Kittyhawk, a bay area firm possessed of wildly creative talent, has crafted the Flyer in 2017, the Cora in 2018, and just announced the Heaviside, a cross-country cruiser named for a physics and electronics genius. Its predecessors go back further, to the JobyMonarch, a single-seat, eight-motor design that made it to the construction stage. That aircraft was based on Windward Performance’s Duckhawk sailplane, a high performance machine that made the most of its sleek lines. Joby had several projects going at the time, including an energy-generating kite business that merged with Makani. Carmel deAmicis does a good job of synthesizing a long series of inventions that help lead to Heaviside. “After Joby Energy succeeded at creating airborne vessels that could generate energy from wind, it merged with Makani, a wind power company which Google recently bought. Before the merger, a group of engineers decided to use the technology developed on the turbines to build an aircraft that could hover like a helicopter and fly …