Out of Pod Experience

Better vid, here. A bit jingoistic, but it shows the skills. Imagine these maneuvers at night, with limited lights, and NVGs.
http://youtu.be/q_SrTZ8_WUw

And more:
http://youtu.be/bUku-OxjJew

You made me curious about obscure experiments, and there you go, I actually found one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr_X1IfYeHw
...and then I also looked it up on wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
... but the video and the wikipedia description don't seem to really match, so I wonder, was that a wild departure from the dropped project, or another project altogether ?

In this time and place, anything that departs too far from the mainstream it's going to be too unefficent to be economically viable unless the extended flight envelope justifies so.

My personal pet are giant airships. Airships are the only flying machines that can use the surface/volume ratio to fly better. The bigger they are, the better lift they achieve with a certain airframe weight, and that's priceless once you don't use energy for lift.

Of course, airships suffer from the worst case of bad publicity in history, as everybody associates them to the Hindenburg disaster and the Hindenburg fire was blamed on hydrogen... so we fill airships with rare helium instead of hydrogen, which provides better lift too.

Convincing the public that most hydrogen in the Hindenburg climbed so fast that it couldn't catch fire from the highly flammable canvas cover would need a lot of effort. But in the long run, I dream to see, in my life, 1 kilometer long airships carrying 10,000 people across the ocean at 300 km/h for a fraction of the cost of doing so in jetliners...

That would be a start, to learn know-how and experience and get ready for luxury passenger airships.