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There are more than 2,800 small airports scattered throughout the United States — and they’re vastly underused. Flying cars and their intrepid inventors have actually been with us for decades, but for many reasons, they’ve always seemed to sputter and stall before reaching commercial success.

So what’s the holdup? Could any of these 5 flying car prototypes become a regular-production reality?

• The Terrafugia Transition: The Transition, a four-wheel, canard-bearing vehicle, features wings that fold twice — once at the root, where the wings meet the fuselage, and again mid-wing.
• DARPA Project Transformer (TX): The U.S. government is actually working on something called Project Transformer, or TX, for short. Specifically, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is investigating how feasible it would be to build vehicles that could perform scouting or other duties on land, then transform to evacuate the area when done — or when action on the ground got too hot.

Full list at HowStuffWorks.com.

Total aggregation of HowStuffWorks.com.

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