Joburg woman helps drive Airbus project to create pilotless air taxis

DRONE technology is advancing so rapidly that airspace regulatory authorities are battling to catch up.

The next big thing is “urban air mobility” – a development that combines driverless car, taxi app and drone technologies to deliver a pilotless, flying taxi you can hail by smartphone.

At the forefront of facing those challenges is Johannesburg's Jana Rosenmann, head of unmanned aerial systems at Airbus Defence and Space, a new division of Airbus launched in Dallas, Texas, last month. Its headquarters are set to be in Atlanta, Georgia, when it goes operational next year.

Speaking to Dispatch sister paper Business Times at Airbus in Toulouse, France, Rosenmann said that although urban air mobility was a little further down the track it still faced the challenge “to convince people to get into an unmanned air vehicle and fly somewhere”.

Despite this challenge, Airbus was working on a three-tiered, unmanned aerial vehicle remotesensing project that would integrate conventional commercial drones, high-altitude surveillance drones and satellites.

While Rosenmann’s division works out business solutions for air-taxi fleet management, among others, experimentation on the development of cargo drones and prototype air taxis is being driven by chief technology officer Paul Eremenko’s team in Silicon Valley.

Eremenko explained how the air-taxi concept had taken off with the development of electricfuel hybrid propulsion systems in 2010, rapidly evolving into the eight-rotor Vahana vertical takeoff-and-landing, or VTOL, demonstrator that is “the pillar of our urban air-mobility portfolio”. Vahana is now being developed into a four-seat Airbus VTOL air taxi “expected to have its first flight next year”.

The need is clear: urban traffic congestion is expected to cost France, Germany, the UK and the US R4.2-billion a year by 2030.

The number of commercial UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] estimated to be airborne in the EU by 2025 is 400 000, according to economist Roelof Botha, speaking at South Africa’s second annual Drone Con in June.

Donovan Andersen of Anglo American complained about South Africa’s onerous drone regulations, put in place by the Civil Aviation Authority in July 2015.

The CAA, responsible for safety, did not respond to for comment.

But under its process companies wishing to fly drones need to acquire a “remotely piloted aerial system operator certificate” and an “air service licence” from the Department of Transport – and each of their pilots needs to qualify for their “remote pilot’s licence”. Each of its drones must be CAA tested, certified and registered and have public liability insurance of R500 000. air requests