Soaring a couple hundred feet off the ground, alone in a small aircraft with no piloting experience, sounds like a nightmare to some. But to me, flying solo has been a fantasy since a young Tom Cruise conquered the skies in an F-14.

Pivotal, and a half-dozen competitors in the emerging eVTOL space, have created one-seat, electric aircraft to release your inner Maverick, with no formal flight training.

But the Silicon Valley company's 10-day program for owners, pilot or not, is a mandatory part of the purchase agreement.  It involves about 40 hours of flight training in a simulator, basically so you can prove you know the one-person aircraft well enough to fly it. That's followed by 10 real flights. 

The BlackFly (pre-production version of the Helix that I trained in and flew) has been around for 14 years, though it's a much different aircraft than the garage-built plane Marcus Leng first flew in 2011 to prove an affordable, everyman electric plane could change the face of aviation.

At a summer barbecue, the Canadian inventor strapped himself into a 14-foot-long, two-wing oval contraption, telling guests they might want to stand behind their cars. He throttled up the electric engines and took off, careening wildly 10 feet above the yard, wingtips taking divots out of the grass. But the odd-duck aircraft stayed aloft, proving the concept.

Leng forged ahead. Four iterations, 7,000 piloted flights and 40,000 flight miles later, the BlackFly has transitioned to the production-ready Helix, with a $190,000 base price, similar to a Lamborghini Huracan—though the Lambo can't fly over remote terrain or cross lakes at 300 feet.

Pivotal, backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, moved from Toronto to Silicon Valley in 2014 to take advantage of the world's largest brain trust of EV and battery tech. The Palo Alto headquarters includes two non-descript buildings that look like everything else in the neighborhood. But just inside the front door is where the pre-flight magic happens—an air-conditioned simulator room where I'd spend the next six days. In the production facility behind, a half-dozen Helixes are in various stages of production.