Uber eyes flying vehicles, hires NASA veteran

SAN FRANCISCO — Uber Technologies is speeding ahead with plans for flying cars, which could zoom among urban centers such as Silicon Valley, San Francisco and Oakland, by hiring a NASA veteran who has presented research about the possibilities.

If it sounds like “The Jetsons” or the flying DeLorean in the “Back to the Future” movies, the comparison might be apt. Uber and others working in this new field call the flying cars “vertical take-off and landing aircraft,” or VTOL for short.

The new technologies are being touted as a way to ease the mammoth traffic jams that snarl busy employment hubs such as the Bay Area.

“Imagine traveling from San Francisco’s Marina to work in downtown San Jose — a drive that would normally occupy the better part of two hours — in only 15 minutes,” Jeff Holden, Uber’s chief product officer, stated in a post at Medium.com. “Every day, millions of hours are wasted on the road worldwide.”

San Francisco-based Uber, which is building a co-headquarters in Oakland, said Monday it has hired Mark Moore, chief technologist with the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia.

“Uber continues to see its role as a catalyst to the growing and developing VTOL ecosystem,” said Nikhil Goel, Uber’s head of product for advanced programs, in confirming the hiring of Moore. “We’re excited to have Mark join us to work with companies and stakeholders as we continue to explore the use case described in our white paper.”

Still, such initiatives are primarily blue skies type studying, rather than a world suddenly filled with flying vehicles overhead, analysts said.

“We are decades off from the reality of flying cars, but some companies are starting to do the research now,” said Ben Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, which tracks tech trends. “Good on Uber to start seeing how feasible this is.”

A flying vehicle would initially require a fee of $129 for a flight between San Francisco and San Jose, whereas an UberX trip might cost about $111 during commute travel times. But the trip duration up in the sky would be 15 minutes rather than approaching two hours.

An array of helipads could be used as landing sites for the flying vehicles.

“Just as skyscrapers allowed cities to use limited land more efficiently, urban air transportation will use three-dimensional airspace to alleviate transportation congestion on the ground,” Uber stated in its white paper.