JAPAN : Flying car gets off ground aboard a person

The decades-old dream of zipping around in the sky as simply as driving on highways may be becoming less illusory.

Japan's SkyDrive Inc., among the myriads of "flying car" projects around the world, has carried out a successful though modest test flight with one person aboard.

In a video shown to reporters on Friday, a contraption that looked like a slick motorcycle with propellers lifted several feet (1-2 meters) off the ground, and hovered in a netted area for four minutes.

Tomohiro Fukuzawa, who heads the SkyDrive effort, said he hopes "the flying car" can be made into a real-life product by 2023, but he acknowledged that making it safe was critical.

"Of the world's more than 100 flying car projects, only a handful has succeeded with a person on board," he told The Associated Press.

"I hope many people will want to ride it and feel safe."

The machine so far can fly for just five to 10 minutes but if that can become 30 minutes, it will have more potential, including exports to places like China, Fukuzawa said.

Unlike airplanes and helicopters, eVTOL, or "electric vertical takeoff and landing," vehicles offer quick point-to-point personal travel, at least in principle.

They could dispose of the problem of airports and visitors jams and the fee of hiring pilots, they might fly automatically.

Battery sizes, air visitors control and different infrastructure troubles are a few of the many capacity demanding situations to commercializing them.

"Many matters should happen," stated Sanjiv Singh, professor on the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, who co-based Near Earth Autonomy, close to Pittsburgh, which is likewise operating on an eVTOL aircraft.

"If they fee $10 million, no person goes to shop for them. If they fly for five minutes, no person goes to shop for them. If they fall out of the sky each so often, no person goes to shop for them," Singh stated in a telephone interview.

The SkyDrive assignment commenced humbly as a volunteer assignment known as Cartivator in 2012, with investment with the aid of using pinnacle Japanese businesses such as automaker Toyota Motor Corp., electronics enterprise Panasonic Corp. and video-recreation developer Bandai Namco.