Pie in the sky or up ’n away?
While big-name companies all over the world are looking seriously at airborne city transport, others see this as a mere dream
You’re running late. The city is gridlocked thanks to the peak hour traffic and you are in danger of missing your appointment.
You quickly open an app on your smartphone and hop into a nearby pod.
Soon a giant drone-like machine descends from the sky and clips onto the carbon fibre and glass bubble that surrounds you, pulling you up into the air.
You fly high above the city’s traffic. As you near your destination, your app locates a free wheel base, enabling you to descend and dock. The drone breaks away and your new wheels start turning, transforming your pod into an autonomous (driverless) car for the rest of your journey.
Hollywood has, for years, fed us tales of flying Deloreans, space taxis and the Jetsons’ flying family bubble cars.
Now it seems the race is on to make those dreams a reality.
The scene described above is exactly how Airbus SE and Volkswagen’s Audi unit’s “Pop.up Next” will work. The drone-like flying taxi/electric city car combo was unveiled at the Geneva Motor
Show in March.
Now the German government has signed a letter of intent with executives from both companies, allowing them to test the flying taxi-pod around Audi’s home town, Ingolstadt in Bavaria.
“Flying taxis aren’t a vision any longer — they can take us off into a new dimension of mobility,” says Andreas Scheuer, Germany’s transport minister.
He’s right: flying vehicles seem to be the new “space race”.
Those stepping up to the plate include big-name aviation companies, start-ups and even Google co-founder Larry Page.
Boeing has just unveiled the first round of finalists in its Gofly competition, which invited designs for personal flying vehicles that must be able to take off vertically — or nearly vertically — and carry someone 32 km without needing to land and recharge.
It has given 10 teams — from Latvia, the Netherlands, Japan, the UK and the US — US$20,000 to begin to turn their written proposals into reality for a 2019 lift-off. With designs ranging from egglike helicopter pods, drone motorcycles and a chair with 10 rotors beneath it, the teams are competing for
$2m and the full intellectual property rights to their creations.
But the biggest name on everyone’s lips as far as flying vehicles go is still Uber.
Following its Elevate summit in May, Uber says it will increase its number of testing sites and has brought forward its timeline for what it calls UBERAIR from 2023 to 2020.
These timelines are bold claims for a company that has no physical aircraft to show (yet). It has plans to build takeoff and landing points.
But considering the logistics needed to pull off a feat of that scale and in that time frame, it’s