It is right up there with meal pills, jetpacks, robot butlers and colonies on Mars. Since at least 1962, when the TV cartoon characters George, Jane, Elroy and Judy Jetson first took to the skies, flying cars have been a staple of speculative visions of the future. Designs for dozens of small, affordable, personal flying machines were unveiled in the latter half of the 20th century. Few became airborne and none took commercial flight.
However, a form of flying car is set to escape the clutches of eccentrics and the confines of science fiction. A handful of well-funded start-ups, some backed by major aviation and automakers, have carried out test flights of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. Piloted air taxi and shuttle services are expected before 2025.
Uber says it expects to be operating aircraft without pilots by about 2030.
Illustration: Mountain People
Heavy hitters including Toyota, Hyundai and Boeing are giving eVTOLs what looks like unstoppable momentum, which this raises some important questions: Where will eVTOLs fly? Can operators persuade us that their aircraft are safe and quiet enough to fly regularly over our homes and schools? And will they be just a premium service for rich people, or a means of mass transportation with the potential to transform the way we live in positive ways?
One thing that is clear is that ground-based transport infrastructure is creaking at the seams. Annually, drivers in London waste an average of nine-and-a-half days — 227 hours — stuck in traffic. Workers in Los Angeles and Sydney spend the equivalent of seven working weeks commuting a year.
Industry enthusiasts do not think that eVTOLs will have a major impact on congestion within a few years, but they do believe they can play a role in the longer term.
“Ground infrastructure simply cannot keep up with increasing urbanization and the congestion it is causing,” says Michael Cervenka, chief operating officer at Vertical Aerospace, a Bristol, England-based start-up. “We will start small and it is not a magic bullet, but we see an opportunity for eVTOLs to be part of the solution to pent-up global demand.”
Some companies believe that rapidly persuading city dwellers to feel relaxed about seeing aircraft regularly zipping above their heads might be a leap too far. Vertical Aerospace’s third prototype, which it plans to fly later this year, will have a range of 160km to target quicker intercity journeys. US-based Joby Aviation is planning a range of 241km, while German company Lilium touts a range of 320km between charges.
Others are going straight for what they see as lucrative, congested routes across cities. Uber has announced plans for Uber Air eVTOL services in Dallas, Los Angeles and Melbourne by 2023.
In January, it announced a deal with South Korean automaker Hyundai, which plans to mass produce eVTOLs for the Uber Air network.
German company Volocopter, which carried out a first crewed urban test flight for its two-seater eVTOL in Singapore in October last year, is also planning for short city hops.
There are three broad classes of vehicle: wingless “multicopters,” which are best suited for shorter journeys and rely on rotors for both vertical and horizontal movement; “lift and cruise” eVTOLs, which use rotors to hover and wings for more efficient cruising; and more complex “vectored thrust” systems that have wings and fans or propellers, and can swivel their thrust generators.
One thing the rivals agree on is that services will run between takeoff and landing pads, or “vertiports,” not passengers’ initial setting-off points and final destinations.
“Nobody is talking about point to point,” says Graham Warwick, executive editor for technology at Aviation Week. “They don’t think they will ever be quiet enough to fly into people’s backyards.”
Flying taxi companies are all too aware that at present most people do not differentiate between eVTOLs and helicopters and so they are tainted by noisy association.
“The main reason we don’t see helicopters flying around cities all the time is that people don’t want to be exposed to the noise they make,” Volocopter’s Fabien Nestmann says.
In a paper published in 2019, Volocopter claimed that its vehicles’ low weight, high rotor surface area and low rotor tip speed would generate about one-third of the noise of a helicopter.
Lilium chief commercial officer Remo Gerber claims that his company’s aircraft is “seven to eight times quieter” than a helicopter of comparable size.
Some rivals are skeptical that Lilium’s large vehicle can achieve that.
Convincing passengers that the technology is safe is probably the biggest challenge facing the industry.
In July last year, the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA) published a set of conditions for the certification of eVTOLs. To operate over urban areas, manufacturers will have to demonstrate a failure rate of less than 1 per 1 billion flying hours — the same as large commercial airliners. To achieve this, they are building backup rotors, engines, batteries and flight control systems into their designs. Thankfully for manufacturers, regulatory approval will not involve 1 billion hours of test flights, but is based on the track record of existing components.
Manufacturers and operators are acutely aware they still have much to do to get paying passengers and the wider public onside.
“We need to show people the benefits of a faster, more predictable and safe form of transport that has little or no impact on the lives of people on the ground,” Nestmann says.
To make this affordable for the masses, you have to get the pilot out. Will people fly in something without a pilot?
Industry leaders also know that they will struggle if only wealthy people can afford to fly.
Volocopter says that for a 30km journey from central London to Heathrow Airport, it would expect to charge ￡100 to ￡200 (US$127 to US$254).
Lilium and Vertical Aerospace say starting prices will be similar to first-class rail.
Uber says it expects initial prices per kilometer to compare with its Uber Black executive service, but then close to match UberX prices within two years.
On that basis, a trip from central London to Heathrow including an Uber Air flight would cost about ￡88 in 2023, falling to ￡30 to ￡35 by about 2025.
Eric Allison, head of Uber Elevate, says such low prices will be possible thanks to the low maintenance costs of distributed electric propulsion, the ability to incorporate flights into journeys that include Uber vehicles through its existing platform and pilotless flights.
“Our simulations suggest we can drive utilization and fill seats through our ground network,” Allison says.
Whether Allison is being realistic, optimistic or just engaging in public relations is hard to know.
“This is going to start as a premium service for businesspeople, but the industry will need to get prices down to reasonable levels quickly before it becomes seen as something only the rich can afford,” Warwick says.
One way to do that is to fly without pilots, monitoring aircraft from control centers on the ground.
“To really bring costs down and make this an affordable form of transport for the masses, you have to get the pilot out,” Warwick says. “The question is: Will people fly in something without a pilot? Nobody really knows the answer to that.”
Uber expects passengers to be ready to go pilot-free in about a decade.
“We don’t think autonomy is practical from a regulatory and potentially a technology standpoint by 2023, but we see self-piloted aircraft with remote monitoring as an inevitable direction, which will make the economics even better and come, we think, end-2020s or 2030,” Allison says.
Some thrill-seeking passengers will not have to wait that long. Dozens have already flown pilotless in trials carried out by Chinese company E Hang, mostly in China, but also in the Netherlands, Austria and Qatar.
The New Zealand government has agreed to trials of passenger-carrying eVTOLs in the Canterbury region by US company Wisk, subject to aircraft certification.
In a statement, New Zealand Minister of Research, Science and Innovation Megan Woods highlighted “Wisk’s vision of a greener, emission-free way for Kiwis and visitors to New Zealand to get around.”
Gerber also sees eVTOLs as environmentally friendly.
“We will have a similar end-to-end carbon footprint as electric cars, but we don’t need millions of tonnes of concrete and steel to build connections between places,” he said.
That might be true, but eVTOLs’ thirst for power and need to operate frequently to recoup costs means they will work their batteries harder than cars. Batteries are likely to need replacing after a year to 18 months and making lithium ion batteries emits a lot of carbon dioxide.
However, some manufacturers do believe that the technology can bring positive changes to our lifestyles.
“If people can travel much more quickly, we can unlock a lot of potential in medium-size cities that today are seen as secondary,” Gerber says. “It has the potential to relieve the pressure on the biggest cities and provide opportunities for people to live and work in new ways.”
Such visions of transformative decentralization would require mass production of vehicles, huge infrastructure building and widespread adoption, all of which are, at best, a long way off.
While it seems likely that eVTOL flying taxi and shuttles will begin operating in the next few years, less certain is whether the planned public acceptance campaigns will succeed, and whether the industry can scale up and reduce prices as rapidly as it needs to avoid eVTOLs being labeled as a billionaire’s plaything.
“There’s certainly a lot of hype, but I think the hype is in the time frame, not in the technology,” says Warwick, who has been covering the sector for Aviation Week for close to a decade. “I’m pretty certain we will see initial commercial services with a relatively small number of vehicles some time between 2023 and 2025, but as for the long-term vision of mass transportation, I think it will be some time after 2035 before we get to any sort of scale.”
Flying taxis: early risers:
‧ Volocopter VoloCity
Vehicle type: 18-rotor multicopte
Capacity: Pilot, one passenger with hand luggage
Range: 35km
Speed: 110kph
Launch: 2022-2023
Who: Based in Bruchsal, Germany, cofounded by former skateboarding star Alex Zosel and backed by the Chinese automaker Geely.
‧ E Hang 216
Vehicle type: Multicopter with 16 propellers
Capacity: Two passengers, no pilot
Range: 35km
Speed: 130kph
Launch: Unknown
Who: Start-up based in Guangzhou, China.
‧ Lilium Jet
Vehicle type: Vectored thrust, with 36 jet engines
Capacity: Pilot and four passengers
Range: 300km
Speed: 300kp
Launch: 2025
Who: Munich-based start-up with investors including Chinese Internet giant Tencent.
‧ Joby S4
Vehicle type: Vectored thrust with six tilting propellers
Capacity: Pilot and four passengers
Range: 240km
Speed: 322kph
Launch: 2023
Who: California-based start-up founded in 2009, backed by major investors including Toyota and Intel.
‧ Wisk Cora
Vehicle type: Hybrid with fixed wings and 12 rotors
Capacity: Two passengers, no pilot
Range: 40km
Speed: 160kph
Launch: Unknown
Who: Joint venture between Silicon Valley start-up Kitty Hawk and Boeing, backed by Google’s Larry Page.
‧ Vertical Aerospace Seraph
Vehicle type: Multicopter with 12 propellers
Capacity: Pilot and two passengers
Range: Unknown
Speed: 80kph
Launch: The company this year plans to unveil a prototype hybrid with fixed wings and rotors, and space for a pilot and four passengers. It is aiming for a commercial launch in 2023-2024.
Who: Bristol, UK-based start-up that last year acquired MGI, a Formula One consultancy led by motorsports veteran Mike Gascoyne.
In an article published in Newsweek on Monday last week, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged China to retake territories it lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. “If it is really for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t China take back Russia?” Lai asked, referring to territories lost in 1858 and 1860. The territories once made up the two flanks of northern Manchuria. Once ceded to Russia, they became part of the Russian far east. Claims since then have been made that China and Russia settled the disputes in the 1990s through the 2000s and that “China
China has successfully held its Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, with 53 of 55 countries from the African Union (AU) participating. The two countries that did not participate were Eswatini and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which have no diplomatic relations with China. Twenty-four leaders were reported to have participated. Despite African countries complaining about summit fatigue, with recent summits held with Russia, Italy, South Korea, the US and Indonesia, as well as Japan next month, they still turned up in large numbers in Beijing. China’s ability to attract most of the African leaders to a summit demonstrates that it is still being
Trips to the Kenting Peninsula in Pingtung County have dredged up a lot of public debate and furor, with many complaints about how expensive and unreasonable lodging is. Some people even call it a tourist “butchering ground.” Many local business owners stake claims to beach areas by setting up parasols and driving away people who do not rent them. The managing authority for the area — Kenting National Park — has long ignored the issue. Ultimately, this has affected the willingness of domestic travelers to go there, causing tourist numbers to plummet. In 2008, Taiwan opened the door to Chinese tourists and in
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) on Thursday was handcuffed and escorted by police to the Taipei Detention Center, after the Taipei District Court ordered that he be detained and held incommunicado for suspected corruption during his tenure as Taipei mayor. The ruling reversed an earlier decision by the same court on Monday last week that ordered Ko’s release without bail. That decision was appealed by prosecutors on Wednesday, leading the High Court to conclude that Ko had been “actively involved” in the alleged corruption and it ordered the district court to hold a second detention hearing. Video clips
RSS