Silicon Valley tackles flying cars
ON A recent afternoon, an aerospace engineer working for a small Silicon Valley company called Kitty Hawk piloted a flying car above a scenic lake about 150 kilometres north of San Francisco.
Kitty Hawk’s flying car, if you insisted on calling it a “car”, looked like something Luke Skywalker would have built out of spare parts. It was an open-seated, 100-kilogram contraption with room for one, powered by eight battery-powered propellers that howled as loudly as a speedboat.
The tech industry is fond of disrupting things, and lately the automakers have been a target. Cars that use artificial intelligence to drive themselves, for example, have been in development for a few years and can be spotted on roads in a number of cities. And now, coming onto the radar screen, are flying machines that do not exactly look like your father’s Buick with wings.
More than a dozen startups backed by deep-pocketed industry figures like Larry Page, a Google founder – along with big aerospace firms like Airbus, the ride-hailing company Uber and even the government of Dubai – are taking on the flying car.
The approaches by the different companies vary and the realisation of their competing visions seems far in the future, but they have one thing in common: a belief that one day regular people should be able to fly their own vehicles around town.
There are challenges, no doubt, with both the technology and government regulations. Perhaps the biggest hurdle will be convincing the public that the whole idea isn’t crazy.
“I love the idea of being able to go out into my backyard and hop into my flying car,” said Brad Templeton, an entrepreneur who has served as a consultant on Google’s self-driving project. “I hate the idea of my nextdoor neighbour having one.”
Kitty Hawk, the company backed by Page, is trying to be one of the first out of the gate and plans to start selling its vehicle by the end of the year.
The company has attracted intense interest because of Page and its chief executive, Sebastian Thrun, an influ- ential technologist and self-driving car pioneer who is the founding director of Google’s X lab.
In 2013, Zee Aero, a Kitty Hawk division, became the object of Silicon Valley rumours when reports of a small air taxi-like vehicle surfaced.
During his recent test flight, Cameron Robertson, the aerospace engineer, used two joysticklike controls to swing the vehicle back and forth above Clear Lake. The flight, just 5 metres above the water, circled over the lake about 20 or 30 metres from shore, and after about five minutes Robertson steered back to a floating landing pad at the end of a dock.
The Kitty Hawk Flyer is one of several prototypes the startup is designing. The company hopes to create an audience of enthusiasts and hobbyists, who can now pay $100 to sign up for a $2,000 discount on the retail price of a Flyer to “gain exclusive access to Kitty Hawk experiences and demonstrations where a select few will get the chance to ride the Flyer”.
It is an unusual offer, since the company has not yet set a price for the vehicle, and Thrun’s and Page’s involvement can be taken as evidence that the company is aiming far beyond hobbyists. Still, Kitty Hawk is clearly targeting a new kind of trans- portation – air flight that can be performed safely by most people.
“We hope that this is more of an exciting concept than what most people have had in their minds about flying cars,” Robertson said. “This is not yet that product in terms of what we will say and what it can do, but I think it demonstrates a vision of the future.”
At the Geneva International Motor Show last month, Airbus proposed an autonomous vehicle named Pop. Up that would operate on both the ground and in the air. And this year, the government of Dubai, in partnership with a Chinese firm, EHang, said it planned to begin operating an autonomous flying taxi by this July. Also, Uber was expected yesterday to detail its “vision for the future of Urban Air Mobility” at a conference in Dallas.
There is no shortage of sceptics pointing out the roadblocks. There is already significant resistance to the idea of drones flying over urban areas, and flying cars could face substantial opposition, even if they can be quieted to automotive noise levels.
For these personal air vehicles to become a reality in the United States, the country would need a whole new air traffic control system.
Two years ago, NASA began devel- opment of an air traffic control system meant for managing all sorts of flying vehicles, including drones. One NASA developer described it as an air traffic control system, “for a sky dark with drones”. Researchers hope testing can begin by 2019.
Batteries are also an issue. While electric propeller-driven motors seem promising, today’s battery technology cannot support flights of a reasonable distance, say a 50- or 80kilometres commute.
“How is this going to work? I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, but we can’t even take our cellphones on airplanes today because of fears about battery fires,” said Missy Cummings, the director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory at Duke University, who is researching personal air transport for NASA.
And don’t forget that flying cars will not be able to pull to the side of the road in an emergency, said John Leonard, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
“Silicon Valley is full of very smart people, but they don’t always get the laws of physics,” he said.
“Gravity is a formidable adversary.”