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Welcome, and congratulations. You’ve lived long enough to see the age of flying cars—privately owned, solo-piloted aircraft, free to operate in unrestricted airspace, much as automobiles can take to the open road. And they’re all electric. I knew you’d be thrilled.
Here in the future, we call them ultralight eVTOLs (electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles). Of course, they don’t much resemble the levitating Studebakers and auto-gyrating Chevys foretold in pulp science fiction. The Pivotal BlackFly—the first series-produced ultralight eVTOL to reach the consumer market (2023)—doesn’t even have wheels. It takes off and lands on its curved keel. It’s also amphibious, behavior highly atypical in cars.
Don’t be afraid. Try the VR simulator. The two joysticks accommodate righties or lefties, but you only use one to fly. The rocker switch on top pushes/pulls for climb/descend. The joystick controls speed and turn/bank angle. The trigger switches between flight modes: Hover and Cruise. In Hover mode, the joystick provides fine-grained yaw control, allowing the BlackFly to execute its surreal pirouette.
To take off, simply hold the toggle switch forward. The props turn slowly in unison—calibrating, calibrating—then spool furiously, a squadron of lawn mowers on deck. The machine vaults into the air, nose-first, throwing you on your back, looking at the sky. It will just hang like that until you push the joystick forward. Remember to keep that thumb going up.
Around 100 feet, pilots transition to Cruise mode. Click the trigger and the BlackFly noses down, bringing the pilot to a position more like a gaming chair than an ejection seat. As the wings begin to generate lift, the rotors’ pace slackens. The droning drops an octave. You can let go of the joystick if you like. The BlackFly goes where it’s pointed. Feel free to move about the cabin.
In other words, it’s easy. What makes the BlackFly disruptively like an automobile isn’t the range (20 minutes) or top speed (55 knots, per FAA rules). It’s the accessibility. By virtue of its human-factors engineering and flight-control automation, the BlackFly can be mastered by almost anyone with a few days’ training, roughly comparable to the requirements for a driver’s license. Nor is age any barrier. The craft’s joystick controller is practically instinctive to game-trained teenagers. The oldest BlackFly-certified pilot is 88.
Take me, for example. I’ve got a heart stent and an artificial hip. I don’t see as well as I used to. Future me is kind of a wreck, actually. But because the BlackFly qualifies as an ultralight aircraft (254 pounds, or less), the FAA doesn’t require pilots to pass any kind of medical test. Hell, even the DMV requires an eye test now and then.
I am not a pilot nor do I aspire to be one. My interest dates back to my time living in Los Angeles. We had a house at the top of Mount Washington where, on a clear day, I could see the downtown skyscrapers surrounding my office—five minutes, as the crow flies. In a car, the same trip represented an hour or more of hell.
Around the same time, Marcus Leng was building the car of my dreams in his basement. In 2011, the Canadian entrepreneur and flying enthusiast tested his first boxy prototype, reaching an altitude of 10 feet. By 2014, Google emeritus Larry Page had added Leng’s startup to his growing portfolio of eVTOL investments. That same year, the company moved to Palo Alto, Calif., and by 2021, the series-production prototype was ready. At that year’s EAA AirAdventure, in Oshkosh, Wis., the BlackFly debuted to a gobsmacked planet.
What sorcery is this? In the emerging taxonomy of eVTOLs, the BlackFly is known as a tilt-aircraft design. Unlike tilt-rotor designs, the rotors here are fixed; the BlackFly takes off and lands propulsively by rotation of the entire craft. These aerodynamics account for the BlackFly’s slightly mad landing dance: sweeping dramatically to a tailstand, turning slowly into the wind, then lowering itself onto its rocker-shaped bottom, amid a cloud of blown-away spectators.
A branding reboot in 2023 changed the company name from Opener to Pivotal. Production of the BlackFly ended late last year; Pivotal is now taking orders for an upgraded version called the Helix, with a sticker price of $190,000.
Most eVTOLs startups in the news—like Joby Aviation—are developing autonomously controlled air taxis, with or without backup pilots on board. Analysts studying advanced air mobility (AAM) see autonomous ride-sharing machines facing huge public resistance. The no-pilot idea really rattles people.
Yet in some ways, Pivotal’s technology is even more audacious, in that it puts a human pilot—potentially a squirmy, Earth-hugging rookie like me—squarely into the control loop of a flying machine. With great respect and catered lunches provided, Pivotal requires buyers to complete a ground school at their offices in Palo Alto. Trainees wear VR headsets and sit in motor-driven rocking chairs that approximate the rearing-horse verticality of landing or taking off.
In VR, as in real life, the BlackFly practically flies itself; the pilot only points it in the desired direction. The flight controller’s guidance/navigation/control (GNC) software maintains stability and attitude by manipulating differences in thrust among the eight rotors, much like a typical camera drone. These thrust differentials are coordinated with dual flaps on the trailing edges of the stubby wings.
Hear those props? The way they speed and slow, roar and snore, constantly balancing thrust to counteract changing winds? Should the BlackFly turn into a strong tailwind, for example, the rpm of all eight props will slow rather dramatically in order to maintain constant air speed. For an instant it sounds like you are going to fall out of the sky. The BlackFly flies on, straight and level. In an airplane or helicopter, you’d be handling that workload for yourself.
To ensure safe handling, the GNC bakes in a number of control laws that constrain responses to inputs—it’s impossible to stall the BlackFly, for instance, or put one into an unrecoverable spin. Such self-protective algorithms would be familiar to anyone who has piloted a camera drone.
Still, owners must be prepared in case the automated systems fail. What if you lose GPS-assisted ground lock and/or the ground-sensing radar, requiring you to freehand the landing? What if you fly into a flock of ducks and lose a prop due to birdstrike—or a shot from an irate duck hunter? In dire emergencies, pilots may resort to the mortar-propelled parachute, designed to lower the craft safely to the ground, baby and all.
Pivotal’s peppermint-scented training room became my personal Vietnam. I am plagued by motion sickness, of which the most pernicious variety is “sim sickness.” My first attempt to master the simulator was in August. After three hellish days in a drooling, Dramamine-induced coma, I failed my check ride.
I returned to Palo Alto in early September, with new eyeglasses, a prescription for the anti-emetic Zofran and a surplus-store flight suit. Four days later, I was approved to fly the real thing. Call sign: Upchuck Yeager.
“I promise you won’t feel any of that in the real thing,” said Sabrina Alesna, one of four of the licensed pilot instructors it took to get me in the air. She was right.
I arrived the next morning at an agricultural estate near Watsonville, Calif., where Pivotal does many of its customer checkout flights. A two-story hangar and grassy runway are situated among 400 acres of cultivated fields and grow houses owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. As the morning marine layer burned off it revealed miles of dreamy California coastline, with sand cliffs tumbling to the shore.
Having spent hours flying over its virtual simulacrum, I knew the place well. I was especially wary of the big tree at the edge of the cliffs.
The support crew unloaded two machines from their Wells Cargo trailers. That way one could charge while the other flew. A BlackFly painted in EMS livery waited for me in the silvery grass. After the walk-around inspection, I fastened my chin strap and hoisted myself into the bare-carbon cockpit. As she had done many times in the simulator, Alesna walked me through the preflight checklist. “You’re cleared for takeoff,” I heard her say. And off I flew, tickety-boo.
As cool as it would be to land on the roof of your office like George Jetson, federal regulations forbid ultralights and experimental aircraft from overflying populated areas—cities, suburbs, highway corridors, etc. Nor can they fly at night or in bad weather. These restrictions effectively rule out widespread adoption of eVTOLs for urban commuting. While Pivotal’s technology is bursting with practical possibilities, the BlackFly itself cannot be but a toy—a glorious, wonderful toy.
And, like any toy—at least any that fly—you could potentially hurt yourself, if you put your mind to it. What the FAA calls uncontrolled airspace is hardly free of conflict. In fact, I found my time in the air pretty freaking dynamic, what with the flocks of stupid birds and the trees and the Navy helicopter roaring down the beach at 200 knots. I had to keep my head on a swivel.
Question: Is an eVTOL that just about any idiot can fly necessarily a good thing? What happens when bucks-up barnstormers start crashing into each other off Point Dume or over Burning Man?
To an amazing degree, the FAA relies on ultralight pilots’ judgment and sense of self preservation. However, the rule book warns that if ultralights start to become a problem for the public, the FAA is ready to bring down the flyswatter.
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