If you ever drive through Seattle-area traffic, you may have had some version of this thought: “I wish my car had wings right now.”
The flying car is a symbol of mid-century optimism about the future, and it seemed almost inevitable at the time that, sooner or later, we’d have them. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. But we actually came a lot closer to getting them than you might think, thanks to a Washington man named Molton Taylor and his Aerocar.
Jake Schultz, an analyst at Boeing, wrote a book about Taylor, called “A Drive in the Clouds.” It traces Taylor’s fascination with flying, his vision for a winged automobile, and the fairly mundane obstacles that did the project in.
He joined KPLU‘s Gabriel Spitzer on our show “Sound Effect” to talk about the flying car that almost was.
