Book Review & Giveaway: Flying Cars by Andrew Glass brought back so many memories for me. When I was growing up, I was convinced that we would all zip around like George Jetson by the 21st century or at least minimally we would have cars that could also fly. My dad flew light planes and I could easily see how cars and planes combined would be really wonderful things to have. It just made sense – when you landed your plane, you needed a car to get around so why not combine the two? If we could go into outer space, why couldn’t we do something like that? Read the rest of my review & enter our giveaway for it at http://popcornreads.com/?p=8693. ( )

Roadable airplanes, or flying cars, have always been a dream of aeronautical engineers, since the dawn of the age of flight. Glass points out that even before we had the technology to achieve flight, inventors like Leonardo da Vinci were figuring out the means to achieve this feat. Glass takes his reader on an odyssey that begins with the first efforts at flight, and ends with modern day innovations in auto-plane fusion. Each chapter of this book takes the reader a step forward in the history of attempts at combining cars and airplanes into a roadable aircraft for the masses. The chapters are arranged chronologically by famous inventor or benchmark in design. There are profuse sketches, illustrations, and photographs to depict the imaginative fancies of these inventors, some of which were a little more than fancies. The reader will be truly amazed by the progress that has historically been made in this direction, as the little known history of flying cars comes to light.

As I read each chapter, I expected the designs for these cross-breeds to gradually unfold in complexity. This wasn't quite the case, however: while one inventor chose to make his aircraft with a flight-component assemblage, another inventor chose to make a three-wheeled aircraft with stable compact wings and rudder. The only commonalty one can find in these composite structures, is that generally the four-wheeled models were meant to look more like cars, requiring a flight component assembly, while the three-wheeled models were designed to eliminate the flight-component assembly altogether. Buckminster Fuller is given credit for having popularized the latter concept.

The rationale that each inventor gives for this kind of transportation is also precariously dissimilar. The inventors of the early 19th century dreamed of a car that could avoid unpaved roadways, since most roadways during that time were muddy and rutted before the era of federally funded highways. As roadways developed, however, inventors of flying cars came up against resistance of the average consumer. Flying cars could not have helicopter propellers because of qualms about blow-back from the propellers flattening rose bushes and lawns or tearing off shingles of houses. There were also worries over whether flying cars would crash land on residential properties. As more of these worries flourished, inventors had to come up with more fantastic claims for their product's utility. Bucky Fuller dreamed up a simplistic future where cars simply took off from roadways and landed comfortably in a suburban saucer-like residence. Daniel Zuck, designing his car during the Cold War, advertised the use of flying cars to scatter dense urban populations in the event of a nuclear attack. Inventors used any dream or fear to pitch their product. Glass leaves us wondering, at the end of this odyssey, why these dreams have never been realized. His afterword leaves us with a few clues to his own thinking on this matter. He feels that flying cars have always been a worry for the public because of the fear of drunken or careless pilots falling out of the sky onto residential homes, suggesting that with new automated computer technology, these threats will eventually become innocuous. My final question, however, is that with decreased commercial flight regulations, what will we do with the plethora of fully-automated drone cars in the sky by that time? Privacy is a little more than a fear that a flying car will crash a party. This is a thought provoking book for young adult readers with an interest in aviation engineering. ( )