Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying Car Factories

Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories

Three years ago, Silicon Valley developed a fleeting infatuation with a startup called Zee.Aero. The company had set up shop right next to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., which was nosey, because Google tightly controls most of the land in the area. Then a reporter spotted patent filings showcasing Zee.Aero was working on a petite, all-electric plane that could take off and land vertically—a flying car.

In the handful of news articles that ensued, all the startup would say was that it wasn’t affiliated with Google or any other technology company. Then it stopped answering media inquiries altogether. Employees say they were even given wallet-size cards with instructions on how to deflect questions from reporters. After that, the only information that trickled out came from fledgling pilots, who sometimes posted pictures of a strange-looking plane taking off from a nearby airport.

Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, June thirteen – 26, 2016. Subscribe now.

Turns out, Zee.Aero doesn’t belong to Google or its holding company, Alphabet. It belongs to Larry Page, Google’s co-founder. Page has personally funded Zee.Aero since its launch in two thousand ten while requesting that his involvement stay hidden from the public, according to ten people with intimate skill of the company. Zee.Aero, however, is just one part of Page’s plan to usher in an age of personalized air travel, free from gridlocked streets and the cramped indignities of modern flight. Like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Page is using his private fortune to build the future of his childhood fantasies.

The Zee.Aero headquarters, located at 2700 Broderick Way, is a 30,000-square-foot, two-story white building with an ugly, blocky design and an industrial feel. Page primarily restricted the Zee.Aero squad to the very first floor, retaining the 2nd floor for a man cave worthy of a multibillionaire: bedroom, bathroom, expensive paintings, a treadmill-like climbing wall, and one of SpaceX’s very first rocket engines—a bounty from his pal Musk. As part of the secrecy, Zee.Aero employees didn’t refer to Page by name; he was known as GUS, the man upstairs. Soon enough, they needed the upstairs space, too, and engineers looked on in awe as GUS’s paintings, exercise gear, and rocket engine were hauled away.

“What emerges in the next five to ten years will be incredible”

Zee.Aero now employs close to one hundred fifty people. Its operations have expanded to an airport hangar in Hollister, about a 70-minute drive south from Mountain View, where a pair of prototype aircraft takes regular test flights. The company also has a manufacturing facility on NASA’s Ames Research Center campus at the edge of Mountain View. Page has spent more than $100 million on Zee.Aero, say two of the people familiar with the company, and he’s not done yet. Last year a 2nd Page-backed flying-car startup, Kitty Hawk, began operations and registered its headquarters to a two-story office building on the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac about a half-mile away from Zee’s offices. Kitty Hawk’s staffers, sequestered from the Zee.Aero team, are working on a challenging design. Its president, according to two thousand fifteen business filings, was Sebastian Thrun, the godfather of Google’s self-driving car program and the founder of research division Google X. Page and Google declined to speak about Zee.Aero or Kitty Hawk, as did Thrun.

Flying cars, of course, are ridiculous. Lone-wolf inventors have attempted to build them for decades, with little to demonstrate for their efforts besides disappointed investors and depleted bank accounts. Those failures have done little to lessen the yearning: In the nerd hierarchy of needs, the flying car is up there with downloadable brains and a working holodeck.

But better materials, autonomous navigation systems, and other technical advances have wooed a growing figure of clever, wealthy, and evidently serious people that within the next few years we’ll have a self-flying car that takes off and grounds vertically—or at least a puny, electrified, mostly autonomous commuter plane. About a dozen companies around the world, including startups and giant aerospace manufacturers, are working on prototypes. Furthest along, it shows up, are the companies Page is calmly funding. “Over the past five years, there have been these tremendous advances in the underlounging technology,” says Mark Moore, an aeronautical engineer who’s spent his career designing advanced aircraft at NASA. “What shows up in the next five to ten years will be incredible.”

Northern California in particular has had a long fascination with flying cars. In one thousand nine hundred twenty seven a now mostly forgotten engineer named Alexander Weygers very first began thinking up the design for a flying saucer that could zip inbetween rooftops. In one thousand nine hundred forty five he received a patent for what he described as a “discopter,” a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) machine with room inwards for passengers to walk around, cook, and sleep. He depicted smaller versions landing in pods atop buildings in downtown San Francisco. No discopters were built, however it’s believed that the U.S. Army, which paid visits to Weygers’s compound in Carmel Valley, Calif., tinkered with a prototype.

Today, the world’s premier flying-car enthusiast is Paul Moller, 79, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Davis. Fifty years ago, when he was instructing mechanical and aeronautical engineering, he developed a specific vision: an aircraft you could park in your garage, drive a few blocks to a puny runway, then take skyward. He tested his very first prototype, the XM-2, in 1966. The XM-2 resembled a flying saucer with a seat at its center protected by a plastic bubble. It managed an altitude of four feet, while graduate students held it constant with ropes. “We were worried if the machine got out of control, we might kill a few people,” Moller says.

“Self-flying aircraft is so much lighter than what the auto companies are attempting to do with self-driving cars”

In one thousand nine hundred eighty nine his M200X made it to fifty feet above the ground. Then came the M150 Skycar, the M400 Skycar, the 100LS, the 200LS, the Neuera 200, and the Firefly, all variations on the same Jetsonian idea. In January 2000, Moller gave a speech on flying cars at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the birthplace of the graphical user interface and, for nerds, sacred ground. Afterward, an engineer in his late 20s walked up and said he was interested in the concept but was skeptical that streetworthy private aircraft were technically feasible; at the time, Moller didn’t recognize youthfull Larry Page.

Moller kept attempting. He says he burned through more than $100 million developing his designs and proclaimed individual bankruptcy in 2009.

That same year, Moore, the NASA researcher, published a paper describing a concept plane called the Puffin. Moore’s big idea was to use electrical motors, which are quieter and safer and have far fewer moving parts than internal combustion engines or conventional turbines. “By going to electrical propulsion, you get rid of the vast majority of the complexity, cost, and unreliability,” Moore says. “This is why companies looking at this area aren’t insane.” Moore credits Musk’s Tesla and other automakers with advancing the technology. “Electrified motors were mostly used in industrial settings where they were stationary, and no one cared about their weight that much,” Moore says. “It wasn’t until the automotive industry got interested that they began to get more lightweight.”

Carmakers invested in other areas, too, that are helpful for building petite electrified planes, particularly batteries and the semiconductors that control them. Self-driving systems, like the kind Google uses in its Koala cars, are perhaps a decade away from mainstream use on the roads, but they may already be good enough for the skies. “Self-flying aircraft is so much lighter than what the auto companies are attempting to do with self-driving cars,” Moore says.

Moore’s paper circulated, rekindling excitement. Sometime in 2009, a petite group of engineers had begun meeting in Silicon Valley to discuss funding an electric-plane project. One of them was JoeBen Bevirt, a mechanical engineer and entrepreneur who had studied under Moller at UC Davis. Another was Ilan Kroo, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at Stanford. And another was Page. Albeit it primarily looked as if they might all team up, Kroo and Page broke off to begin Zee.Aero. Alone, Bevirt founded Joby Aviation, a company he hopes will strike Zee.Aero to market and prove that his efforts with Moller—and the older man’s life’s work—weren’t in vain.

Bevirt possesses a 500-acre compound near Santa Cruz, Calif. To get there, you turn onto idyllic California State Route one and drive past the boardwalk, a few blocks of de-robe malls, and fifteen miles of undeveloped, windswept coastal dunes. Then you turn onto a mud road, pass a lake and a grove of towering redwoods, and walk through gardens overflowing with lavender and roses. It’s here that Bevirt has built a series of workshops, plus housing for about half of his thirty five employees.

Bevirt grew up nearby on an electricity-free commune where his mom worked as a midwife and his father built custom-built homes. From a youthfull age, he learned his way around toolboxes and construction sites, and was an avid reader. After consuming the sci-fi classic The Forever Formula in elementary school, he determined he dreamed to build the kind of private aircraft the book’s hero flew and persuaded a friend to help. “We built lots of prototypes, but they always crashed and burned,” he says. They shifted to custom-made bikes.

The flying-car desire stuck with Bevirt as he entered UC Davis in one thousand nine hundred ninety one to probe mechanical engineering, and he quickly found himself working for Moller, building one prototype after another. Bevirt eventually concluded their collective desire wouldn’t be feasible until battery and motor technology improved. He figured he’d need to wait twenty years. “Paul had been working on this for thirty years, and he was fifty years ahead of his time,” he says.

Bevirt got his bachelor’s, and then a master’s in mechanical engineering from Stanford. He worked in biotech after graduation, co-founding a company called Velocity11 that built robots to sequence DNA. His next company, called Joby (his childhood nickname), sold camera accessories such as limber plastic tripods. Joby turned Bevirt into a multimillionaire. In two thousand eight he commenced Joby Energy, a maker of airborne wind turbines whose technology Google later acquired. The 20-year mark was approaching, so in two thousand nine he also used some of his wealth to buy the five hundred acres and begin Joby Aviation.

Its headquarters is an engineer’s fantasyland. The focal point is a large wooden building where two dozen workers sit at a few rows of desks jammed with computers. Aside from the clusters of large black monitors, the place feels more like a barn than an office. Aircraft prototypes dangle from the ceiling, as does a thick climbing cord for exercise. In the open kitchen, abutting a long redwood dining table in one corner, a cook uses ingredients from the nearby gardens to prepare three meals a day. While the smell of a Malaysian curry fills the room, a banjo twangs from speakers overhead.

The manufacturing happens at a series of buildings about one hundred yards downhill, past gardens and an outdoor clay pizza oven. One of the buildings is an airy warehouse with a giant oven inwards—but this one isn’t for pizza. It’s used to cure the carbon-fiber figures of the planes and looks like a Quonset hut. Former members of Oracle’s America’s Cup sailing team, some of the world’s leading materials experts, oversee the curing process, baking the carbon fiber at about 194F. In another building, engineers build cantaloupe-size electrical motors; in a third, they test electronics; in a fourth, they put the ending touches on wings and other parts. Out back, there’s a large truck with an extendible arm atop its trailer like a cherry picker, which lifts propellers high into the air so engineers can perform wind tests while driving down a road at high speed. Robotic prototypes whirr around.

Bevirt funded Joby Aviation by himself until last year, when he was joined by Paul Sciarra, one of the co-founders of Pinterest. Sciarra grew up in Fresh Jersey, trained himself to code, hit it big with Pinterest, then went looking for something fresh to throw himself into. He, too, concluded that electrified motors and batteries appeared to have applications well beyond the auto industry. “The objective is to build a product that impacts the lives of lots of people,” Sciarra says. “Not just folks that are inexperienced pilots or wealthy, but everyone.”

Sciarra and Bevirt hope to begin flying a human-scale prototype plane later this year. They won’t give the exact specifications but suggest that it could hold, say, a family of four and travel one hundred miles or so on a total charge. The vehicle looks like a plane-helicopter hybrid packed with propellers, about eight mounted on the wings and tail. For takeoff and landing, the propellers string up horizontally like a helicopter’s and rotate for forward propulsion once in the air. Joby Aviation has already built smaller prototypes and has models of the plane’s assets, wings, and propellers scattered about the manufacturing facilities. Bevirt and Sciarra see the vehicle taking off from parking garages, roofs, or areas alongside highways. They want to suggest flights as an Uber-like service—summon a plane when you need it.

The Joby aircraft looks similar to other vehicles being built around the world. In May the German company E-volo conducted manned flights of its Volocopter, a two-seat aircraft powered by eighteen propellers. Other flying-car startups include AeroMobil, Lilium Aviation, and Terrafugia. Even Airbus has built a two-seater prototype at its Silicon Valley labs, say two people familiar with the designs.

In 2013, Crimson Bull held one of its Flugtag competitions in Long Beach, Calif. Flugtag is a televised spectacle where hobbyists see how far they can launch their homemade flying machines off a dock. It’s more about entertainment than sustained flight—the contraptions generally dive straight into the water, and everyone laughs. At this one, however, a group called the Chicken Whisperers stunned the assembled crowd. Dressed in full-body baby-chick garments, the team shoved its glider off the dock and observed as it cruised two hundred fifty eight feet, cracking the previous record of two hundred twenty nine feet. The chickens danced. They clucked. They took a swim in the water. They were all Zee.Aero employees in disguise, having joy, attempting out some designs.

In the six years since its founding, Zee.Aero has hired some of the brightest youthfull aerospace designers, software engineers, and experts in motor and battery hardware. They’ve come from places such as SpaceX, NASA, and Boeing, and they’re all pursuing after the purpose introduced succinctly on Zee.Aero’s spare website: “We’re switching individual aviation.”

At its outset, Zee.Aero was led by Kroo, the Stanford aerospace professor. He wrote the original Zee.Aero patent, No. 9,242,738, which shows a strange-looking one-seater aircraft with a long, narrow figure. Behind the craft’s cockpit, rows of horizontal propellers run along both sides of the bod of the plane to treat the VTOL work. There’s also a wing at the back with two more propellers that add forward thrust.

Zee.Aero worked on this design for a duo of years. Puny, computer-controlled versions of the aircraft were photographed by reporters and hobbyists sitting in the parking lot at two thousand seven hundred Broderick Way. None of the prototypes were big enough to fit a human.

Over time, the company realized this might not be the best design, according to three former Zee.Aero employees. Page also grew dissatisfied with the rate of progress. In 2015, Kroo returned to instruct at Stanford total time but continued to advise Zee.Aero as “principal scientist,” while the company’s engineering chief, Eric Allison, took over as chief executive officer. Under Allison, the company began work on a simpler, more conventional-looking design, now coming to life at the Hollister Municipal Airport.

Hollister is a city of about 35,000 nestled among garlic and artichoke farms. Its airport is popular among inexperienced pilots because of favorable winds and a lack of commercial air traffic. There’s a flight school, a sky-diving business, and a few run-down buildings. The least shabby structure is Building Nineteen, which has been taken over by a dozen or so Zee.Aero workers.

People working at the airport have caught peeks of two Zee.Aero craft in latest months

The airport is open for business from eight a.m. to five p.m. on weekdays, but Zee.Aero employees frequently run test flights when no one else is around. Nonetheless, people working at the airport have caught peeks of two Zee.Aero craft in latest months. Both have a narrow figure, a bulbous cockpit with room for one person upfront, and a wing at the back. In industry lingo, the planes are pushers, with two propellers in the rear. One of the prototypes looks like a petite conventional plane; the other has catches sight of for puny propellers along the main assets, three per side.

When the aircraft take off, they sound like air raid sirens.

The people at the airport haven’t heard Page’s name mentioned, but they long ago concluded Zee.Aero’s possessor is super rich. Zee.Aero employees receive catered lunches—sometimes $900 worth of barbecue from Armadillo Willy’s, a local chain. Recently, the company purchased a $1 million helicopter to fly alongside the planes and gather data.

For Page, this project is deeply individual. He’s been known to spend evenings with Musk, both guys thinking aloud about ways to fundamentally switch transportation. Musk wants to build an upscale electrical VTOL jet; Page wants the down-market version. In an interview with a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter a duo of years ago, Page confessed that he longed to take more risks like his industrialist friend. He dreamed to dabble with fresh forms of investment outside the restrains of Google and back projects that focused on atoms, not bits. “There’s a lot of money going into internet startup kinds of things, which is fine,” he said. “But for some of the real problems we face, I think we need other kinds of investments, too. I have youthful kids, so I would like them to be safe. I’d like for pedestrians to be much safer. I’d like for blind people and old people and youthful people to get around.”

The former Zee.Aero employees describe the company as a joy place to work but don’t downplay the serious expectations from Page. He wants the flying-car future, and he wants it now. If the atmosphere grew tense with Kroo’s departure, it didn’t lighten up when the Kitty Hawk team arrived.

Kitty Hawk has about a dozen engineers, including some Zee.Aero veterans. Others came from Aerovelo, a startup whose claim to fame was winning the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize in 2013, for building a human-powered helicopter that could stay aloft for more than a minute. Kitty Hawk employees include Emerick Oshiro, who did self-driving car work at Google, and David Estrada, who treated legal affairs for Google X. They all listed the company as their employer on LinkedIn until they were contacted by Bloomberg Businessweek, at which point they erased any mention of Kitty Hawk from their profiles.

Page has drawn a line separating his two flying-car teams, employees say. It’s common for the Zee.Aero engineers to speculate over lunch about what their Kitty Hawk counterparts are up to. The former Zee.Aero employees think Page desired to see if a smaller team could stir swifter, and the added pressure on Zee.Aero didn’t hurt. Two people say Kitty Hawk is working on something that resembles a giant version of a quadcopter drone.

There’s no ensure that Kitty Hawk’s or Zee.Aero’s or anyone else’s flying cars will ever take to the skies. There are still technology problems to solve, regulatory hurdles to cross, and urgent safety questions to response. Page once vowed to a colleague that if his involvement in the sector ever became public, he might pull support from the companies.

Here’s hoping that’s not true. If nothing else, these projects showcase that bold, some might say far-fetched, invention is alive and well in Silicon Valley. The place that spent the past decade focused on social network apps has trained its engineering powers on robots, cars, and now aviation. “We were promised flying cars, and instead what we got was one hundred forty characters,” a local venture capitalist once put it. Page and his cohorts are attempting to get us both.

Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying Car Factories

Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories

Three years ago, Silicon Valley developed a fleeting infatuation with a startup called Zee.Aero. The company had set up shop right next to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., which was nosey, because Google tightly controls most of the land in the area. Then a reporter spotted patent filings displaying Zee.Aero was working on a petite, all-electric plane that could take off and land vertically—a flying car.

In the handful of news articles that ensued, all the startup would say was that it wasn’t affiliated with Google or any other technology company. Then it stopped answering media inquiries altogether. Employees say they were even given wallet-size cards with instructions on how to deflect questions from reporters. After that, the only information that trickled out came from fledgling pilots, who from time to time posted pictures of a strange-looking plane taking off from a nearby airport.

Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, June thirteen – 26, 2016. Subscribe now.

Turns out, Zee.Aero doesn’t belong to Google or its holding company, Alphabet. It belongs to Larry Page, Google’s co-founder. Page has personally funded Zee.Aero since its launch in two thousand ten while requiring that his involvement stay hidden from the public, according to ten people with intimate skill of the company. Zee.Aero, however, is just one part of Page’s plan to usher in an age of personalized air travel, free from gridlocked streets and the cramped indignities of modern flight. Like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Page is using his private fortune to build the future of his childhood desires.

The Zee.Aero headquarters, located at 2700 Broderick Way, is a 30,000-square-foot, two-story white building with an ugly, blocky design and an industrial feel. Page originally restricted the Zee.Aero squad to the very first floor, retaining the 2nd floor for a man cave worthy of a multibillionaire: bedroom, bathroom, expensive paintings, a treadmill-like climbing wall, and one of SpaceX’s very first rocket engines—a bounty from his pal Musk. As part of the secrecy, Zee.Aero employees didn’t refer to Page by name; he was known as GUS, the man upstairs. Soon enough, they needed the upstairs space, too, and engineers looked on in awe as GUS’s paintings, exercise gear, and rocket engine were hauled away.

“What emerges in the next five to ten years will be incredible”

Flying cars, of course, are ridiculous. Lone-wolf inventors have attempted to build them for decades, with little to display for their efforts besides disappointed investors and depleted bank accounts. Those failures have done little to lessen the yearning: In the nerd hierarchy of needs, the flying car is up there with downloadable brains and a working holodeck.

But better materials, autonomous navigation systems, and other technical advances have coaxed a growing assets of clever, wealthy, and evidently serious people that within the next few years we’ll have a self-flying car that takes off and grounds vertically—or at least a puny, electrified, mostly autonomous commuter plane. About a dozen companies around the world, including startups and giant aerospace manufacturers, are working on prototypes. Furthest along, it shows up, are the companies Page is calmly funding. “Over the past five years, there have been these tremendous advances in the underlounging technology,” says Mark Moore, an aeronautical engineer who’s spent his career designing advanced aircraft at NASA. “What shows up in the next five to ten years will be incredible.”

Today, the world’s premier flying-car enthusiast is Paul Moller, 79, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Davis. Fifty years ago, when he was instructing mechanical and aeronautical engineering, he developed a specific vision: an aircraft you could park in your garage, drive a few blocks to a puny runway, then take skyward. He tested his very first prototype, the XM-2, in 1966. The XM-2 resembled a flying saucer with a seat at its center protected by a plastic bubble. It managed an altitude of four feet, while graduate students held it stable with ropes. “We were worried if the machine got out of control, we might kill a few people,” Moller says.

“Self-flying aircraft is so much lighter than what the auto companies are attempting to do with self-driving cars”

Moller kept attempting. He says he burned through more than $100 million developing his designs and proclaimed individual bankruptcy in 2009.

That same year, Moore, the NASA researcher, published a paper describing a concept plane called the Puffin. Moore’s big idea was to use electrical motors, which are quieter and safer and have far fewer moving parts than internal combustion engines or conventional turbines. “By going to electrified propulsion, you get rid of the vast majority of the complexity, cost, and unreliability,” Moore says. “This is why companies looking at this area aren’t insane.” Moore credits Musk’s Tesla and other automakers with advancing the technology. “Electrified motors were mostly used in industrial settings where they were stationary, and no one cared about their weight that much,” Moore says. “It wasn’t until the automotive industry got interested that they began to get more lightweight.”

Carmakers invested in other areas, too, that are helpful for building petite electrical planes, particularly batteries and the semiconductors that control them. Self-driving systems, like the kind Google uses in its Koala cars, are perhaps a decade away from mainstream use on the roads, but they may already be good enough for the skies. “Self-flying aircraft is so much lighter than what the auto companies are attempting to do with self-driving cars,” Moore says.

Moore’s paper circulated, rekindling excitement. Sometime in 2009, a puny group of engineers had begun meeting in Silicon Valley to discuss funding an electric-plane project. One of them was JoeBen Bevirt, a mechanical engineer and entrepreneur who had studied under Moller at UC Davis. Another was Ilan Kroo, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at Stanford. And another was Page. Albeit it originally looked as if they might all team up, Kroo and Page broke off to embark Zee.Aero. Alone, Bevirt founded Joby Aviation, a company he hopes will hit Zee.Aero to market and prove that his efforts with Moller—and the older man’s life’s work—weren’t in vain.

Bevirt grew up nearby on an electricity-free commune where his mom worked as a midwife and his father built custom-built homes. From a youthful age, he learned his way around toolboxes and construction sites, and was an avid reader. After consuming the sci-fi classic The Forever Formula in elementary school, he determined he dreamed to build the kind of individual aircraft the book’s hero flew and persuaded a friend to help. “We built lots of prototypes, but they always crashed and burned,” he says. They shifted to custom-built bikes.

The flying-car desire stuck with Bevirt as he entered UC Davis in one thousand nine hundred ninety one to explore mechanical engineering, and he quickly found himself working for Moller, building one prototype after another. Bevirt eventually concluded their collective fantasy wouldn’t be feasible until battery and motor technology improved. He figured he’d need to wait twenty years. “Paul had been working on this for thirty years, and he was fifty years ahead of his time,” he says.

Bevirt got his bachelor’s, and then a master’s in mechanical engineering from Stanford. He worked in biotech after graduation, co-founding a company called Velocity11 that built robots to sequence DNA. His next company, called Joby (his childhood nickname), sold camera accessories such as supple plastic tripods. Joby turned Bevirt into a multimillionaire. In two thousand eight he embarked Joby Energy, a maker of airborne wind turbines whose technology Google later acquired. The 20-year mark was approaching, so in two thousand nine he also used some of his wealth to buy the five hundred acres and embark Joby Aviation.

Its headquarters is an engineer’s fantasyland. The focal point is a large wooden building where two dozen workers sit at a few rows of desks jammed with computers. Aside from the clusters of large black monitors, the place feels more like a barn than an office. Aircraft prototypes drape from the ceiling, as does a thick climbing strap for exercise. In the open kitchen, abutting a long redwood dining table in one corner, a cook uses ingredients from the nearby gardens to prepare three meals a day. While the smell of a Malaysian curry fills the room, a banjo twangs from speakers overhead.

The manufacturing happens at a series of buildings about one hundred yards downhill, past gardens and an outdoor clay pizza oven. One of the buildings is an airy warehouse with a giant oven inwards—but this one isn’t for pizza. It’s used to cure the carbon-fiber figures of the planes and looks like a Quonset hut. Former members of Oracle’s America’s Cup sailing team, some of the world’s leading materials experts, oversee the curing process, baking the carbon fiber at about 194F. In another building, engineers build cantaloupe-size electrified motors; in a third, they test electronics; in a fourth, they put the ending touches on wings and other parts. Out back, there’s a large truck with an extendible arm atop its trailer like a cherry picker, which elevates propellers high into the air so engineers can perform wind tests while driving down a road at high speed. Robotic prototypes whirr around.

Bevirt funded Joby Aviation by himself until last year, when he was joined by Paul Sciarra, one of the co-founders of Pinterest. Sciarra grew up in Fresh Jersey, instructed himself to code, hit it big with Pinterest, then went looking for something fresh to throw himself into. He, too, concluded that electrical motors and batteries appeared to have applications well beyond the auto industry. “The objective is to build a product that impacts the lives of lots of people,” Sciarra says. “Not just folks that are fledgling pilots or wealthy, but everyone.”

Sciarra and Bevirt hope to begin flying a human-scale prototype plane later this year. They won’t give the exact specifications but suggest that it could hold, say, a family of four and travel one hundred miles or so on a utter charge. The vehicle looks like a plane-helicopter hybrid packed with propellers, about eight mounted on the wings and tail. For takeoff and landing, the propellers suspend horizontally like a helicopter’s and rotate for forward propulsion once in the air. Joby Aviation has already built smaller prototypes and has models of the plane’s bod, wings, and propellers scattered about the manufacturing facilities. Bevirt and Sciarra see the vehicle taking off from parking garages, roofs, or areas alongside highways. They want to suggest flights as an Uber-like service—summon a plane when you need it.

In 2013, Crimson Bull held one of its Flugtag competitions in Long Beach, Calif. Flugtag is a televised spectacle where hobbyists see how far they can launch their homemade flying machines off a dock. It’s more about entertainment than sustained flight—the contraptions generally dive straight into the water, and everyone laughs. At this one, tho’, a group called the Chicken Whisperers stunned the assembled crowd. Dressed in full-body baby-chick garments, the team shoved its glider off the dock and observed as it cruised two hundred fifty eight feet, cracking the previous record of two hundred twenty nine feet. The chickens danced. They clucked. They took a swim in the water. They were all Zee.Aero employees in disguise, having joy, attempting out some designs.

In the six years since its founding, Zee.Aero has hired some of the brightest youthfull aerospace designers, software engineers, and experts in motor and battery hardware. They’ve come from places such as SpaceX, NASA, and Boeing, and they’re all pursuing after the aim introduced succinctly on Zee.Aero’s spare website: “We’re switching individual aviation.”

At its outset, Zee.Aero was led by Kroo, the Stanford aerospace professor. He wrote the original Zee.Aero patent, No. 9,242,738, which shows a strange-looking one-seater aircraft with a long, narrow figure. Behind the craft’s cockpit, rows of horizontal propellers run along both sides of the assets of the plane to treat the VTOL work. There’s also a wing at the back with two more propellers that add forward thrust.

People working at the airport have caught peeks of two Zee.Aero craft in latest months

When the aircraft take off, they sound like air raid sirens.

The people at the airport haven’t heard Page’s name mentioned, but they long ago concluded Zee.Aero’s proprietor is super rich. Zee.Aero employees receive catered lunches—sometimes $900 worth of barbecue from Armadillo Willy’s, a local chain. Recently, the company purchased a $1 million helicopter to fly alongside the planes and gather data.

For Page, this project is deeply private. He’s been known to spend evenings with Musk, both dudes thinking aloud about ways to fundamentally switch transportation. Musk wants to build an upscale electrified VTOL jet; Page wants the down-market version. In an interview with a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter a duo of years ago, Page confessed that he longed to take more risks like his industrialist friend. He wished to dabble with fresh forms of investment outside the restrains of Google and back projects that focused on atoms, not bits. “There’s a lot of money going into internet startup kinds of things, which is excellent,” he said. “But for some of the real problems we face, I think we need other kinds of investments, too. I have youthful kids, so I would like them to be safe. I’d like for pedestrians to be much safer. I’d like for blind people and old people and youthful people to get around.”

Page has drawn a line separating his two flying-car teams, employees say. It’s common for the Zee.Aero engineers to speculate over lunch about what their Kitty Hawk counterparts are up to. The former Zee.Aero employees think Page wished to see if a smaller team could budge swifter, and the added pressure on Zee.Aero didn’t hurt. Two people say Kitty Hawk is working on something that resembles a giant version of a quadcopter drone.

There’s no assure that Kitty Hawk’s or Zee.Aero’s or anyone else’s flying cars will ever take to the skies. There are still technology problems to solve, regulatory hurdles to cross, and urgent safety questions to response. Page once vowed to a colleague that if his involvement in the sector ever became public, he might pull support from the companies.

Here’s hoping that’s not true. If nothing else, these projects display that bold, some might say far-fetched, invention is alive and well in Silicon Valley. The place that spent the past decade focused on social network apps has trained its engineering powers on robots, cars, and now aviation. “We were promised flying cars, and instead what we got was one hundred forty characters,” a local venture capitalist once put it. Page and his cohorts are attempting to get us both.

Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying Car Factories

Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories

Three years ago, Silicon Valley developed a fleeting infatuation with a startup called Zee.Aero. The company had set up shop right next to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., which was nosey, because Google tightly controls most of the land in the area. Then a reporter spotted patent filings showcasing Zee.Aero was working on a puny, all-electric plane that could take off and land vertically—a flying car.

In the handful of news articles that ensued, all the startup would say was that it wasn’t affiliated with Google or any other technology company. Then it stopped answering media inquiries altogether. Employees say they were even given wallet-size cards with instructions on how to deflect questions from reporters. After that, the only information that trickled out came from fledgling pilots, who at times posted pictures of a strange-looking plane taking off from a nearby airport.

Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, June thirteen – 26, 2016. Subscribe now.

The Zee.Aero headquarters, located at 2700 Broderick Way, is a 30,000-square-foot, two-story white building with an ugly, blocky design and an industrial feel. Page primarily restricted the Zee.Aero team to the very first floor, retaining the 2nd floor for a man cave worthy of a multibillionaire: bedroom, bathroom, expensive paintings, a treadmill-like climbing wall, and one of SpaceX’s very first rocket engines—a bounty from his pal Musk. As part of the secrecy, Zee.Aero employees didn’t refer to Page by name; he was known as GUS, the man upstairs. Soon enough, they needed the upstairs space, too, and engineers looked on in awe as GUS’s paintings, exercise gear, and rocket engine were hauled away.

“What shows up in the next five to ten years will be incredible”

Zee.Aero now employs close to one hundred fifty people. Its operations have expanded to an airport hangar in Hollister, about a 70-minute drive south from Mountain View, where a pair of prototype aircraft takes regular test flights. The company also has a manufacturing facility on NASA’s Ames Research Center campus at the edge of Mountain View. Page has spent more than $100 million on Zee.Aero, say two of the people familiar with the company, and he’s not done yet. Last year a 2nd Page-backed flying-car startup, Kitty Hawk, began operations and registered its headquarters to a two-story office building on the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac about a half-mile away from Zee’s offices. Kitty Hawk’s staffers, sequestered from the Zee.Aero team, are working on a contesting design. Its president, according to two thousand fifteen business filings, was Sebastian Thrun, the godfather of Google’s self-driving car program and the founder of research division Google X. Page and Google declined to speak about Zee.Aero or Kitty Hawk, as did Thrun.

But better materials, autonomous navigation systems, and other technical advances have wooed a growing figure of brainy, wealthy, and evidently serious people that within the next few years we’ll have a self-flying car that takes off and grounds vertically—or at least a puny, electrical, mostly autonomous commuter plane. About a dozen companies around the world, including startups and giant aerospace manufacturers, are working on prototypes. Furthest along, it shows up, are the companies Page is calmly funding. “Over the past five years, there have been these tremendous advances in the underlounging technology,” says Mark Moore, an aeronautical engineer who’s spent his career designing advanced aircraft at NASA. “What shows up in the next five to ten years will be incredible.”

Northern California in particular has had a long fascination with flying cars. In one thousand nine hundred twenty seven a now mostly forgotten engineer named Alexander Weygers very first began thinking up the design for a flying saucer that could zip inbetween rooftops. In one thousand nine hundred forty five he received a patent for what he described as a “discopter,” a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) machine with room inwards for passengers to walk around, cook, and sleep. He depicted smaller versions landing in pods atop buildings in downtown San Francisco. No discopters were built, tho’ it’s believed that the U.S. Army, which paid visits to Weygers’s compound in Carmel Valley, Calif., tinkered with a prototype.

Today, the world’s premier flying-car enthusiast is Paul Moller, 79, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Davis. Fifty years ago, when he was instructing mechanical and aeronautical engineering, he developed a specific vision: an aircraft you could park in your garage, drive a few blocks to a petite runway, then take skyward. He tested his very first prototype, the XM-2, in 1966. The XM-2 resembled a flying saucer with a seat at its center protected by a plastic bubble. It managed an altitude of four feet, while graduate students held it sustained with ropes. “We were worried if the machine got out of control, we might kill a few people,” Moller says.

“Self-flying aircraft is so much lighter than what the auto companies are attempting to do with self-driving cars”

Moller kept attempting. He says he burned through more than $100 million developing his designs and proclaimed individual bankruptcy in 2009.

That same year, Moore, the NASA researcher, published a paper describing a concept plane called the Puffin. Moore’s big idea was to use electrified motors, which are quieter and safer and have far fewer moving parts than internal combustion engines or conventional turbines. “By going to electrified propulsion, you get rid of the vast majority of the complexity, cost, and unreliability,” Moore says. “This is why companies looking at this area aren’t insane.” Moore credits Musk’s Tesla and other automakers with advancing the technology. “Electrified motors were mostly used in industrial settings where they were stationary, and no one cared about their weight that much,” Moore says. “It wasn’t until the automotive industry got interested that they embarked to get more lightweight.”

Carmakers invested in other areas, too, that are helpful for building puny electrical planes, particularly batteries and the semiconductors that control them. Self-driving systems, like the kind Google uses in its Koala cars, are perhaps a decade away from mainstream use on the roads, but they may already be good enough for the skies. “Self-flying aircraft is so much lighter than what the auto companies are attempting to do with self-driving cars,” Moore says.

Moore’s paper circulated, rekindling excitement. Sometime in 2009, a petite group of engineers had begun meeting in Silicon Valley to discuss funding an electric-plane project. One of them was JoeBen Bevirt, a mechanical engineer and entrepreneur who had studied under Moller at UC Davis. Another was Ilan Kroo, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at Stanford. And another was Page. Albeit it originally looked as if they might all team up, Kroo and Page broke off to embark Zee.Aero. Alone, Bevirt founded Joby Aviation, a company he hopes will hammer Zee.Aero to market and prove that his efforts with Moller—and the older man’s life’s work—weren’t in vain.

Bevirt wields a 500-acre compound near Santa Cruz, Calif. To get there, you turn onto idyllic California State Route one and drive past the boardwalk, a few blocks of de-robe malls, and fifteen miles of undeveloped, windswept coastal dunes. Then you turn onto a mud road, pass a lake and a grove of towering redwoods, and walk through gardens overflowing with lavender and roses. It’s here that Bevirt has built a series of workshops, plus housing for about half of his thirty five employees.

Bevirt grew up nearby on an electricity-free commune where his mom worked as a midwife and his father built custom-built homes. From a youthfull age, he learned his way around toolboxes and construction sites, and was an avid reader. After consuming the sci-fi classic The Forever Formula in elementary school, he determined he wished to build the kind of private aircraft the book’s hero flew and persuaded a friend to help. “We built lots of prototypes, but they always crashed and burned,” he says. They shifted to custom-built bikes.

The flying-car wish stuck with Bevirt as he entered UC Davis in one thousand nine hundred ninety one to explore mechanical engineering, and he quickly found himself working for Moller, building one prototype after another. Bevirt eventually concluded their collective wish wouldn’t be feasible until battery and motor technology improved. He figured he’d need to wait twenty years. “Paul had been working on this for thirty years, and he was fifty years ahead of his time,” he says.

Bevirt got his bachelor’s, and then a master’s in mechanical engineering from Stanford. He worked in biotech after graduation, co-founding a company called Velocity11 that built robots to sequence DNA. His next company, called Joby (his childhood nickname), sold camera accessories such as supple plastic tripods. Joby turned Bevirt into a multimillionaire. In two thousand eight he commenced Joby Energy, a maker of airborne wind turbines whose technology Google later acquired. The 20-year mark was approaching, so in two thousand nine he also used some of his wealth to buy the five hundred acres and begin Joby Aviation.

Its headquarters is an engineer’s fantasyland. The focal point is a large wooden building where two dozen workers sit at a few rows of desks jammed with computers. Aside from the clusters of large black monitors, the place feels more like a barn than an office. Aircraft prototypes drape from the ceiling, as does a thick climbing strap for exercise. In the open kitchen, abutting a long redwood dining table in one corner, a cook uses ingredients from the nearby gardens to prepare three meals a day. While the smell of a Malaysian curry fills the room, a banjo twangs from speakers overhead.

The manufacturing happens at a series of buildings about one hundred yards downhill, past gardens and an outdoor clay pizza oven. One of the buildings is an airy warehouse with a giant oven inwards—but this one isn’t for pizza. It’s used to cure the carbon-fiber bods of the planes and looks like a Quonset hut. Former members of Oracle’s America’s Cup sailing team, some of the world’s leading materials experts, oversee the curing process, baking the carbon fiber at about 194F. In another building, engineers build cantaloupe-size electrified motors; in a third, they test electronics; in a fourth, they put the ending touches on wings and other parts. Out back, there’s a large truck with an extendible arm atop its trailer like a cherry picker, which elevates propellers high into the air so engineers can perform wind tests while driving down a road at high speed. Robotic prototypes hum around.

Bevirt funded Joby Aviation by himself until last year, when he was joined by Paul Sciarra, one of the co-founders of Pinterest. Sciarra grew up in Fresh Jersey, instructed himself to code, hit it big with Pinterest, then went looking for something fresh to throw himself into. He, too, concluded that electrified motors and batteries appeared to have applications well beyond the auto industry. “The objective is to build a product that impacts the lives of lots of people,” Sciarra says. “Not just folks that are inexperienced pilots or wealthy, but everyone.”

Sciarra and Bevirt hope to begin flying a human-scale prototype plane later this year. They won’t give the exact specifications but suggest that it could hold, say, a family of four and travel one hundred miles or so on a total charge. The vehicle looks like a plane-helicopter hybrid packed with propellers, about eight mounted on the wings and tail. For takeoff and landing, the propellers drape horizontally like a helicopter’s and rotate for forward propulsion once in the air. Joby Aviation has already built smaller prototypes and has models of the plane’s figure, wings, and propellers scattered about the manufacturing facilities. Bevirt and Sciarra see the vehicle taking off from parking garages, roofs, or areas alongside highways. They want to suggest flights as an Uber-like service—summon a plane when you need it.

In 2013, Crimson Bull held one of its Flugtag competitions in Long Beach, Calif. Flugtag is a televised spectacle where hobbyists see how far they can launch their homemade flying machines off a dock. It’s more about entertainment than sustained flight—the contraptions generally dive straight into the water, and everyone laughs. At this one, tho’, a group called the Chicken Whisperers stunned the assembled crowd. Dressed in full-body baby-chick garments, the team shoved its glider off the dock and observed as it cruised two hundred fifty eight feet, violating the previous record of two hundred twenty nine feet. The chickens danced. They clucked. They took a swim in the water. They were all Zee.Aero employees in disguise, having joy, attempting out some designs.

In the six years since its founding, Zee.Aero has hired some of the brightest youthful aerospace designers, software engineers, and experts in motor and battery hardware. They’ve come from places such as SpaceX, NASA, and Boeing, and they’re all pursuing after the purpose introduced succinctly on Zee.Aero’s spare website: “We’re switching individual aviation.”

At its outset, Zee.Aero was led by Kroo, the Stanford aerospace professor. He wrote the original Zee.Aero patent, No. 9,242,738, which shows a strange-looking one-seater aircraft with a long, narrow bod. Behind the craft’s cockpit, rows of horizontal propellers run along both sides of the bod of the plane to treat the VTOL work. There’s also a wing at the back with two more propellers that add forward thrust.

Over time, the company realized this might not be the best design, according to three former Zee.Aero employees. Page also grew dissatisfied with the rate of progress. In 2015, Kroo returned to train at Stanford total time but continued to advise Zee.Aero as “principal scientist,” while the company’s engineering chief, Eric Allison, took over as chief executive officer. Under Allison, the company began work on a simpler, more conventional-looking design, now coming to life at the Hollister Municipal Airport.

People working at the airport have caught peeks of two Zee.Aero craft in latest months

The airport is open for business from eight a.m. to five p.m. on weekdays, but Zee.Aero employees frequently run test flights when no one else is around. Nonetheless, people working at the airport have caught peeks of two Zee.Aero craft in latest months. Both have a narrow assets, a bulbous cockpit with room for one person upfront, and a wing at the back. In industry lingo, the planes are pushers, with two propellers in the rear. One of the prototypes looks like a petite conventional plane; the other has catches sight of for petite propellers along the main figure, three per side.

When the aircraft take off, they sound like air raid sirens.

The people at the airport haven’t heard Page’s name mentioned, but they long ago concluded Zee.Aero’s holder is super rich. Zee.Aero employees receive catered lunches—sometimes $900 worth of barbecue from Armadillo Willy’s, a local chain. Recently, the company purchased a $1 million helicopter to fly alongside the planes and gather data.

For Page, this project is deeply private. He’s been known to spend evenings with Musk, both guys thinking aloud about ways to fundamentally switch transportation. Musk wants to build an upscale electrified VTOL jet; Page wants the down-market version. In an interview with a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter a duo of years ago, Page confessed that he longed to take more risks like his industrialist friend. He desired to dabble with fresh forms of investment outside the restricts of Google and back projects that focused on atoms, not bits. “There’s a lot of money going into internet startup kinds of things, which is excellent,” he said. “But for some of the real problems we face, I think we need other kinds of investments, too. I have youthfull kids, so I would like them to be safe. I’d like for pedestrians to be much safer. I’d like for blind people and old people and youthful people to get around.”

Page has drawn a line separating his two flying-car teams, employees say. It’s common for the Zee.Aero engineers to speculate over lunch about what their Kitty Hawk counterparts are up to. The former Zee.Aero employees think Page dreamed to see if a smaller team could stir quicker, and the added pressure on Zee.Aero didn’t hurt. Two people say Kitty Hawk is working on something that resembles a giant version of a quadcopter drone.

There’s no assure that Kitty Hawk’s or Zee.Aero’s or anyone else’s flying cars will ever take to the skies. There are still technology problems to solve, regulatory hurdles to cross, and urgent safety questions to reaction. Page once vowed to a colleague that if his involvement in the sector ever became public, he might pull support from the companies.

Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying Car Factories

Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories

Three years ago, Silicon Valley developed a fleeting infatuation with a startup called Zee.Aero. The company had set up shop right next to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., which was nosey, because Google tightly controls most of the land in the area. Then a reporter spotted patent filings demonstrating Zee.Aero was working on a puny, all-electric plane that could take off and land vertically—a flying car.

In the handful of news articles that ensued, all the startup would say was that it wasn’t affiliated with Google or any other technology company. Then it stopped answering media inquiries altogether. Employees say they were even given wallet-size cards with instructions on how to deflect questions from reporters. After that, the only information that trickled out came from inexperienced pilots, who periodically posted pictures of a strange-looking plane taking off from a nearby airport.

Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, June thirteen – 26, 2016. Subscribe now.

Turns out, Zee.Aero doesn’t belong to Google or its holding company, Alphabet. It belongs to Larry Page, Google’s co-founder. Page has personally funded Zee.Aero since its launch in two thousand ten while requiring that his involvement stay hidden from the public, according to ten people with intimate skill of the company. Zee.Aero, however, is just one part of Page’s plan to usher in an age of personalized air travel, free from gridlocked streets and the cramped indignities of modern flight. Like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Page is using his individual fortune to build the future of his childhood wishes.

The Zee.Aero headquarters, located at 2700 Broderick Way, is a 30,000-square-foot, two-story white building with an ugly, blocky design and an industrial feel. Page primarily restricted the Zee.Aero squad to the very first floor, retaining the 2nd floor for a man cave worthy of a multibillionaire: bedroom, bathroom, expensive paintings, a treadmill-like climbing wall, and one of SpaceX’s very first rocket engines—a bounty from his pal Musk. As part of the secrecy, Zee.Aero employees didn’t refer to Page by name; he was known as GUS, the dude upstairs. Soon enough, they needed the upstairs space, too, and engineers looked on in awe as GUS’s paintings, exercise gear, and rocket engine were hauled away.

“What emerges in the next five to ten years will be incredible”

Zee.Aero now employs close to one hundred fifty people. Its operations have expanded to an airport hangar in Hollister, about a 70-minute drive south from Mountain View, where a pair of prototype aircraft takes regular test flights. The company also has a manufacturing facility on NASA’s Ames Research Center campus at the edge of Mountain View. Page has spent more than $100 million on Zee.Aero, say two of the people familiar with the company, and he’s not done yet. Last year a 2nd Page-backed flying-car startup, Kitty Hawk, began operations and registered its headquarters to a two-story office building on the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac about a half-mile away from Zee’s offices. Kitty Hawk’s staffers, sequestered from the Zee.Aero team, are working on a contesting design. Its president, according to two thousand fifteen business filings, was Sebastian Thrun, the godfather of Google’s self-driving car program and the founder of research division Google X. Page and Google declined to speak about Zee.Aero or Kitty Hawk, as did Thrun.

But better materials, autonomous navigation systems, and other technical advances have persuaded a growing assets of wise, wealthy, and evidently serious people that within the next few years we’ll have a self-flying car that takes off and grounds vertically—or at least a puny, electrified, mostly autonomous commuter plane. About a dozen companies around the world, including startups and giant aerospace manufacturers, are working on prototypes. Furthest along, it emerges, are the companies Page is calmly funding. “Over the past five years, there have been these tremendous advances in the underlounging technology,” says Mark Moore, an aeronautical engineer who’s spent his career designing advanced aircraft at NASA. “What shows up in the next five to ten years will be incredible.”

Northern California in particular has had a long fascination with flying cars. In one thousand nine hundred twenty seven a now mostly forgotten engineer named Alexander Weygers very first began thinking up the design for a flying saucer that could zip inbetween rooftops. In one thousand nine hundred forty five he received a patent for what he described as a “discopter,” a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) machine with room inwards for passengers to walk around, cook, and sleep. He depicted smaller versions landing in pods atop buildings in downtown San Francisco. No discopters were built, tho’ it’s believed that the U.S. Army, which paid visits to Weygers’s compound in Carmel Valley, Calif., tinkered with a prototype.

Today, the world’s premier flying-car enthusiast is Paul Moller, 79, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Davis. Fifty years ago, when he was instructing mechanical and aeronautical engineering, he developed a specific vision: an aircraft you could park in your garage, drive a few blocks to a petite runway, then take skyward. He tested his very first prototype, the XM-2, in 1966. The XM-2 resembled a flying saucer with a seat at its center protected by a plastic bubble. It managed an altitude of four feet, while graduate students held it constant with ropes. “We were worried if the machine got out of control, we might kill a few people,” Moller says.

“Self-flying aircraft is so much lighter than what the auto companies are attempting to do with self-driving cars”

Moller kept attempting. He says he burned through more than $100 million developing his designs and announced individual bankruptcy in 2009.

That same year, Moore, the NASA researcher, published a paper describing a concept plane called the Puffin. Moore’s big idea was to use electrical motors, which are quieter and safer and have far fewer moving parts than internal combustion engines or conventional turbines. “By going to electrical propulsion, you get rid of the vast majority of the complexity, cost, and unreliability,” Moore says. “This is why companies looking at this area aren’t insane.” Moore credits Musk’s Tesla and other automakers with advancing the technology. “Electrical motors were mostly used in industrial settings where they were stationary, and no one cared about their weight that much,” Moore says. “It wasn’t until the automotive industry got interested that they began to get more lightweight.”

Moore’s paper circulated, rekindling excitement. Sometime in 2009, a puny group of engineers had begun meeting in Silicon Valley to discuss funding an electric-plane project. One of them was JoeBen Bevirt, a mechanical engineer and entrepreneur who had studied under Moller at UC Davis. Another was Ilan Kroo, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at Stanford. And another was Page. Albeit it originally looked as if they might all team up, Kroo and Page broke off to embark Zee.Aero. Alone, Bevirt founded Joby Aviation, a company he hopes will strike Zee.Aero to market and prove that his efforts with Moller—and the older man’s life’s work—weren’t in vain.

Bevirt wields a 500-acre compound near Santa Cruz, Calif. To get there, you turn onto idyllic California State Route one and drive past the boardwalk, a few blocks of unwrap malls, and fifteen miles of undeveloped, windswept coastal dunes. Then you turn onto a mess road, pass a lake and a grove of towering redwoods, and walk through gardens overflowing with lavender and roses. It’s here that Bevirt has built a series of workshops, plus housing for about half of his thirty five employees.

Bevirt grew up nearby on an electricity-free commune where his mom worked as a midwife and his father built custom-built homes. From a youthfull age, he learned his way around toolboxes and construction sites, and was an avid reader. After consuming the sci-fi classic The Forever Formula in elementary school, he determined he wished to build the kind of private aircraft the book’s hero flew and persuaded a friend to help. “We built lots of prototypes, but they always crashed and burned,” he says. They shifted to custom-made bikes.

The flying-car fantasy stuck with Bevirt as he entered UC Davis in one thousand nine hundred ninety one to investigate mechanical engineering, and he quickly found himself working for Moller, building one prototype after another. Bevirt eventually concluded their collective wish wouldn’t be feasible until battery and motor technology improved. He figured he’d need to wait twenty years. “Paul had been working on this for thirty years, and he was fifty years ahead of his time,” he says.

Bevirt got his bachelor’s, and then a master’s in mechanical engineering from Stanford. He worked in biotech after graduation, co-founding a company called Velocity11 that built robots to sequence DNA. His next company, called Joby (his childhood nickname), sold camera accessories such as nimble plastic tripods. Joby turned Bevirt into a multimillionaire. In two thousand eight he commenced Joby Energy, a maker of airborne wind turbines whose technology Google later acquired. The 20-year mark was approaching, so in two thousand nine he also used some of his wealth to buy the five hundred acres and commence Joby Aviation.

Its headquarters is an engineer’s fantasyland. The focal point is a large wooden building where two dozen workers sit at a few rows of desks jammed with computers. Aside from the clusters of large black monitors, the place feels more like a barn than an office. Aircraft prototypes string up from the ceiling, as does a thick climbing wire for exercise. In the open kitchen, abutting a long redwood dining table in one corner, a cook uses ingredients from the nearby gardens to prepare three meals a day. While the smell of a Malaysian curry fills the room, a banjo twangs from speakers overhead.

The manufacturing happens at a series of buildings about one hundred yards downhill, past gardens and an outdoor clay pizza oven. One of the buildings is an airy warehouse with a giant oven inwards—but this one isn’t for pizza. It’s used to cure the carbon-fiber bods of the planes and looks like a Quonset hut. Former members of Oracle’s America’s Cup sailing team, some of the world’s leading materials experts, oversee the curing process, baking the carbon fiber at about 194F. In another building, engineers build cantaloupe-size electrical motors; in a third, they test electronics; in a fourth, they put the completing touches on wings and other parts. Out back, there’s a large truck with an extendible arm atop its trailer like a cherry picker, which raises propellers high into the air so engineers can perform wind tests while driving down a road at high speed. Robotic prototypes hum around.

Bevirt funded Joby Aviation by himself until last year, when he was joined by Paul Sciarra, one of the co-founders of Pinterest. Sciarra grew up in Fresh Jersey, instructed himself to code, hit it big with Pinterest, then went looking for something fresh to throw himself into. He, too, concluded that electrified motors and batteries appeared to have applications well beyond the auto industry. “The aim is to build a product that impacts the lives of lots of people,” Sciarra says. “Not just folks that are fledgling pilots or wealthy, but everyone.”

Sciarra and Bevirt hope to begin flying a human-scale prototype plane later this year. They won’t give the exact specifications but suggest that it could hold, say, a family of four and travel one hundred miles or so on a total charge. The vehicle looks like a plane-helicopter hybrid packed with propellers, about eight mounted on the wings and tail. For takeoff and landing, the propellers dangle horizontally like a helicopter’s and rotate for forward propulsion once in the air. Joby Aviation has already built smaller prototypes and has models of the plane’s figure, wings, and propellers scattered about the manufacturing facilities. Bevirt and Sciarra see the vehicle taking off from parking garages, roofs, or areas alongside highways. They want to suggest flights as an Uber-like service—summon a plane when you need it.

In 2013, Crimson Bull held one of its Flugtag competitions in Long Beach, Calif. Flugtag is a televised spectacle where hobbyists see how far they can launch their homemade flying machines off a dock. It’s more about entertainment than sustained flight—the contraptions generally dive straight into the water, and everyone laughs. At this one, tho’, a group called the Chicken Whisperers stunned the assembled crowd. Dressed in full-body baby-chick garments, the team shoved its glider off the dock and observed as it cruised two hundred fifty eight feet, cracking the previous record of two hundred twenty nine feet. The chickens danced. They clucked. They took a swim in the water. They were all Zee.Aero employees in disguise, having joy, attempting out some designs.

In the six years since its founding, Zee.Aero has hired some of the brightest youthfull aerospace designers, software engineers, and experts in motor and battery hardware. They’ve come from places such as SpaceX, NASA, and Boeing, and they’re all pursuing after the objective introduced succinctly on Zee.Aero’s spare website: “We’re switching individual aviation.”

At its outset, Zee.Aero was led by Kroo, the Stanford aerospace professor. He wrote the original Zee.Aero patent, No. 9,242,738, which shows a strange-looking one-seater aircraft with a long, narrow figure. Behind the craft’s cockpit, rows of horizontal propellers run along both sides of the figure of the plane to treat the VTOL work. There’s also a wing at the back with two more propellers that add forward thrust.

Zee.Aero worked on this design for a duo of years. Petite, computer-controlled versions of the aircraft were photographed by reporters and hobbyists sitting in the parking lot at two thousand seven hundred Broderick Way. None of the prototypes were big enough to fit a human.

Hollister is a city of about 35,000 nestled among garlic and artichoke farms. Its airport is popular among fledgling pilots because of favorable winds and a lack of commercial air traffic. There’s a flight school, a sky-diving business, and a few run-down buildings. The least shabby structure is Building Nineteen, which has been taken over by a dozen or so Zee.Aero workers.

People working at the airport have caught peeks of two Zee.Aero craft in latest months

The airport is open for business from eight a.m. to five p.m. on weekdays, but Zee.Aero employees frequently run test flights when no one else is around. Nonetheless, people working at the airport have caught peeks of two Zee.Aero craft in latest months. Both have a narrow bod, a bulbous cockpit with room for one person upfront, and a wing at the back. In industry lingo, the planes are pushers, with two propellers in the rear. One of the prototypes looks like a puny conventional plane; the other has catches sight of for petite propellers along the main bod, three per side.

When the aircraft take off, they sound like air raid sirens.

For Page, this project is deeply individual. He’s been known to spend evenings with Musk, both studs thinking aloud about ways to fundamentally switch transportation. Musk wants to build an upscale electrical VTOL jet; Page wants the down-market version. In an interview with a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter a duo of years ago, Page confessed that he longed to take more risks like his industrialist friend. He desired to dabble with fresh forms of investment outside the restricts of Google and back projects that focused on atoms, not bits. “There’s a lot of money going into internet startup kinds of things, which is superb,” he said. “But for some of the real problems we face, I think we need other kinds of investments, too. I have youthfull kids, so I would like them to be safe. I’d like for pedestrians to be much safer. I’d like for blind people and old people and youthful people to get around.”

Page has drawn a line separating his two flying-car teams, employees say. It’s common for the Zee.Aero engineers to speculate over lunch about what their Kitty Hawk counterparts are up to. The former Zee.Aero employees think Page wished to see if a smaller team could budge swifter, and the added pressure on Zee.Aero didn’t hurt. Two people say Kitty Hawk is working on something that resembles a giant version of a quadcopter drone.

There’s no ensure that Kitty Hawk’s or Zee.Aero’s or anyone else’s flying cars will ever take to the skies. There are still technology problems to solve, regulatory hurdles to cross, and urgent safety questions to reaction. Page once vowed to a colleague that if his involvement in the sector ever became public, he might pull support from the companies.

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Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying Car Factories

Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories

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Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories

Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories

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