To get a peek at the future of transportation, you could start by visiting a warehouse building in an industrial stretch of Mountain View, California. Above the door, which has its window papered over, a safety sign catalogs various health and fire hazards that lurk within. A red and black wet suit hangs in a tree nearby. Alex Roetter strolls over from another building, scans his security badge, and leads me inside. Roetter, who is a division president at this aviation startup, Kitty Hawk, steps into a vast room with cement floors. There, arrayed in a U shape, are 13 or so Flyers, an oddball aircraft that few people have seen and even fewer have piloted.

“It's the kind of vehicle that anyone can learn to fly in 15 minutes,” Roetter says. “The computer does all the hard work, so the human is just left to do the things that people are really good at. Look out the window, decide where you want to go, and just point the stick to where you want to go, and land.”

The Flyer is an airborne trimaran in gleaming white. The middle pod, where the pilot sits, resembles a Formula 1 car cockpit. It's flanked by a pair of pontoons, so it can land on water as well as earth, with two beams protruding from their sides. With one seat and 10 propellers, it's 13 feet long, 7.5 feet wide, and 5 feet tall. Thanks to carbon fiber construction, the aircraft weighs in at only 250 pounds. Powered by electricity, it is remarkably quiet. It takes off, lands, and flies pretty much like a helicopter.

Actually, this is the second generation of the Flyer; the first, which Kitty Hawk showed off over San Francisco Bay in June 2017, looked like something a comic book villain might fly, with a seat you straddled. The shift to the protective cockpit, though, pales in importance compared with the transformation in the vehicle's onboard computers. Learning to fly the first version took several days: five hours in a simulator, a day of training, a series of flights while tethered to the ground. The new aircraft lets people with zero aviation experience take off after that 15-minute lesson, thanks to smarter software.

In a helicopter, the pilot works four controls at once, while monitoring how each impacts the others. In the Flyer, the pilot's left hand works a thumbwheel to go up or down. The right handles a joystick to send the aircraft forward, back, left, right, and around. Let go of the controls and the Flyer holds itself level and in place, like a ship at anchor. That's it. The digital 0s and 1s translate the human pilot's basic commands into aeronautic expertise. The computer sets rotor pitch and speed while using GPS, an inertial measurement unit, lidar laser scanning, and radar to ascertain its position in space. It's as easy as flying a quadcopter drone, except you are inside it.

Roetter has taken about half a dozen low-speed flights in the Flyer over water. He's more engineer than salesman—a software engineer, to be specific. The bullet point on his CV that won him this job was developing an advertising software tool at Twitter that generated billions in revenue. But he's also a licensed pilot, and he lights up while talking about the ride: “It's like being a kid.”