Zee.Aero

Another flying car contender appears

Zee.Aero has filed patents describing a “personal aircraft”

The San Francisco Chronicle has spotted patent filings from a secretive company located close to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View that show a “personal aircraft” sitting between two vehicles in a car park.

Zee.Aero’s patent sketch

The company is called Zee.Aero and joins a stable of others attempting to revolutionise the way we travel. So far, despite nearly a century of trying, none have succeeded.

The closest so far is Terrafugia, an American company founded in 2006 by a team of graduates from MIT. It has a dorky-looking flying car called the Transition that’s still in testing but supposedly close to release, as well as a sleeker concept model called the TF-X that can take-off and land vertically.

Zee.Aero’s plane appears to come with vertical take-off from the get-go. It has eight rotors positioned atop the craft for lift, and another pair at the back for propulsion. A thin body appears to have room for a pilot and perhaps one extra passenger.

The patent describes the design as “safe, quiet and efficient, as well as easy to control and highly compact”. Some versions of the designs show the landing gear controlled by electric motors, allowing it to drive along the ground.

Zee.Aero’s official website is modern but minimalist. On it, the company pledges to “re-envision flight”, adding that it’s designing, building and testing simulations and prototypes made of carbon fibre that deliver “better ways to get from A to B”. It also lists ten job vacancies for aeronautics engineers.

Greg Espiritu / SF Chronicle

Caleb Garling, a technology writer for the SF Chronicle, managed to dig up a photo of the prototype craft, sitting in an abandoned naval base, taken by Greg Espiritu from a helicopter just under a year ago. From the person standing next to it, however, it looks like this might be a scaled-down unmanned model.

Garling also managed to get in contact with the founder of the company, Ilan Kroo. He wrote in an email:

I am working on some interesting transportation ideas at an early stage start-up company in Mt. View (near Google and other tech companies, but not affiliated with them). The company is in its early stages — still in stealth mode — and we have not been talking to people about our plans quite yet.

It’s too early to tell whether Zee.Aero will be able to get its craft into the hands of the public — a step that few other companies have managed in the long, storied history of flying cars. Regulation may also be an issue, as Terrafugia has discovered.

Either way, we’re looking forward to hearing more about Zee.Aero’s designs in the future. That flying car promised by the Jetsons might not be as far away as you think.