David Loury isn't a classic-car kind of guy. But when he decided to radically redesign the private plane, he turned to luxury automobiles—and their design-forward aesthetic—for inspiration. "Maserati and Mercedes-Benz were the two main cars I looked at, and I engineered ideas and concepts from them," says the independent aerospace engineer. Those concepts evolved into the Valkyrie: a five-seat, single-piston-engine plane that he calls a "high-tech vehicle of the future."

The Valkyrie's exterior certainly looks futuristic—and beautiful. That's because Loury designed it to have aesthetic proportions: "a convex profile in the front, a concave one in the back, and an inflection point where they join."