UK eyes 1st flying taxi hub
>>COVENTRY: Coventry has seen better days. Once known as Britain’s motor city, the settlement of about 400,000 people in England’s Midlands has been left struggling for an identity by decades of slumping auto output that followed widespread destruction from World War II bombing.
This spring, however, Coventry is once again at the forefront of world-leading innovation in personal mobility as it hosts what’s billed as the first-ever fully functional hub for flying taxis, the electric-powered vertical takeoff and landing craft that backers are talking up as the biggest new thing in aviation.
The site is fully functional, that is, apart from the air taxis themselves. With the scores of proposed eVTOL models yet to win regulatory signoff, unmanned drones are standing in for the typically five-person craft during three weeks of demonstration flights in Coventry.
Everything else, though, is just as it will be when the first flying cabs come to market in a few years’ time, according to the hub’s developer, Urban-Air Port, a London-based startup that’s leading the push to develop so-called vertiports in competition with UK rival Skyports.
“We’re here to show everyone what the future is going to look like,” UrbanAir Port founder and executive chairman Ricky Sandhu said. “There’s no point having new technology if people don’t believe in it.”
The hub, on a car parking lot near Coventry’s main railway station, makes no concessions to the futuristic glamour of Jetsons-style travel, while the city itself is emblematic of Britain’s former industrial centres, seeking to reinvent itself yet held back by limited or overcrowded transport links.
“Coventry isn’t London, and that’s important,” Mr Sandhu said. “London is well served by public transport.”
Surrounding the hub are charging points for electric cars and scooters intended to allow passengers to switch seamlessly from one mode of travel to another.
The overall message is clear. Flying taxis aren’t some exotic adventure, but a workaday solution to decarbonising inter-city travel that will be within reach of many, costing much the same as an airport limousine. Hub construction will also be affordable, Sandhu says, starting at 5 million pounds (213 million baht).
The Coventry base is built to a doughnut-shaped design that UrbanAir Port reckons will be most efficient in city settings, featuring a central helicopter-style landing pad surrounded by an outer ring housing check-in facilities, a pre-departure lounge and cafe.
The whole thing is only 46 metres across, partly to fit into crowded city centres, but also because the time between a passenger arriving and boarding a flight is intended to be just 20 minutes. That requires a minimal waiting area, more comparable to a busy cabstand than an airport security queue.
Passengers simply walk a few metres to the waiting craft, visible through ceiling-high glass walls at the centre of the vertiport. Once they’ve boarded, the pad elevates until it’s level with the top of the building, allowing the eVTOL to rise into the air and head off to its destination.
Airlines have placed orders for hundreds of the battery-powered craft, which have been exhibited at air shows. While they’re mostly intended for short journeys, some can fly 160 kilometres.
Urban-Air Port aims to build 200 hubs in five years in five designs, from a floating marine to one for cargo carriage.