The Money Picks An Air Taxi

摘要

If you want to see JoeBen Bevirt's flying car, you have to get in a helicopter. The engineer's private airfield is nestled in a valley on the Northern California coast between Monterey and Santa Barbara, and it's remote by design, out past a swirl of tan and green fields. Bevirt, a 44-year-old whose bursts of childlike delight punctuate his otherwise quiet intensity, bounds out to greet the chopper, then points the arriving pair of reporters to the prototype resting on the dirt runway nearby. It's an exotic-looking white aircraft with numerous propellers. (Bevirt agreed to the visit only on the condition that physical specifics remain unpublished.) He calls it an air taxi. "This is what I have been dreaming about for 40 years," he says. "It's the culmination of my life's work."