Boeing sets sights on flying vehicles, rules of the sky
Race is on to stake claim in industry that rests on tackling safety issues
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 presentday plans of Boeing’s leadership.
“I think it will happen faster than any of us understand,” CEO Dennis Muilenburg said. “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 parcel-hauling 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-tobumper traffic.
Other observers share his aggressive timeline. Electric passenger drones, seating two to five travellers 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 studying the feasibility of what it 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.
“It won’t be all turned on in one day,” Muilenburg said.
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 Inc. Other partners for Uber’s futuristic Elevate service include Textron’s Bell Helicopter and Embraer SA, a Brazilian plane maker currently in tie-up 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 not-too-distant future, Aurora plans to whisk passengers between rooftop “vertiports.” Test flights could begin as soon as 2020 in Dallas and Dubai, according to the company.
Others are also rushing rotorcraft concepts to market. Vahana, the self-piloting air taxi developed by A3, Airbus’s techcentric 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 Ub- er and Lyft Inc. 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. That requires leaps in artificial intelligence and sensor technology from today’s personal drones, which mostly fly within sight of operators.
“Right now, what we’re transitioning from is a hobbyist industry to a commercial industry,” said Darryl Jenkins, an aerospace consultant specializing in autonomous vehicles.
Jenkins thinks drones will first be adopted to haul packages, such as the three billion pizzas delivered annually in the U.S. Flying humans is far more complicated and a host of issues still needs to be resolved. Without human pilots or air crew, who would ensure passengers are protected from the uncovered rotor blades that would power most air-taxi designs?
Commuters aren’t going to embrace flying craft unless their safety is assured, but getting approval from aviation regulators for people-carrying drones will take millions of dollars and several years — and that’s once agencies such as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) decide what the standards should be. No such standards currently exist.
“Nothing like that has been certified,” said John Hansman, an aeronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “People at the FAA are worrying about how to do it, but nobody knows how to do it yet.”
One of the key underpinnings to the airline industry’s unprecedented string of years without fatalities in the U.S. is the rigorous process of certifying aircraft. But it is these high standards that will make it tough to approve the revolutionary new designs for robotic vehicles.
U.S. and equivalent regulations around the world hold that manufacturers must demonstrate that catastrophic failures are so remote that they won’t happen in a billion flights. That means wings won’t fall off or the autopilot won’t suddenly veer into the ground during a model’s entire lifespan.
Unless Congress or the FAA eases the standards for autonomous vehicles, Boeing and other manufacturers would have to prove to regulators that their computerized sensors and robotic guidance systems are equally reliable.
“It’s extremely costly to certify new aircraft, even when you’re certifying it for a well-established use and with well-established rules,” said Steve Wallace, a former FAA official who oversaw accident investigations and also worked in the agency’s certification branch. “Here we’re trying to open up a whole new use where there aren’t any rules. That’s an enormous task.”
“People at the FAA are worrying about how to do it, but nobody knows how to do it yet.” JOHN HANSMAN MIT AERONAUTICS PROFESSOR