What's happening with downward-pointing fan-based flight? There were a couple of interesting prototypes, a few years ago, and then relative silence in the tech

What's happening with downward-pointing fan-based flight? There were a couple of interesting prototypes, a few years ago, and then relative silence in the techie headlines I scan. Kind of like a giant drone. You can have some redundancy. You can have an emergency chute for the vehicle -- some small planes are beginning to carry these. As with autos, I see the future of personal transportation in the U.S. as being electric. We're not at the end of onboarding power capacity into vehicles. Electric motors can provide sufficient drive. As renewable / next-generation energy grows, grid capacity is going to expand while prices hold or drop. Past a point, when the power gets cheap enough, you can sacrifice some power efficiency of the transportation for convenience and other factors. Let me cite "time efficiency" as something highly valued. I see this extending to personal flight vehicles. Although I agree with other posters that, particularly en masse, automated flight controls are probably going to be necessary/mandatory much of the time. Also, noise control. I don't want some dude's Harley quad-coptor roaring over my house. P.S. If batteries can't meet all needs, there is still fuel-cell technology. Although, currently, batteries seem to be running away with the market. (Sorry for the unintended pun, there.)