Electric flying taxis take wing at Paris show
Companies hope for transport revolution
LE BOURGET, France – Just a dot on the horizon at first, the bug-like and surprisingly quiet electrically-powered craft buzzes over Paris and its traffic snarls, treating its doubtless awestruck passenger to privileged vistas of the Eiffel Tower and the city’s signature zinc-gray rooftops before landing him or her with a gentle downward hover. And thus, if all goes to plan, could a new page in aviation history be written.
After years of dreamy and not always credible talk of skies filled with flying, nonpolluting electric taxis, the aviation industry is preparing to deliver a future that it says is now just around the corner.
Capitalizing on its moment in the global spotlight, the Paris region is planning for a small fleet of electric flying taxis to operate on multiple routes when it hosts the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games next summer. Unless aviation regulators in China beat Paris to the punch by greenlighting a pilotless taxi for two passengers under development there, the French capital’s prospective operator – Volocopter of Germany – could be the first to fly taxis commercially if European regulators give their OK.
Volocopter CEO Dirk Hoke, a former top executive at aerospace giant Airbus, has a VIP in mind as his hoped-for first Parisian passenger – none other than French President Emmanuel Macron.
“That would be super amazing,” Hoke said, speaking this week at the Paris Air Show, where he and other developers of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft – or eVTOLs for short – competed with industry heavyweights for attention.
“He believes in the innovation of urban air mobility,” Hoke said of Macron. “That would be a strong sign for Europe to see the president flying.”
But with Macron aboard or not, those pioneering first flights would still be just small steps for the nascent industry that has giant leaps to make before flying taxis are muscling
out competitors on the ground.
The limited power of battery technology restricts the range and number of paying passengers they can carry, so eVTOL hops are likely to be short and not cheap at the outset.
And while the vision of simply beating city traffic by zooming over it is enticing, it also is dependent on advances in airspace management. Manufacturers of eVTOLs aim in the coming decade to unfurl fleets in cities and on more niche routes for luxury passengers, including the French Riviera. But they need technological leaps so flying taxis don’t crash into each other and all the other things already congesting the skies or expected to take to them in very large numbers – including millions of drones.
Starting first on existing helicopter routes, “we’ll continue to scale up using AI, using machine-learning to make sure that our airspace can handle it,” said Billy Nolen of Archer Aviation Inc. It aims to start flying between downtown Manhattan and Newark’s Liberty Airport in 2025. That’s normally a one-hour train or old-fashioned taxi ride that Archer says its sleek, electric 4-passenger prototype could cover in under 10 minutes.