When Are We Going to See the Flying Car?

Incognito #5 by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

In comics, there are many instances when we have to suspend our disbelief. Alien planets, superpowers, time travel, radioactive spiders, parallel universes, and the list goes on. Incognito is no exception. In this series, superpowers, monsters, cloning and mind control all play a large role. And I am willing to suspend my disbelief for all of these. Growing a full-grown superhuman capable of intelligent thought in a laboratory? Sure, why not?

Where I draw the line is the flying car.

In this issue, we see Zack Overkill and Ava Destruction zipping around the sky in a flying car that, no doubt, was invented by the mad scientists of the villainous crime syndicate, of which they were previously members. I have a hard time believing that such a car as depicted in the image above is economically or technologically feasible. Nor do I think it is actually a smart idea for Zack and Ava to possess one.

First, it surprises me that these two supposedly brilliant criminal masterminds would try to remain under the radar and attempt to avoid capture by traveling in the flying car. Wouldn't a regular car have worked better? This way, they would have blended into the crowd, rather than attracting attention during take-off, landing, and possibly even the flight. I thought the name of the book was Incognito.

Second, there is the issue of lifting off and landing vertically. Notice in the image that the car does not have any wings. This means that it does not require acceleration on a runway (like an ordinary airplane) to take off, but instead is likely capable of doing it on its own. After all, we're talking about sinister, mad-scientist technology here. The problem is that millions and millions of dollars have already been spent trying to create such a car, and so far we have seen minimal results. In fact, according to The Economist,

One enthusiast, Canadian-born Paul Moller of Davis, California, has spent an estimated $250m of his own and other people’s money over the past 45 years trying get his fan-powered Skycar off the ground. So far, none of his vertical take-off and landing prototypes has risen much more than a few feet.

So that's $250 million spent developing the Moller Skycar, which still does not really do much more than hover. And this is a man who has spent over forty years working exclusively on the development of the flying car. How would the villains have been able to do better?

Third, what about the fuel of the flying car? Well, the Terrafugia Transition, the latest design for a "roadable plane" claims that it can get 500 miles on a single tank (20 gallons) of petrol cruising at 115 mph. 500 miles of flying is pretty good, but remember that this is more of a small airplane than it actually is a flying car. The cars from fiction, from our imaginations, and from Incognito do not have wings to help with lift or aviation. Instead, they have to power themselves through the duration of the flight, and more importantly, through liftoff. This would require a significant amount of fuel, which I suspect would both be expensive and inefficient. Maybe the villains have tapped an alternate energy source, which they are using to propel their cars. If this is the case, then why even be villains? Just make billions of dollars selling energy on the market. Or efficient flying cars!

There are many other reasons to think that it will be a long time before humans are cruising as they did in The Jetsons or Back to the Future II. As The Economists notes, many of the cars that are designed like planes, such as the Transition, are likely to require proper pilot licensing. In addition, it is still illegal (except in Alaska) to take off or land on public roads. Then there are air traffic control problems, FAA regulations to pass, National Highway and Traffic Safety regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation, and a whole mess of legality issues to get through. This does not really apply to Incongito, but it is just something to think about regarding the future of the flying car.

Believe me, no one is more upset about the infeasibility of the flying car than I am. I grew up hoping that one day I would get to live in a world where I could fly to work through a hovering skyway. Back to the Future predicted this would happen by 2015. I am sad to report it does not look so. Despite what Zack Overkill and Eva Destruction say.

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How Easy Is It To Steal a Dead Man's Identity?

Is Zack Overkill's plan of identity theft here far fetched? At first, I thought so. But as it turns out, under the circumstances Zack might just get away with it (presuming he actually follows through and is not just idly thinking).

A bit of back story first for those not familiar with Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Incognito. Zack Overkill is under quite a bit of pressure these days. A former supervillain (and one of the most ruthless), Zack made the decision to rat out his former boss, the Black Death (a villain even more notoriously ruthless than he). In order to protect himself, he enrolled in witness protection and now serves as an ordinary file clerk while attempting to suppress his inner desires to, well, villainize.

Unfortunately for him, Zack got careless and began spending his nights running around town, stopping burglaries and robberies, in order to escape from his monotonous daily life. When word got out of his nighttime antics, two supervillains were dispatched in order to bring him in. In the process, Zack's only "friend" from the office, Farmer, was killed.

Now Zack needs an escape route. Feeling he has been discovered and facing pressure from both sides (the law enforcement officials who put him there and his former gang led by the Black Death), he considers his options for escaping witness protection (and his likely death). Finding Farmer's credit card, he considers crafting himself a fake I.D. and escaping using his former friend's identity.

Would Zack actually be able to pull this off? Possibly.

Identity theft, as many of us know, is a major problem. 8.3 million Americans claimed they were the victims of some form of identity theft in 2005. And it's bad enough when criminals steal the identity of living people. But there is also a form, known as Ghosting, in which criminals assume the identity of a dead person. It is the rarest form of identity theft, particularly because it is quite difficult to accomplish successfully.

Ghosting is particularly difficult in the modern, technological age. This is due in no small part to the advent of computerized records, search engines, and quick spread of information between agencies, especially compared with the 1970s and 1980s, when the United States filed birth certificates and death certificates separately. Furthermore, DNA imaging and fingerprinting technology has made catching Ghosters a much less harrowing and lengthy process as it was when fingerprints were not all stored in an electronic database and DNA testing was less sophisticated.

Nevertheless, there are criminals who frequently scan obituaries for names and addresses of recently deceased, and then are able to purchase their personal information off of the internet. For example, the Social Security Administration has a Master Death Index which allows users to enter some basic information about a deceased individual (name, birthdate, etc.) and receive his or her social security number. They might also just steal some documents from the person's mailbox, which might include credit card numbers, etc.

If we look at Zack Overkill's situation, we see that it is not completely infeasible for him to assume Farmer's identity to escape his pursuers and the Witness Protection Program. First of all, it just so happens that Farmer was about the same age as he was. Identity theft is significantly easier to accomplish when the victim is the same age as the criminal, otherwise it would arouse suspicion. If Farmer was 70, for instance, Zack might be pulled into an interrogation office upon trying to flee the country with Farmer's birth certificate.

Moreover, Farmer was a loner who, it seems, did not have many close friends or family members and lived a fairly boorish lifestyle. Although his death was fairly public (police and hospital rushed to the scene of his death, so there must be at least a hospital record of his death and autopsy) and well-known by those who had seem him the most (there was an office party held in his memory in the latest issue), this does not necessarily imply that news of his death had spread to all the appropriate agencies. In fact, many successful Ghosting attempts occur because family members of the deceased often neglect to call the Social Security Administration and the credit card companies to inform them of the death. For example, in 2007 MSNBC reported this story about a man whose identity was stolen and sold merely two weeks after his death, in part because the family had not notified the proper agencies. And this is not unreasonable. Usually, when someone dies, families spend time grieving, rather than worrying about administrative tasks. Unfortunately, this makes it easier for the Ghoster.

Therefore, since it was unlikely that Farmer's relatives or friends took the time to notify the credit bureaus, it is entirely possible that they might not yet be aware of his death. Hence, Zack Overkill would be in a prime position to steal his identity.

And hey, there's got to be a reason they call him "Overkill."

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