The year is 2015. “Mad scientist” Doc Brown has just brought wide-eyed teenager Marty McFly to the future in style: aboard a flying DeLorean. Although the time travelers are out of place, their mode of transportation is not. Cars zip by in the sky.
We’re now 10 years past the future envisioned in Back to the Future Part II, and still no flying cars.
But aerial automobiles, a mainstay of sci-fi and fantasy stories since the early 1900s, may soon be reality. The technology to make flying cars already exists, says Xiaosong Du, an aerospace engineer at Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla.