Flight re personal VTOL

One day, I will take to the air, and fly my own self-contained VTOL craft, free as a bird to soar up and over the tallest buildings.

Until then . . .

If one looked, one found, at the end of the 1990s, a host of young companies poised to produce the first compact personal VTOL devices. AirScooter was one. There was an Israeli firm. There were rotor designs with intuitive (think Segway) controls. There was a Hiller flying platform one could buy for $ 28,000 and build yourself. The FAA did not regulate very low to the ground flight with ultralights like proposed VTOLs, so the hills and fields were to be ours.

Then came 9/11.

At first, many of the firms rebranded themselves military and rescue-style craft. AirScooter had two compact fans on either side of a cage, and their prototype had achieved brief stable hovering. Then they painted camouflage on the thing. The company was bought out by the military, or some large company, and vanished. So did the Israeli hovering "sled." So did the kits, the rotor-production plans, leaving super lightweight engines and so forth orphaned.

I guess men flying around urban airspace is not in the cards for now.