Flying cars in the future?
NASA and partners will study ‘urban air mobility’ technology
Imagine a world where instead of inching through gridlocked traffic to get to work, you ease back in your seat while your self-piloted flying car handles everything.
While airborne vehicles have long been the stuff of science fiction, NASA is boldly planning a future with thousands of drones and air taxis zipping across Bay Area skies. The nation’s space agency is joining forces with a number of U.S. companies, including San Francisco-based Uber, to develop technologies that will make a George Jetson-like car a reality.
“Flying cars have become this sort of archetype of the technology that we were promised and never got,” said Brad Templeton, a self-driving-car expert and industry consultant. “Now that it’s materializing, people don’t be
lieve it.”
The ambitious vision, dubbed “urban air mobility,” or UAM for short, aims to establish a safe and efficient system for air transportation in American cities — from delivery drones that whisk critical medical supplies between hospitals to self-flying air shuttles that ease traffic congestion on the ground.
For new ideas, NASA is appealing to vehicle makers, researchers and government agencies to join its UAM Grand Challenge. The multiyear series of events will help the space agency, whose lofty missions include aeronautics research to improve aviation on Earth, gain a more thorough understanding of the technological and regulatory demands of flying vehicles.
The first phase of the Grand Challenge is scheduled for next year. Once NASA’s industry partners are selected for the events, the agency will perform initial flight tests of vehicles and run simulations of airspace software systems. In later phases, which will expand to include additional partners, the goal will be to see if the vehicles and operating systems are capable of safely navigating an urban environment.
Getting one car into the air is challenging enough. Getting multiple vehicles to navigate traffic without hitting one another is mindbogglingly complicated.
“Imagine if you have a fleet of vehicles in the thousands or tens of thousands,” said Shivanjli Sharma, a NASA aerospace research engineer who is one of the leaders of the UAM Grand Challenge.
Beyond ensuring that each vehicle follows its correct flight path, “You’re going to need a significant mechanism for scheduling these aircraft and scheduling them not only amongst themselves, but amongst the existing air traffic that’s flying currently above us,” Sharma said.
Over the past several years, NASA has been quietly laying the groundwork to address the potential pitfalls. Its Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management project, which began at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in 2015, seeks to build the infrastructure needed for unmanned drones to detect obstacles and avoid them while aloft. The final phase of the project, testing the vehicles and guidance systems in urban environments, is now underway.
What’s next? Think airborne ride-sharing.
Teams at NASA Ames and Uber recently connected parts of their computer systems to identify the kind of data needed for the company’s planned airbased transportation network, Uber Air, to coordinate multiple flights and manage emergency landing situations. Uber’s goal is to create a network of skyports and a fleet of self-piloted electric vehicles that can take off and land vertically, while being much quieter than helicopters. The aircraft will initially be piloted by humans.
Uber has partnered with nearly 20 companies and organizations, including six vehicle manufacturers. The company plans to start test flights in Dallas, Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia, next year and ramp up to commercial operations by 2023. Uber Air’s airspace management system will also be tested with its food delivery network, Uber Eats. The company has already announced plans to test self-piloted delivery drones in San Diego this summer.
Uber isn’t the only company exploring urban air transport. Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent, Alphabet, is a dronebased delivery service that ships goods directly to customers. The company just started delivering packages to homes in the small Virginia town of Christianburg.
While the new technology could effectively free up clogged traffic lanes in the Bay Area and other metropolitan areas, drones and airborne vehicles pose many questions and challenges, especially with respect to safety.
“There will be zillions of these things flying all over the place and, inevitably, somebody’s not going to service their car properly and they’re going to drop a hubcap and it’s going to guillotine somebody,” technology visionary Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, said at a 2018 news conference.
Another issue may be noise. While electric vehicles are quieter than jet aircraft, there are still additional factors to consider regarding noise pollution.
“The big fight is going to be how low they get to fly, who they get to fly over, and the hours. Do they get to in the middle of the night? All this stuff,” said aviation expert James Herriot, a leader of Sky Posse Palo Alto, a grassroots group that battles airplane noise and pollution.
The pending decisions about airborne vehicles come at a time when Bay Area and Central Coast communities and the Federal Aviation Administration are already locking horns over NextGen, the government’s controversial modernization of the U.S. air transport system. The system disproportionately affects Palo Alto and other Peninsula communities, said Jennifer Landesmann, a Sky Posse leader.
Local communities want a voice in the decision-making process, rather than being forced to suffer from decisions made by distant regulatory agencies, both Herriot and Landesmann emphasized.
NASA acknowledges the potential frictions and hopes to reduce them through the UAM Grand Challenge.
The space agency, Sharma said, is committed to building public confidence in the safety and efficiency of creating a bold new breed of traffic in America’s skies.
“It’s beyond just going from point A to point B,” she said. “This could be a whole network of operations which could really transform the world.”