breaks.

Tabletop Games

  • Shadowrun has a selection of hovercars in addition to normal cars, helicopters, and airplanes. The really fun thing is that if you have a reasonable DM, it is possible to afford a hovercar at character creation (it will eat up around half your cash, though)
  • Teenagers From Outer Space has spacesters: look like a car, move like a flying saucer. No teenager can afford to buy one—but a clever human/alien pair can build one by, yes, cannibalizing parts from a car and a flying saucer.
  • Warhammer 40,000 has "skimmers" - not quite free-flying antigrav vehicles. In the Imperium they are expensive and rarely seen outside Mechanicus and the elites of Hive Worlds. Armored ones are used as light attack craft. They are more common among the Tau and Eldar (Craftworld and Dark, anyway).

Video Games

  • Dribble and Spitz's taxi in the Wario Ware series is capable of flight and space travel.
  • Beam Breakers was a computer game in which you drove antigravity cars in a Fifth Element-esque city. It was also awesome...
  • The Pheonix Hovercar in X-COM: Apocalypse. Together with the Hoverbikes, they're excellent vehicles for Zerg Rushing Flying Saucers in the early and mid game.
  • Some of the Choro Q games have jet packs and wings as add-ons which allow your car to fly.
  • Common in Mass Effect, due to the ubiquity of Element Zero-based technology. In the "Lair of the Shadow Broker" DLC for Mass Effect 2, you even get to pilot one in a scene reminiscent of Attack of the Clones.
  • Space Taxi.
  • Professor Layton and the Unwound Future features the Laytonmobile, a decidedly dated car...which, thanks to Don Paolo, can sprout wings and an airscrew and transform into a fully functional aeroplane.

Luke: "Professor, where did you learn to fly a plane?"
Layton: "Plane? This is an automobile."

Web Original

(on matter replicators) The end of everything will come on the day when anyone can make anything. Except a flying car, those will still be useless.

  • Fenspace has flying cars that are spaceworthy. They still need fuel, though they don't seem to need oxidizers for the fuel.
  • Schlock Mercenary has Artificial Gravity developed to the point that flying cars are common (and flight belts, but those are less common). Of course, those are powered by annihilation plants (which is a ball of superstrong alloy loaded with neutronium and antimatter, that is distressingly close to armor piercing low-yield nuclear shell) and some of the implications are that on anything that easily counts as a shuttle "manual operation under influence" is commonly a capital offence - of course, it requires tampering with the hardware to remove overrides, and customer vehicles may not even have manual controls to begin with - their autopilots are pretty good at avoiding damage.

Western Animation

  • About half of the cars in Batman Beyond, including the Batmobile, can fly. There are still roads though, covered with wheeled vehicles.
  • The Falconcar on Dynomutt Dog Wonder.
  • British cartoon hero Danger Mouse had what looked suspiciously like a flight-capable version of James Bond's Lotus Esprit.
  • Heroes aren't the only ones to get the sweet rides: Dr Claw had his getaway car which could function as both a jet and a submarine.
  • In Futurama all cars are flying cars. Nobody even knows what wheels are. And yet they still crawl along in traffic jams.
    • Like most Futurama gags, they only "don't know what wheels are" for the one episode where it's funny.
  • At least one in M.A.S.K. The doors were "wings". There was also a flying bicycle.
  • The ATV series of Rupert Bear featured a cart named "The Chariot", which was capable of flight. The CGI series featured a more modern looking flying car.
  • The Jetsons' jet-car, probably one of most-cited examples of a flying car as far as the general public's concerned.
  • Common in the future presented in Meet the Robinsons. The Time Machine is even engineered from one a la Back to The Future.
  • Flint Lockwood made an attempt of building one without wings in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs though actually builds a working and winged one by the climax
  • Tracks' alternate mode in Transformers Generation 1 was a Corvette Stingray with pop-out wings
    • In Transformers Cybertron, Optimus' vehicle mode has a flight configuration. The side panels swing out and then rotate down to become large wings, and the ladder/cannon on either one swings around so that it still faces forward. His vehicle mode? A fire truck. That's right, he turns into a flying fire truck.
  • Bob's car in ReBoot is a flying car, which tends to break down and drop like a stone.
  • Due to being tricked out by her twin super genius brothers, Kim Possible's car has this capability.
  • Goldie of Goldie Gold and Action Jack has a flying limo.

Real Life

  • As pointed out at the top of the page, flying cars have been invented in Real Life. The idea has just never managed to get off the ground [pun intended] because the flying cars used up way too much fuel while airborne. Also, they had a nasty tendency to crash when they ran out (which happened much more quickly than one might think.) Add expense, complexity of operation, and the relative practicality of an automobile as transportation... and you see the problem.
    • The critical problem with 'flying cars' is that they are aircraft. As such you can't fly one without a pilot's license, and air traffic control would go insane trying to sort out millions of aircraft flying around each other in a small area. Most existing 'flying cars' are better described as roadable aircraft. Most small airfields are in rural areas, so you have the minor problem of arriving at an airfield and having no transport to the nearest town, except for a taxi or folding bicycle. The idea is that you could detach the wings and propeller, then drive the remaining vehicle by road into town. They are not really designed as a replacement for your normal car.
      • Not to mention that traffic collisions are bad enough with how cars are now. Imagine how much worse they'd get if you factored in the fact that the car's going to be falling from 300+ feet above the ground.
  • Top Gear‍'‍s James May made a documentary on the subject, concluding that despite the safety concerns the main problem with flying cars would be the paperwork.
  • Vaporware example: the Moller Skycar.
    • The Moller website does have some lovely quotes, though:

You've always known it was just a matter of time before the world demanded some kind of flying machine which would replace the automobile. [...] No matter how you look at it the automobile is only an interim step on our evolutionary path to independence from gravity. That's all it will ever be.

    • Several others have been tried.
    • There was even a flying Pinto.
    • Of course making it fly safely is only the first step, you then have to get FAA approval and find backing. the Taylor Aerocar managed the second step, but not quite the third.
  • The closest Real Life equivalent to the flying car of science fiction is the helicopter. Unfortunately, they're expensive, hard to fly, and make much more noise than you would want to live next to, which is why the average person doesn't own one.
    • The good news is that we now have computers that can make helicopters significantly easier to fly. Of course that doesn't help the noise, and actually makes them more expensive... so...
    • Actually, if one doesn't mind a little less fuel efficiency there's always tip-jet powered helicopters, whose rotor blades are not powered by a central shaft, but instead a jet at the tips. The Nazis tried it using ramjets at the end, but it's less complicated and safer to use compressed air pumped through the rotor assembly by a compressor inside the body. Not only is this system quieter, but the lack of a torqued shaft removes the need for a tail rotor and dramatically decreases the slow response time of control inputs, making it much easier to fly than traditional helicopters.
    • Small airplanes, such as those made by Cessna, are also pretty close to the science fiction conception of flying airplanes cars in everything but ease of control and appearance. Also, they are very expensive.
      • A used, very basic Cessna might cost about the same as a (new, good, but not luxury-level) automobile. Learning to fly it and getting a license to do so is probably a bigger difficulty, and many would be averse to the risk to begin with. Then there's additional maintenance costs and complications. And a small plane simply isn't as practical as an automobile for transportation, which is probably the biggest reason why it can't be treated as an equivalent. You can't exactly take a Cessna on a grocery shopping trip, and even for, say, visiting out-of-town relatives, you'll need some way to get from the airstrip to their front door. Of course, part of the reason cars are so comparatively practical is that we have an entire infrastructure designed around them... But it's hard to imagine doing the same for conventional airplanes.
  • The ParaJet SkyCar is an unusually simple example. It looks like a dune buggy with a parawing and a propeller strapped to the back. Largely because that's exactly what it is. But it works! As a bonus, if the engine fails or runs out of fuel, the buggy will simply glide to the ground with its "wing" acting as a parachute, rather than suffer a deadly crash. Judging from the design, the main purpose will be fun and recreation. Shipping is expected to start this year (2010) -- it remains to be seen whether this will turn out to be Vaporware or not.
  • Urban Aeronautics' proposed VTOL aircraft certainly looks like a large flying car, though flying cars is not what the company intends to create (they want to build aircraft useful for rescue operations, and other non-personal uses). However, the goal is to build a compact, safe, quiet, relatively easy-to-control aircraft that is capable of operating in an urban environment, including safely manoeuvring between buildings while dealing with turbulence, and is capable of remaining airborne while in contact with a physical object (like, say, the side of a building). It certainly sounds like the company may inadvertently take a big step towards creating working flying cars if they succeed. Currently they have a scale prototype undergoing extensive flight testing.
  • Boeing sunk six million dollars into something called the "Sky Commuter" program in the 1980s. This prototype, which was apparently sold on Ebay in 2008, is all that remains. It looks beautiful, and very much like a proper science fiction flying car, but it seems it did not fly particularly well.
  • This lot look like they might be close to actually selling transforming flying cars commercially. Hope you have $200,000 on you, though.
    • This highlights an interesting, if subtle, distinction between "flying cars" and "road-able aircraft", which is a term you'll often read if studying this topic. The Terrafugia "Transition" is an airplane that happens to have compact, folding wings and the ability to drive on regular roads. You still need to take off and land at an airport, and fly the vehicle like any small plane—but you can drive it home from the airstrip after you land, too, as if it were a car. (You can also drive instead of flying if weather conditions are bad). Not quite as glamorous as a full flying car might be -- but in the end, far more practical.
  • While other flying car designs are more like "airplanes you can drive on the road", this I-TEC design is more like "a car that can also fly". It only gets 40 MPH in the air, but it's pretty speedy on the road (see around 2:50 in the video), and the company seems to have serious plans for what they want to do with it.
  • The Avrocar. It never really took off, figuratively or literally.
  • Volkswagen's China branch appears to have come up with a floating car. This particular concept car relies on magnetic levitation instead of conventional engines, meaning it'll require a lot of specialized infrastructure to be drivable.
  • Hovecrafts, technically. Well, they don't actually touch the ground when in motion. It happens that their flight ceiling is about an inch.
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