For all the talk of flying cars, you might be surprised to find yourself stuck as ever on the ground, commuting to work and trundling to the grocery store on old-fashioned wheels. The good news is that scores of companies are working to change that—and they're making progress. Uber is working with manufacturers to meet its goal of starting a flying ride-hail service in Dallas and Los Angeles by the end of 2023. Plane builder Airbus is tackling technical and legislative details with Vahana, its flying car project.

And now, Larry Page's Kitty Hawk has shown a vehicle that looks, well, real. The single-seat Flyer now looks like a glossy, professional, production-ready machine, a major upgrade over the slightly precarious prototype it showed last year. That first version had the pilot perched on what looked like a motorcycle seat, separated from eight spinning fans by a net. The whole thing resembled a flying trampoline, or, as we put it last June, something the Green Goblin would order from Skymall.

Now the Flyer has a sleek-looking cockpit passenger pod, with the (now 10) electric fans positioned on spines that extend from the side of the aircraft, where you might expect wings to be on a plane, for a total width of 13 feet. Slung underneath are slender pontoons, like you'd see on a seaplane. That’s because Kitty Hawk designed the Flyer to fly over water. It's more pleasure craft than practical ride.

The 250-pound Flyer can hit 20 mph, between three and 10 feet above the water, and stay aloft for 20 minutes at a time. It fits into the FAA’s ultralight category, along with things like powered gliders. The FAA restricts it to uncontrolled airspace (typically remote areas away from people and planes) and places that don't have people on the ground. The Kitty Hawk team decided lakes, bays, and other large bodies of water were the safest bets.

The ultralight classification limits speed and weight but has one major advantage: no pilot's license required. The person onboard controls direction with a joystick in one hand and speed with a slider in the other. There are no other controls, instruments, or screens—the point is to make flying as intuitive and simple as possible. A computer quietly handles the complicated business of actually staying level, and, like with a small, modern drone, the pilot just has to push the control in the direction they want to go.