Did you know that we could have had flying cars as early as the late1980’s?
Yup!. Back in the 1980s, Boeing did something that seemed straight out of science fiction: they built a flying car, the Boeing Sky Commuter. It was an amazing concept that promised to redefine personal transportation.
Boeing’s vision was to create a Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) vehicle, the Boeing Model 727-269, known colloquially as the “flying car.” The concept was impressive: a car-sized aircraft that could lift off vertically, eliminating the need for runways, and carry passengers across cities with ease.
But, as history shows, this great innovation failed to take off (pun intended), robbing the world of a truly amazing product.
There were a couple of reasons for the failure, the most obvious being the cost of manufacturing and running it. The prototype cost $6 million to build, and used a special type of jet fuel that was extremely expensive.
Further, the car only accommodated one person with a small briefcase.
That was a high price to pay for such a small vehicle!
In the end, the Boeing flying car project was a pioneer in thinking beyond
traditional boundaries but crashed due to a combination of high costs, usability and technical constraints.
Could the visionary Sky Commuter concept have realized its full potential and transformed into a thriving business? We will never know.
But we do know that, like many other technologies, there was a chance some changes could have been made, that would have made a major difference.
Maybe adding some of the 6 Power Skills like creativity and problem solving, things could have been vastly different.
Instead, they quit.