Boeing gets ready to sell pilot-less, flying taxis in the next decade
The dream of flying cars has been around longer than Boeing Co. has been making airplanes. Now a vision from the pages of Jules Verne is near enough to occupy the present-day plans of Boeing’s leadership.
“I think it will happen faster than any of us understand,” CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in an interview. “Real prototype vehicles are being built right now. So the technology is very doable.”
The new era of flying urban vehicles is close enough for the man overseeing jetliners and spacecraft to begin plotting what he calls the “rules of the road” for three-dimensional highways. Autonomous air taxis and parcelhauling drones have the potential to be the next disruption to sweep the aerospace industry, with Boeing and archrival Airbus SE among the manufacturers racing to stake a claim.
Muilenburg sees it as a rare opening to shape a new transportation ecosystem. Fleets of self-piloted craft could be hovering above city streets and dodging skyscrapers within a decade, he said. Propelling these advances are a flood of investment, rapid gains in autonomy, and growing consumer frustration with bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Other observers share his aggressive timeline. Electric passenger drones, seating two to five and looking like distant cousins of today’s helicopters, could come on the market within the next two years, according to a new study by Deloitte.
By the early 2020s, the study said, flying cars could drive to the airport by roadways and then accelerate down runways into the sky. Even NASA is now studying the feasibility of what the government space agency calls “Urban Air Mobility.”
But if any of these technologies are to take root, regulators must first figure out a host of critical safety issues, starting with how to manage both conventional traffic and new flying machines.
Boeing bolstered its portfolio of unconventional pilotless aircraft last year by buying Aurora Flight Sciences, whose projects include a new flying taxi it is developing with Uber Technologies. Other partners for Uber’s futuristic Elevate service include Textron’s Bell Helicopter and Embraer SA, a Brazilian plane-maker currently in merger talks with Boeing.
Aurora has been inventing autonomous vehicles since the late 1980s, and its portfolio of novel flying machines includes a two-seat robotic copter known as an eVTOL (an abbreviation for electric vertical takeoff and landing). For its rideshare of the nottoo-distant future, Aurora plans to whisk passengers between rooftop “vertiports.” Test flights could begin as soon as 2020 in Dallas and Dubai. Vahana, the self-piloting air taxi developed by A3, Airbus’s tech-centric Silicon Valley outpost, completed its first test flight on Jan. 31. Intel and EHang are also testing their flying vehicles.
But the next generation of Uber and Lyft vehicles can’t arrive by air until manufacturers and regulators figure out how to keep them from bumping into buildings, commercial planes, personal drones and each other.