Enlarge (credit: Uber)

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Uber has hired Mark Moore, a senior research engineer from NASA’s Langley Research Center. Moore will work on the flying-car vision, dubbed Uber Elevate, that Uber outlined in a white paper in October (PDF).

Apparently Moore won’t be constructing an actual flying car system just yet but will instead work on addressing isolated problems specific to Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft like “noise pollution, vehicle efficiency, and limited battery life,” Bloomberg notes.

Moore has been thinking about flying cars for more than a decade—he wrote a white paper about “Personal Air Vehicles” (PDF) in 2003. A good system for shorter-distance flight, Moore wrote at the time, would evolve from the airport-based system we have now. But bringing the technology to market would require thinking about “ease of use, automated airspace control, affordable propulsion, economically viable concepts, low community noise, modern certification procedures, and near-all-weather capability while achieving a factor of ten improvement in small aircraft safety.”