Florida gets hub to build ‘Jetsons’-like ‘flying cars’
In an announcement that drew immediate comparisons to “The Jetsons,” the city of Orlando, Florida, and a German aviation company have formally unveiled plans to build the first hub for flying cars in the United States.
The so-called vertiport is scheduled to be completed in 2025 and will enable passengers to bypass Florida’s notoriously congested highways, the city and the hub’s developers contend.
The electric-powered aircraft will be capable of taking off vertically from the ground-based hub and reaching a top speed of 186 miles per hour, according to the Munich-based aviation company Lilium, which is working with the Orlando firm Tavistock Development Company on the project.
But is the ambitious project, intended to introduce Lilium’s flying taxis as a more time-efficient if costlier alternative to ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, viable? There is a caveat: The aircraft are still in the developmental phase.
Orlando officials don’t seem to be dissuaded by that uncertainty. On Monday, the City Council approved more than $800,000 in potential tax rebates to Lilium.
Buddy Dyer, the city’s longtime mayor, framed the project as a transformational one.
“For this new technology to truly reshape the transportation ecosystem, it is going to take a true partnership between cities, developers and transportation operators,” Dyer said. “We have been focused on finding the right partners to be a global leader in the advanced air mobility space.”
The site selected for the transportation hub is in Lake Nona, a 17-square-mile planned community within the city limits that is next to Orlando International
Airport. It will require approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. The aircraft themselves will also fall under the agency’s oversight.
Jim Gray, a City Council commissioner whose district includes the site of the planned hub, said the project would create about 140 jobs that paid about $65,000 a year on average.
Orlando officials noted that the projected salaries would be more than 25 percent higher than the average salary in Orange County, which includes the city.
In a January 2019 report on the emergence of flying cars, analysts at Morgan Stanley said that “autonomous urban aircraft may no longer be the stuff of comic books.”
But they took a longer view on the technology, stating that flying cars would be common by 2040, with the global market projected to be $1.4 trillion to $2.9 trillion by then.