LinkedIn's Co-Founder Is Going in on Flying Taxis, Which Are Definitely Realistic This Time Screenshot: Joby Aviation (Fair Use) Time and time again, tech companies have promised a future where commuters will be able to zip around in the flying cars from The Jetsons. And time and time again, that just hasn’t happened. Advertisement That’s because the practical engineering challenges are immense—building small, electrically powered vertical take-off and landing, or VTOL, aircraft would require a massive leap in technology over helicopters. It’s also because many of the business models proposed so far, such as Uber’s now-former “aerial ridesharing” unit Uber Elevate, have been patently ridiculous concepts amounting to not much more than speculative futurism. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is nonetheless taking a big bet that the era of the flying taxi is coming in the foreseeable future, according to Axios.