Gideon Lewis-Kraus at The New Yorker:
While one segment of Silicon Valley lamented the perpetual absence of flying cars, another, it turns out, was quietly building them—or, at least, something flying-car adjacent. Just three months after the Founders Fund manifesto appeared, a Canadian inventor named Marcus Leng invited his neighbors and a couple of friends to his rural property, north of Lake Ontario. Leng was in his early fifties, with a bowl cut of coarse graying hair. He instructed his guests to park their (conventional) cars in a row and cower behind them. He strapped on a helmet and boarded a device that he’d built in his basement. It had a narrow single-seat chassis and two fixed wings, one in front and one in back, each with four small propellers. It was at once sleek and ungainly, as if a baby orca had been hitched to two snowplows. Observers described it, for lack of a better comparison, as looking like a U.F.O. Leng called it the BlackFly.
Leng, who had been flying since he was a teen-ager, had long dreamed of the “perfect aircraft”—something “that didn’t require a pilot’s license, and could take off or land anywhere.” He’d paid close attention to past designs but suspected that their propulsion systems were too heavy, too complex, and too unresponsive.
more here.