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In late August a patent was published that covered a “personal aircraft.” This would be unremarkable except for one thing: one of the drawings showed the aircraft parked in what could be a grocery store parking lot, in a space between two cars.
The patent — which we are first to report — among others, is assigned to Zee.Aero, a stealth company in Mountain View, and the drawings show this is no ordinary personal craft. This is a flying car.
There have been stabs at a Jetson-mobile before, but two designs in the Zee.Aero patent put this one on the outer cutting edge: It would be battery powered. But in addition, it is designed to lift straight up like a helicopter — so no need for a runway. Then, as the patent notes, the collection of rotors on top work with two facing backward to allow it to hover for a bit before cruising off to that grocery store.
We are also hearing from sources that Google is involved, but in what capacity is unclear. However, Zee.Aero’s offices are near Shoreline Lake in Mountain View, according to the job postings. The company operates a barebones website — just three brief pages and there’s no address, phone number, e-mail or contact form.
But as you may have guessed, near Shoreline Lake is also where you’ll find the sprawling Googleplex — and not far from there, Google X, the super-secret facility that gave rise to self driving cars, Internet balloons and Google Glass. Sebastian Thrun, who helped start Google X and led the driverless car effort, has said he sees the majority of people using flying cars by 2040 — though those sorts of starry predictions are a dime a dozen.
Zee.Aero’s jobs postings list 11 open positions with notably lavish benefits, all in mechanical and aeronautical engineering. A search of LinkedIn for those listing Zee.Aero as their employer reveals 52 people, only three of whom aren’t in technical positions. Zee.Aero was founded in 2010, according to Delaware corporation records, and Ilan Kroo, a noted professor of aeronautics, has been on partial leave from Stanford since 2011 to run the company. He holds the aforementioned patent, among others, and has worked for NASA. (I’ve also reached out to him via Stanford.)
The reason I point out all the engineering and technical staff is that there’s really no way to build a stealth hardware company this large without some eye toward sales and marketing — unless you have a generous (and gigantic) financial backer that lets you focus on research and not worry about revenue.
Do keep in mind that patent drawings rarely look exactly like the final product and Zee.Aero has filed a handful over the past couple years. To get a sense of what’s cooking, we should probably take the average of all the drawings, and mix in a little more imagination.
A side question for now is where Zee.Aero might get that sort of battery power. Electric car maker Tesla certainly has made waves recently with its willingness to license its technology.
Either way, another bit of the future is apparently closer to taking flight out of Mountain View.
[Update: I received the following email from Dr Kroo at 3:32 PM PST]
Thanks for your interest and note this morning. As you gathered, 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. I’ll look forward to talking with you when things are a bit further along.
I followed up by asking, since the wording wasn’t quite clear “Does that mean Zee.Aero is not affiliated with Google or you yourself are not affiliated with Google, or neither you nor Zee.Aero have an affiliation with Google?” and will let you know when I hear back. This is the unfortunate part of statements over email.
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