Flying car is an automobile that can legally travel on roads and can take off, fly, and land as an aircraft. arly experiments.Glenn Curtiss, the chief rival of the Wright brothers, was the first to design a flying car. His large, three-wing Curtiss Autoplane was able to hop, not fly. The first flying car to actually fly was built by Waldo Waterman. Waterman was associated with Curtiss while Curtiss was pioneering naval aviator on North Island on San Diego Bay in the 1910s. On March 21, 1937, Waterman's Aerobile first took to the air. The Aerobile was a development of Waterman's tailless aircraft, the Whatsit. In 1926, Henry Ford displayed an experimental single-seat aeroplane that he called the "sky flivver". The project was abandoned two years later when a distance-record attempt flight crashed, killing the pilot. In the 1950s, Ford Motor Company performed a serious feasibility study for a flying car product. They concluded that such a product was technically feasible, economically manufacturable, and had significant realistic markets. The markets explored included ambulance services, police and emergency services, military uses, and initially, luxury transportation. When Ford approached the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) about regulatory issues, the critical problem was that the (then) known forms of air traffic control were inadequate for the volume of traffic Ford proposed.

There is an active movement in the search for a practical flying car. Several conventions are held yearly to discuss and review current flying car projects. Two notable events are the Flying Car forum held at the world-famous EAA Airventure at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) conventions held at various cities. A number of companies are developing vehicles, although few have demonstrated a full-sized vehicle capable of free flight.