Air taxis crash during testing
No one has died or been hurt; advocates call accidents a sign that the industry is pushing the envelope
One prototype air taxi suffered a software glitch, lost control and nosed into a field. Another’s computer erroneously thought it was on the ground, shutting off power in flight and plunging it onto the pavement. Batteries on two more burst into flames.
The race to develop a new family of flying machines to whisk people and cargo across trafficchoked cities has drawn billions of dollars of investment and vast promise. But some of the biggest names in aviation have had accidents during testing, according to a Bloomberg review of reports dating back to 2018. They include Boeing Co. and its subsidiary, Aurora Flight Sciences Corp., Textron Inc.’s Bell helicopter division, billionaire Larry Page’s Kitty Hawk Corp., Joby Aviation Inc. and German air-taxi pioneer Lilium NV.
No one has died or been injured, and advocates say accidents are a healthy sign that the
Companies that have experienced accidents with air taxis include Joby Aviation Inc. On Feb. 16, in a remote testing facility near Jolon, Calif., a physical component on Joby’s six-propeller craft broke in midair.
industry is pushing the envelope. But the new electric-powered, vertical-takeoff vehicles, or eVTOLs, use innovative technologies that haven’t been tested in routine service, and some safety experts say this means the road to government approval and public acceptance won’t be easy.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is preparing to certify a handful of the new aircraft to carry people as soon as 2024. Acting Administrator Billy Nolen said in a speech in June that the agency is on track to meet that
goal, but the timing will be dictated by the safety of the new designs.
“This is harder than people generally understand,” said John Hansman, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-authored a paper on the challenges facing the new electric-powered, vertical-takeoff vehicles. “You’re pushing the state of the art in multiple dimensions at the same time.” Hansman is also an adviser to Electra.aero Inc., which is developing a hybridelectric plane. a partnership with Kitty Hawk known as Wisk Aero LLC.