Flying taxi plans take flight

Big challenges ahead, but dreams live on

The obstacles are daunting, but that isn’t stopping a growing number of companies from trying to develop a workable flying taxi.

Airbus and Boeing have welladvanced plans for such aircraft, with Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenburg saying in January that “real prototypes” are being built and self-piloted craft could be hovering above city streets within a decade.

Japan’s Government has set its eyes on a similar timeframe, as has Uber’s chief executive.

In Britain, Vertical Aerospace is aiming to offer inter-city flying taxi services that take off and land vertically within the next four years.

The company, led by chief executive Stephen Fitzpatrick and with exAirbus and Boeing engineers on staff, just completed its first successful test flight of an unmanned prototype.

“We’ve focused on the market of short distance travel between cities,” says Fitzpatrick. “We expect our piloted vehicles will take people from one city to the next by leaving closer to people’s homes, not necessarily at airports.”

Fitzpatrick’s firm, which he has Aston Martin Lagonda’s concept for a flying taxi. financed personally, is up against competitors who already have a head start. A Deloitte study in January described research and prototyping of passenger drones and flying cars dating back to the early 1980s, almost all of which aren’t yet in production.

But Fitzpatrick isn’t new to the world of cutting-edge vehicle technology and is confident his team of engineers can deliver on his ambition. In 2015, a year before founding Vertical Aerospace, he bought the Manor Marussia Formula One team, days before administrators were to auction its racing cars after it ran into financial crisis.

“I saw a business opportunity in applying Formula 1 technology to aviation to transform short-haul travel and make routes like London to Madrid shorter by getting rid of the need to take off from a runway,” he says.

The company says the test flight of its unmanned all-electric prototype, which looks like a car-sized version of many popular consumer drones, was successfully demonstrated at a small English airport in June. It could only fly for about five minutes, a spokeswoman said, but can travel at up to 80km/h. Piloted production models with a small number of passengers are targeted to travel distances of 800km.

Any company investing in this technology faces strong headwinds. For example, how much backup energy should electric aircraft have? Will pilots need a licence? In what part of the sky can they fly?

“We’ve taken the view that it’ll take a long, long time before regulators and passengers are okay with this,” Fitzpatrick says.

“Proving that the technology works is very different from proving that it never fails, which is what aircraft regulation requires.”

The authors of the Deloitte study concluded that the regulatory challenges might be daunting, but aren’t unsolvable.

Aerospace and related industries have navigated similarly complex challenges before, they said, citing the development and deployment of commercial aircraft.

Proving that the technology works is very different from proving that it never fails, which is what aircraft regulation requires.

Stephen Fitzpatrick,

Vertical Aerospace

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