Alva Review-Courier -

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — By the end of the year, a team of students from the University of Kansas hope to have a small working model of a personal helicopter-like aircraft.

After that comes the full-size version.

"So when you see a pod racer on the silver screen, that's a Hollywood fantasy," KU professor Ron Barrett-Gonzalez told The Kansas City Star . "But if you made a specification that said, 'Hey, design person, use your engineering skills to do actually what a pod racer would do,' this is what we came up with."

Barrett-Gonzalez and eight students from KU are in the thick of a global competit...